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PBS will stop funding Reading Rainbow this Friday. The show has been on tv with host Levar Burton for 26 years. In its storied time on air the show won more than two dozen Emmys. It’s the third longest-running children’s program in Public Television history, right after Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.

Every episode of “Reading Rainbow” featured a children’s book Burton would expand into an adventure. The episodes also featured kids’ own reviews of books, which Burton set up with the trademark line “but you don’t have to take my word for it.”

The show is being cancelled, he says, because no one will put up the several hundred thousand dollars needed to renew the show’s broadcast rights. He blames the recession’s effect on funding.

Reading Rainbow was a show I loved as a child and it will be sad to see it go “but you don’t have to take my word for it.”