On its new home at HBO, the now half-hour show has evolved, or rather devolved, into something rigidly formatted and distressingly predictable, with only enough room or time for the tried and true, the already popular or a new segment that has obviously been focus-tested rigorously and put on television only after consulting all manner of experts, education, marketing and otherwise.
Sesame Street has become a show without surprises or spontaneity, where everything happens with soothing yet disappointing predictability. Sesame Street once felt like it took place on a funky, dirty, diverse New York city street. Now it takes place entirely on a sparkling city set devoid of dirt or grit or in the even shinier, even more, artificial world of green screen and CGI.
But after her deftly handled and appropriately acclaimed introductory episode in the show seemed to struggle to find a way to organically implement her into its tightly-programmed, risk-averse structure. Julia seems to be coming into her own in the new season but she remains less of an active presence on the show than her popularity would suggest.
HBO, on the other hand, is answerable only to its shareholders and the cruel Gods of commerce. Elmo, the furry red menace himself, bears some share of the blame as well. I have a soft spot in my heart for the little guy but the explosive force of his runaway popularity single-handedly made the show skew younger and sappier. With characters like Ernie, Grover and Big Bird, Sesame Street was always cute but there came a point where the cuteness became overwhelming, even pathological.
The ratings and the merchandising increasingly seemed to be dictating the content of the show instead of the other way around. The set used today lacks the signs of use, wear and damage. It uses more brightly colored paint that has proven more eye-catching to young children. The contrast between the original set and the contemporary set is dramatic. It is also a much less recognizable, organic-feeling urban community. Hooper, an ethnically Jewish working-class shopkeeper with a distinct accent who had clearly lived there all his life, let his customers put groceries on their tabs and tried to learn Spanish as he worked on his GED at night school.
Muppets can be marketed; Muppets can be sold. At the end of the day, the show needs toy and merchandise sales to stay viable, and young children want stuffed monsters. My daughter has a stuffed Elmo that she loves, almost as much as my sister Antoinette loved her stuffed Grover at the same age.
All of these shifts, as I look at them, seem logical. But all of this still makes me sad, not just because of nostalgia, but because it means that the new Sesame Street looks a lot less like the neighborhood I am raising my daughter in.
I grew up in an almost exclusively white town of under 5, in rural Ohio. My neighborhood did not look at all like Sesame Street. But I kind of wished it did.
Because far more than any other media I can recall from my youth in the early s, Sesame Street presented an aspirational vision of a utopian urbanism and did so when most cultural representations of urbanity were viscerally dystopian.
There was a superabundance of hope on Sesame Street. And cooperation, and love. And counting. And I want my daughter to be able to watch episodes of Sesame Street where she can see a neighborhood that looks like the one she is growing up in: where the actors look like our neighbors, and the street looks a bit like our street.
And thanks to YouTube video archivists, she can. The fashions are a bit dated, a few of the technological references are pretty outmoded, but at the end of the day, Sesame Street has aged very well. The lessons, from letters and numbers to accepting and loving your neighbors, sharing, being patient — these things are timeless. But that in no way detracts from her enjoyment of the old episodes.
She gets to live in a world with multiple Sesame Streets. But I have to ask myself — could Sesame Workshop maybe do better? But what if it made the 50 years of quality educational programming more widely available?
Access has to be an important part of the archival mission, along with collection and preservation. Sesame Workshop has been the beneficiary of so much public and charitable funding. PBS and HBO both want rights to the recent years, and it seems that contracts with Amazon and Hulu would likely preclude anything after the year And what if they further were able to secure full or even partial rights on some of their many international co-productions?
Suddenly you would have a multilingual one-stop Sesame shop. Sesame Workshop tried to capitalize on these early episodes during the run of Sesame Street Unpaved on the Noggin network, but their partnership with Noggin was dissolved. Similarly, they have packaged DVDs of old episodes, but we seem to have entered an age of streaming for the foreseeable future.
With no obvious plans to capitalize on the back catalog, why not make it freely available for all to stream?
It might help transform the bad optics of partnering with HBO — no matter how commercially necessary that was — and the bandwidth it would require could easily be underwritten by corporate, tax-deductible giving. The most common way of accessing online content in poorer and minority communities tends to be on smartphones and tablets.
By prioritizing Android over iPhones, you could reach more of those communities. Make episodes downloadable on the app — in doing that, you will ensure that it works for people who may be reliant on spotty access. This essay first appeared on his blog in a different form, which was adapted from a June 8 presentation at the New England American Studies Association at Fitchburg State University in Fitchburg, Mass.
Email: shepperd cua. Great article! I watched Sesame Street from its beginning, when I was three, until I started school. I was confused and fascinated by the accents, the individual shops, the idea of home delivered mail by a person whose name you knew. Sesame Street was miles away different from the small, slow-paced, Southern town of my childhood, where all shopping was done in a supermarket, mail was gathered at the PO, and accents were, well, Southern.
By the time my daughter came along and began watching it and its competition on Nick Jr , I was sad that it was less gritty, less New York, less different from the bright child-safe programming of other networks. Thanks Tad Suiter for writing this. Nicely written and so fascinating. Will keep the old episodes in mind if I have a kiddo. Loved your article! Thank you for doing all this research. Our house loves Sesame Street and when they moved to HBO, I was and still really upset as it makes it inaccessible to many.
Subscribing to all of these streaming options add up. We're teaching him moderation. After a former writer said in an interview he considered Bert and Ernie to be more than just roommates , Sesame Workshop released a statement clarifying the relationship between the two characters who had been on the show since it began:. They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves," the statement read. First celeb to guest star?
Carol Burnett , with hundreds of major stars following suit "It was a marvelous show," Burnett told THR of her trips to Sesame Street since her first appearance in I kept going back for more. I think one time I was an asparagus.
A cul-de-sac called "Around the Corner" was shut down after five years in the '90s after children were confused by the alley which was turned into a parking lot. While he was one of the original Muppets on the show, Kermit the Frog actually left Sesame Street after season one as Henson knew the character would become his signature Muppet.
He would return in season three and go on to make appearances over time, while his replacement, Herbert Birdsfoot, was phased out after season five, though his assistant Grover became a fan-favorite. One episode that only aired once and was banned after because it caused an influx of letters from parents?
Two Muppets were retired due to controversies: Roosevelt Franklin, the first African-American puppet, was removed from the show in after five years of complaints from parents and critics alike that the character was racist, with Roosevelt becoming a source of racial tension.
The other controversy involved Don Music, a composer Muppet who was on the show in the '70s and '80s and was known for banging his head against his piano. After parents called in to complain that their children were mimicking this behavior, he was retired from the show.
The ruling was reversed less than one month later. In , Elmo's puppeteer Kevin Clash left the series after he was accused of having a sexual relationship with a man that began when his accuser was 16 years old.
He denied the accusations. Hooper was one of the first four humans to appear on the show and ran Hooper's Store, with Will Lee being the first actor cast and he was on the s how until his death in
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