Who doesn’t love Sesame Street?1
I don’t know if kids today are as enamored of it as I was a child – I can still sing the songs by heart and am apt to quote entire skits by heart (Sure thing, King!). The celebrity cameos went over my head at the time, but I loved the muppets and endured Susan and Mr. Hooper and Luis and Gordan and Maria because they lived on The Street.
I think I would not be wrong to say that this show could not be made now. Some focus group somewhere would say that the street was too “urban” and the cast too diverse and the muppets too subversive. The homophobes would insist that Ernie and Bert were gay and that a show shouldn’t have characters who were obviously missing a screw like Big Bird and that Oscar was clearly a parody of the straight white male, and all sorts of other things.
I was a Grover fan myself, although I also liked Kermit, the ultimate straight-man. I remember sitting and screaming at the TV set that Snuffleupagus was right there where only Big Bird was looking and if one of the grown-ups would just turn their head and look, they would see Snuffy, too!
Do American kids still watch Sesame Street? There’s so much children’s programming now… I know they still watch it overseas because I follow Sesame Workshop on LinkedIn and they post photos and clips from the foreign editions where, in case you didn’t realize it, the kids watch other muppets, geared towards the local cultures, not just translations of the American version. In fact, Sesame Workshop does a lot for kids in areas like Gaza and the Ukraine, where children are suffering.
This book is a “complete history” of Sesame Street, pre-inception through, oh, 2007ish.2 You learn about the genesis, in 1965, when researchers realized what a perfect medium television is for educating children – and, almost simultaneously, recognized that the ad agencies had already figured that out and were using TV to seduce children into aggressive consumerism, through commercials and also through sponsored shows. We meet Jim Henson and learn about how the cast was assembled, how the set was designed, and how the show was designed – and you learn that all those arguments I mimicked above were, indeed made, at the time.
It covers how Sesame Street evolved, how it helped children navigate complicated issues. And you read about the behind the scenes discussions about how to address Mr. Hooper’s death.
If there was one dream company that I could wave a magic wand to work for, it would be Sesame Workshop. I like their mission and I fantasize that it might be a really fun place to work. When I was in college, they attended a show at my school and recruited one of the students for a new role they were workshopping – when I heard, I was soooooo jealous. Happy for her, but so so so so so jealous that she got discovered by Sesame Street – Sesame Street! – and I didn’t.3
I love this book and have read it two or three times – it’s one of those books you can read over and over. If you haven’t read it, give it a shot.
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