Sesame Street Has A New Address
Right down the block from where Fraggle Rock used to be
Sesame Street is on the ropes. After 46 years of public support, the program is going private and will end up on HBO. Even public television is experiencing the effects of gentrification: too much money in too few hands and those hands aren’t all that interested in helping to educate the public.
Articles have been released talking about the loss of long time favorite actors and the economic struggles of Sesame Street running in the red for years at a time. See: F is for fired — Actors who play Bob, Luis and Gordon laid off from ‘Sesame Street’
The Miami Herald said Bob McGrath — who has played Bob on the show since 1969 — recently announced the shocking news at Florida Supercon.
McGrath said not only had he been laid off, but so had Emilio Delgado, who played Luis, and Roscoe Orman, who played Gordon for decades on the series, which mixes live-action, animation and puppetry.
But not to worry, HBO has a plan to save Sesame Street.
This Saturday, the 46th season of Sesame Street will premiere on HBO. Last August, the series signed a five-year deal with the network not exactly known for kid-friendly programming — though HBO did air Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock back in the early 1980s, fair to say the modern viewer is more likely to associate the premium cable giant with NSFW content than with the ABCs of PBS.
For the first time in its nearly 50 years on the air, Sesame Street will air new episodes exclusively on HBO only to air on PBS and its member stations nine months later. Reruns will air on PBS in the interim. The new season brings with it a new set, designed to give core characters central locations. The partnership gives PBS Sesame Street for free and permits Sesame to produce double the number of episodes per season and a Sesame spin-off, even a new Sesame Workshop educational kids’ series. HBO will be streaming 150 archived episodes of Sesame Street plus 52 episodes each of Sesame Workshop’s Pinky Dinky Doo and The Electric Company.
The arrangement may feel, to some, like a violation of the original ethos of Sesame Street. But this pact may have been the only way to keep Sesame Street alive.
Please read the linked articles for the full understanding of this particular transformation. Granted, if you don’t have kids you may not remember how effective Sesame Street was at entertaining and at the same time educating our children. Educational programming is taking it on the chin, like so many things, because of an increasing spread of media programming.
I have fond memories of the Sesame Street from my own childhood, along with other PBS favorites like ZOOM!
and Villa Alegre! where I made my first attempts at mangling Spanish as a child.
Compared to modern media savvy kids, these shows were wonderfully awkward, showing a different age, one where everyone wasn’t media aware, having absorbed a culture of self-absorption and narcissism.
Alas, Sesame Street is one of the only survivors from that era of kids television programming and given the direction of media toward toy associations, DVDs and other money-making connections, it would seem inevitable corporate powers would eventually find their way to Sesame Street.
When I was a kid there were 13 channels of television, new books if you could afford them, the library when you couldn’t and the occasional drive-in movie. Video games had barely been invented. Kids still played with each other outside, in the SUN. Every day. With other kids.
Now kids have hundreds of channels, thousands of video games, hundreds of apps; for those that still read, 300,000 books a year are ground out for kindle, hundreds of movies new and used, er…rebooted. The efforts of companies to engage you and your child’s mental space, the battle for your “attention currency” is real and profitable for the companies capable of creating compelling (or addicting) programming.
Today our media-savvy kids don’t suffer from a lack of things to engage them, but a surfeit and the need to choose or for you to choose for them. Choose wisely.
On the upside, HBO and Sesame Street will be changing their intro song into something more on point with the programming needs of the studio. But they kept the music so it should be easy for everyone to remember it. Sing it with me kids!
A dark day, sweeping the poor away.
On my way to where the payday’s sweet.
Can you tell me how to get,
how to get to @HBOStreet?
Come & play
If your cable’s okay
Friendly neighbors
Just no one you’ll care to meet
Can you tell me how to get,
how to get to @HBO Street?
A magic carpet ride
50 years kissed goodbye
All that good may vanish
for the green
Can you tell me how to get,
how to get to @HBO Street?
how to get to @HBO Street?
how to get to @HBO Street?
Check your local cable provider for the correct channel… And please remember to send your kids outside. Exercise is still recommended in a media-savvy age.
Thaddeus Howze is a writer, essayist, author and professional storyteller for mysterious beings who exist in non-Euclidean realms beyond our understanding. You can follow him on Twitter. Please support his writings on Patreon.
