Will Someone Save ‘Sesame Street’?

In the premiere of the most recent season of Sesame Street, innocent conversations among residents of 123 Sesame Street keep being interrupted by a typically confused and apoplectic Grover. He points out all the ways that each group is filled with seemingly incompatible people — kids who are several years apart in age, fans of rival sports teams, people whose families speak different languages at home — and demands to know, “Can they be friends?!?!?!” If you’ve ever watched more than a minute of the nearly 5,000 episodes produced over 54 seasons of Sesame Street, it will not shock you in the least to learn that the answer to Grover’s question is a resounding yes, and that eventually all the humans and Muppets are singing a song with lyrics like, “Friends can like different things from one another.” 

The lesson has been a recurring theme for much of the half-century run of Sesame Street, with nearly every Bert and Ernie sketch dramatizing the ways that two people can be best pals despite disagreeing on almost everything. But it feels like a particularly necessary one to impress upon the show’s young viewers at a moment when we have grown increasingly tribal and isolated from one another, conditioned to believe that a single difference between two groups of people makes them fundamentally incompatible in every way. It’s a funny sketch, a catchy song, and an elegant reminder of how Sesame Street can take a complicated issue and frame it in a simple and innocent way that preschool kids can understand and internalize. 

Like the song says, friends can like different things from one another, but pretty much everyone loves Sesame Street — well, everyone except David Zaslav, the malevolent, showbiz-hating chairman of Warner Bros. Discovery. Zaslav has never met a beloved property he couldn’t find a way to disappear, all to shave some costs off the conglomerate’s margins. (You get the sense that if there was a way to never release any new movies or TV shows and just subsist on tax write-offs, Zaslav would very much enjoy that.) His latest victim may wind up being Sesame Street. Though a 55th season will debut on Max Jan. 16, that will be the last one produced under an agreement that’s run for nearly a decade. In 2016, when the expense of making the show proved more than PBS could still afford, HBO stepped in to begin producing new episodes, which would debut on the cable giant (and later on what was called HBO Max, and finally just on Max), and then months after would turn up on public television. For many parents who considered the series an essential part of their children’s media diet, the change was invisible. (A much more obvious shift at that time was the contraction from hour-long episodes to half-hour ones.) 

The end of the Max deal gives the show’s production company, Sesame Workshop, the opportunity to sell new seasons to another outlet. Sesame Street is still such a huge name — in a television business that increasingly values big brands over everything else — that it’s not hard to imagine Apple or another streamer stepping in to rescue Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, and friends. But the mere possibility that there may only be one season left of this national treasure, at a dark moment in the world when we need Sesame Street more than ever before, is awfully troubling. 

A devil’s advocate might note that, again, there have been more than 50 seasons, and more than 4,700 episodes, made since Gordon (the great Roscoe Orman) gave a young new resident named Sally a tour of this most unusual neighborhood. Why, such a person might ask, do we need any more Sesame Street? Can’t parents just park their kids in front of one of the thousands of preexisting ones? Won’t every new viewer grow out of the series long before they run out of episodes they haven’t seen before? 

While those questions seem reasonable on the surface, they miss the fact that in both 1969 and 2024, Sesame Street was meant to reflect the world its target audience was learning how to navigate. Its lessons about letters, numbers, and shapes will more or less apply no matter what season they’re from. But just as important — arguably even more important — are the series’ attempts to help build its viewers’ emotional intelligence along with the academic kind. Those lessons have to come from a version of life that kids can recognize and relate to, which means Sesame Street has to keep evolving in ways that acknowledge how children’s lives are different now than they were during the Nixon administration.   

Not long after the move to HBO, the show added a new Muppet, Julia, a young girl with autism. Created to acknowledge the explosion of children being diagnosed somewhere on the autism spectrum, Julia’s behavior was different from that of Elmo or Zoe or Prairie Dawn. In one episode, for instance, Alan, Elmo, and Abby Kadabby help Julia get over her fear of getting a haircut — a sensory issue for many people with autism, Alan explains to the Muppets — through role play that makes her much more comfortable with the activity. In the most recent season, Julia and Elmo hang out together at a “feelings fair,” where they learn how to recognize other people’s emotions by studying their facial expressions — a useful exercise for every child, whether they’re on the spectrum or not. 

Representation matters, and it especially matters when we’re young and impressionable. When you see characters on television who resemble you in some way, it makes you feel less alone. And when you see characters on television who superficially don’t seem much like you at all, it helps teach you empathy. 

In another episode from last season, Rosita, Elmo, and Gabrielle are excited to practice basketball with a new coach and some more experienced players. But the coach keeps calling Rosita “Rosie,” which at first confuses her, then leaves her feeling disheartened. She is named after her mother, and that name means a great deal to her. In a version of the show made for teens or adults, perhaps the coach would be presented as doing this on purpose — or, at least, shrugging the mistake off as no big deal when it’s pointed out. But this is Sesame Street, so we discover that the coach just misheard, understands why Rosita is upset, apologizes profusely, and quickly moves to let the other players know what to call her. It’s two lessons in one, since Gabrielle has to encourage Rosita to realize that, “Grown-ups make mistakes, too,” and it’s OK to point this out to them. The segment ends with, yes, another song: “I’m Proud of My Name,” in which Rosita explains, “My name is who I am, and my identity / My name is a big part of what makes me me.” 

In a recent recurring segment, Cookie Monster and an enthusiastic newer Muppet named Gonger are running a food truck called Monster Foodies. Kids send in videos asking them to make a favorite dish from the kids’ respective cultures, which leads Cookie and Gonger to track down all the ingredients and learn their origins. It’s a fun and easy way to explore multiculturalism.   

Other episodes focus on concepts that were part of the Sesame Street curriculum from the beginning. In the most recent season finale, Prairie Dawn throws a cookie party for Cookie Monster and Elmo, but with a catch: They’re only allowed to eat cookies of specific shapes that she names. (Octagons prove tricky for them to recognize.) But the lessons are framed in a modern and recognizable way. The current Letter of the Day song wouldn’t sound out of place on the radio with non-Muppet vocals:  

The show also manages to still feel vital by playing around with some of its oldest ideas, like an episode about opposites where Grover is a troublesome customer at a restaurant, rather than the waiter, with guest star Kal Penn struggling to satisfy his odd requests for things like dry soup: 

There are a lot of excellent TV shows made for kids today. But none of them have the institutional power of Sesame Street. It has been around for so long, and has made an impression on the lives of so many generations, that everything it does has exponentially more impact than if any other series did the same thing. A television landscape without new episodes of Sesame Street in it would feel much emptier and sadder, and would almost certainly require someone to sing a song to Big Bird that explains that sometimes, TV shows just get canceled, even when they’re more important than ever.