Sesame Street

***Sesame Street*** is an American educational children's television series that combines live action, sketch comedy, animation and puppetry. It is produced by Sesame Workshop (known as the Children's Television Workshop (CTW) until June 2000) and was created by Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett. The program is known for its images communicated through the use of Jim Henson's Muppets, and includes short films, with humor and cultural references. The series premiered on November 10, 1969, to positive reviews, some controversy, and high viewership; it has aired on the U.S.'s national public television provider PBS since its debut, with its first run moving to premium channel HBO on January 16, 2016, then its sister streaming service HBO Max in 2020.

The format of *Sesame Street* consists of a combination of commercial television production elements and techniques which have evolved to reflect the changes in American culture and the audience's viewing habits. With the creation of *Sesame Street*, producers and writers of a children's television show used, for the first time, educational goals and a curriculum to shape its content. It was also the first time a show's educational effects were formally studied. The show, therefore, has undergone significant changes in its history as adjustments to the format and content have been made to reflect change sources to the curriculum.

Shortly after creating *Sesame Street*, its producers developed what came to be called the "CTW model" (after the production company's previous name), a system of television show planning, production, and evaluation based on collaborations between producers, writers, educators, and researchers. The show was initially funded by government and private foundations but has become somewhat self-supporting due to revenues from licensing arrangements, international sales, and other media. By 2006, there were independently produced versions, or "co-productions", of *Sesame Street* broadcast in twenty countries. In 2001, there were over 120 million viewers of various international versions of *Sesame Street*, and by the show's 40th anniversary in 2009, it was broadcast in more than 140 countries.

*Sesame Street* was by then the fifteenth-highest-rated children's television show in the United States. A 1996 survey found that 95% of all American preschoolers had watched the show by the time they were three years old. In 2018, it was estimated that 86 million Americans had watched the series as children. As of 2018, *Sesame Street* has won 189 Emmy Awards and 11 Grammy Awards, more than any other children's show.

## Format

From its first episode, *Sesame Street* has structured its format by using "a strong visual style, fast-moving action, humor, and music," as well as animation and live-action short films. When *Sesame Street* premiered, most researchers believed that young children did not have long attention spans; therefore, the new show's producers were concerned that an hour-long show would not hold their audience's attention. At first, the show's "street scenes"—the action taking place on its set—consisted of character-driven interactions and were not written as ongoing stories. Instead, they consisted of individual, curriculum-based segments which were interrupted by "inserts" consisting of puppet sketches, short films, and animations. This structure allowed the producers to use a mixture of styles and characters, and to vary the show's pace. By season 20, research had shown that children were able to follow a story, and the street scenes, while still interspersed with other segments, became evolving storylines.

"We basically deconstructed the show. It's not a magazine format anymore. It's more like the *Sesame* hour. Children will be able to navigate through it easier."

Upon recommendations by child psychologists, the producers initially decided that the show's human actors and Muppets would not interact because they were concerned it would confuse young children. When the CTW tested the appeal of the new show, they found that although children paid attention to the shows during the Muppet segments, their interest was lost during the "Street" segments. The producers requested that Henson and his team create Muppets such as Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch to interact with the human actors, and the Street segments were re-shot. *Sesame Street*'s format remained intact until the 2000s, when the changing audience required that producers move to a more narrative format. In 1998, the popular "Elmo's World", a 15-minute-long segment hosted by the Muppet Elmo, was created. Starting in 2014, during the show's 45th season, the producers introduced a half-hour version of the program. The new version, which originally complemented the full-hour series, was both broadcast weekday afternoons and streamed on the Internet. In 2017, in response to the changing viewing habits of toddlers, the show's producers decreased the show's length from one hour to thirty minutes across all its broadcast platforms. The new version focused on fewer characters, reduced the pop culture references "once included as winks for their parents", and focused "on a single backbone topic".