PUPPET MASTERS
Sesame Street is still teaching the world to be nice — an important lesson needed now more than ever
Like any grown-ups, then or now, they worried about the power television had over children. The full-volume blare, the raucously random chaos, the cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs — ka-bam! Pow! Sproiiinng! HEY KIDS!!
The origin story of Sesame Street, which has become a permanent piece of cultural history and TV lore, begins at a Manhattan dinner party in the Mad Men years. Joan Ganz Cooney, a producer in public-affairs programming, listened to her friend Lloyd Morrisett, a vice-president at the Carnegie Corp., describe the way his preschool-aged daughter soaked up everything she saw on TV.
Television is often the problem, but sometimes it’s the answer, too. That dinner party in 1966 started a lasting conversation: What if there were a show that was just as mesmerizing as Saturday cartoons, but instead of breakfast-cereal commercials, the jingles would sell letters and numbers? Or shapes and similarities? And introduce concepts like in, on and under? Could it help kids learn? Could it, in some measurable way, prepare less advantaged children for school?
Cooney and Morrisett looked to Harvard University and other institutions, convening curriculum experts, cognitive psychologists and early-childhood researchers to compare notes. There were meetings, seminars and serious arguments about methodology and outcomes.
The experts might have turned the project into a steaming plate of lima beans that no child would ever eat. As described in Michael Davis’ 2008 book Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street, some of those meetings grew so tedious that the children’s author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, an invited participant, began doodling pointed cartoons while the academics droned. One drawing was of a child attacking a TV, first with a hatchet, then worse.
It’s an ongoing miracle, Sesame Street — in the way you remember it, yes, but also as the global humanitarian operation it has become, 50 years after the show began in November 1969.
“The way we do (Sesame Street) has changed,” says Sesame Workshop president and CEO Jeffrey Dunn, who took over five years ago and is credited with bringing the Workshop out of a financial slump, partly by striking a first-run deal in 2015 with HBO, which now foots the bill for Sesame Street while still making it available (free) to public-tv viewers.
“But we have stayed relentlessly true to the mission of helping kids grow stronger, smarter and kinder,” he says. “I’m a huge believer in the idea that society is the result of kids growing up. We’re playing a very long game here, looking 30 years ahead at any point in time ... Your kids are going to grow up and be the adults of tomorrow.”
Sesame Street can feel deeply personal to just about anyone under the age of 55. It taught us to read and count, but it also taught us about kindness and acceptance. Sesame Street was inclusive before anyone really knew what that meant, the first safe space. It is a friend to everyone, which has a lot to do with why it’s the first TV show to receive Kennedy Center Honors.
Some of its original viewers (generation X, those lifelong beta-testers), grew up to be some of its most passionate advocates and caretakers, filling key positions today as executives, creators, writers, artists and puppeteers at the Sesame Workshop, formerly known as the Children’s Television Workshop.
At the non-profit corporation’s headquarters across Broadway from Lincoln Center, where more than 500 employees work, every cubicle is festooned with Sesame toys of all shapes and sizes. Everyone here has a story about how the show affected them. When they meet you, they’re eager to hear yours.
“When people talk to us (about Sesame Street), frequently it is about the literacy. They’ll say, ‘I learned to read because of it,’” Dunn says.
“But the second thing is that everyone sees themselves as somewhat unique, and what they saw was some friend that spoke to them, that let them know, ‘I’m a good person, I’m OK,’ and that there are people who are different, and that’s OK, too. The idea that everybody is deserving of respect.”
You can sense where this is going. Look around your country. Have you forgotten how to get to Sesame Street?
“We’ve never been needed more,” Dunn says.
Nothing in Cooney’s original 45-page report to the Carnegie Foundation predicts Sesame Street’s luckiest break, when the nascent production hired a wildly imaginative young puppeteer named Jim Henson, who immediately understood the concept and assembled a team of puppeteers, including Frank Oz and Caroll Spinney. Together they gave personalities to a group of new friends. In concept, these creatures represented emotional archetypes: a cranky, anti-social monster who lives in a trash can. A furry maniac obsessed with cookies. A thoughtfully empathetic frog.
And more: a scrawny-armed, hapless-yet-optimistic monster; a pair of companionable roommates whose opposite moods adhere to old vaudeville routines; and a sweetly naive canary who stands eight feet tall and keeps a nest in the alley. (“I’m a very nervous bird — I nearly laid an egg right here on Sesame Street.”) In test runs, they clearly were the star attractions.
This raised even more concerns from the experts: How would children, who can be so literal, reconcile the commingling of puppets with the show’s human world, the backdrop of which would resemble a busy block of working-class apartments and retail shops on a shabby (yet cheerful) New York street? Would it make sense?
“This is near,” says Grover, our old friend with the red nose and matted blue fur, standing close to the camera. Then he runs off in the distance and turns back around. “And this is FAR!” he screams. To watch just one old Sesame Street clip is to fall giddily down a never-ending Youtube spiral of classic sketches, songs and moments. You remember the feeling of being three or four, when you started to realize you’re you, which is no small thing. It’s an addictive form of time-travel for adults, a flicker of joy with a trace of the melancholy. It’s Proust, covered in felt and feathers. It is near, and it is far.
There are studies (there are always studies) that show the learning gap is as dire as it was back when Cooney and company first pitched their concept, especially wherever there is poverty, inequality or other barriers to learning. But there is also proof, says Sherrie Westin, the Workshop’s president of social impact and philanthropy, that Sesame Street can help enormously when it gets to the children who need it.
Sesame has helped its viewers cope with divorce, the incarceration of a parent and the deployment of family members in the military. Julia, a Muppet with autism, made her 2017 debut on the TV show to wide acclaim and gratitude from parents. The Workshop reaches children affected by war or hurricanes and other disasters. In Afghanistan, it showed that girls can and should go to school. In South Africa, an Hiv-positive Muppet, Kami, helped lessen the stigma of getting tested for the virus.
But there remains, between Muppets and us, something beyond research data. It even transcends the boundaries of performing arts. It’s an ineffable, lasting and mutual love.
Sesame Street was inclusive before anyone really knew what that meant, the first safe space.
It is a friend to everyone ...