I agree with that first sentence, but I donât agree with the second.
I was born in 1969, and I strongly believe that watching Sesame Street is what led to me being able to read before my fourth birthday. My parents had six other kids, my younger sister required much more parental attention and involvement due to her Down Syndrome, and I didnât attend preschool. What else taught me to read?
Have any of you guys watched Sesame Street lately? I last watched it regularly around four or five years ago, when my daughter was a preschooler. One of the things that struck me was just how much of any given episode was assembled from recycled material from vintage episodes, some dating back to when I first watched the show as a kid. Once the show started shooting in HD, it was kinda weird to see the black bars popping up during all the old 4x3 material.
The show, wonderful as it is, has been held together with bubblegum and baling wire for too long. Do you realize that there are over 4,300 episodes that have been made in the last 45 years? Up until the late 90s, they used to shoot 130 of them a year, which strikes me as mildly insane. Thatâs a whole lot of content, much of which can still teach kids to read as effectively as it taught me.
The fact is:
What HBO is doing is handing a financial lifeline to Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization that makes âSesame Street.â Sesame Workshop has lost millions of dollars in recent years amid sweeping changes in the media business. Revenue from donations, distribution fees paid by PBS stations and licensing for merchandise sales have all been trending downward. âThe losses just kept getting bigger and bigger,â Sesame Workshop CEO Jeffrey Dunn said in an interview with CNNMoney. âWe were faced with no ability to make the show going forward.â So the group âcast a wide netâ and âtalked to pretty much everybody in the industryâ about possible distribution deals. The priority, he said, was keeping the show on PBS in some fashion.
Unlike its heyday in the 70s and 80s, Sesame Workshop produces a measly 18 new episodes a year now. Under the HBO deal, theyâll make 35 new episodes a year. Who knows, maybe they wonât need to recycle so much old material anymore. Yeah, itâs âtrickle-down kidsâ TV,â but the alternative was for Sesame Workshop to go under altogether. This isnât all that much of a deal with the devil as itâs being painted to be.
The day you show me an entitled four-year-old crowing to his less-advantaged colleagues that he gets to watch the brand-new episodes of Sesame Street rather than having to wait for them to be rerun on the Poor Kidsâ Station is the day I eat my hat.
What was Sesame Workshop to do, say âNo, HBO⊠you either air the new ones free on PBS immediately or no dealâ? Theyâve spent nearly half a century pimping for new sources of revenue, and nobodyâs buying their DVDs and Tickle Me Elmos anymore. Short of some philanthropist propping up their expenses even more than they have been for the past forty-five years, there really was no other solution available to them.
And are the kids getting hurt by this? Really? I mean, Mr Hooper died over thirty years ago. Do we really fear that the up-to-the-minute episodes are measurably âbetterâ than 9-month-old reruns? Why werenât you guys bitching about this years ago, when you first noticed how much recycled material was going into new episodes to cut costs?
