Sesame Street is an American children's television program known for its use of format and structure to convey educational concepts to its preschool audience. It utilized the conventions of television, in the form of a combination of Jim Henson's Muppets, animation, short films, humor, and cultural references. Since its premiere in 1969, it was the first preschool educational television program to base its contents, format, and production values on laboratory and formative research, and the first to include a curriculum "detailed or stated in terms of measurable outcomes".[1]
The goal of the show's creators, television producer Joan Ganz Cooney and Carnegie Foundation vice president Lloyd Morrisett, was to create a children's television show that would "master the addictive qualities of television and do something good with them",[2] such as helping young children prepare for school. The format of Sesame Street consisted of a combination of commercial television production elements and educational techniques. It was the first time a more realistic setting, an inner city street and neighborhood, was used for a children's program, a choice writer Michael Davis called "unprecedented".[3]
At first, each episode was structured like a magazine, but in 1998, as a result of changes in their audience and its viewing habits, the producers changed to a more narrative format, including the addition of a popular, fifteen-minute long segment, "Elmo's World", hosted by the Muppet Elmo. The show expanded the new format to the entire show in 2002.
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As writer Cary O'Dell has stated, Sesame Street's producers, from its first episode, have used elements of commercial television in structuring the format of the show: "a strong visual style, fast-moving action, humor, and music".[4] They also used animation, live-action short films, and music.[4] The show's staff produced segments filmed in-studio with their human and Muppet cast and they contracted out the animations and short films[note 1] to independent producers.[5][note 2] Cooney was the first to suggest that they use "teaching commercials", or several twelve -to ninety-second shorts, and that they consistently repeat several key concepts throughout an episode.[4] The studio segments were written to concentrate on the African-American child, a key component of the show's audience.[6]
The producers and writers decided to build the new show around a brownstone on an inner-city street, a choice writer Michael Davis called "unprecedented".[3] They reproduced their viewers' neighborhoods—as O'Dell, described it, "a realistic city street, complete with peeling paint, alleys, front stoops, and metal trash cans along the sidewalk".[7] Director Jon Stone, for example, was convinced that in order for inner-city children to relate to Sesame Street, the show had to be set in a familiar place.[8][note 3] Despite its urban setting, however, the producers decided to avoid depicting more negativity than what was already present in the child's environment, but instead depicted the world both realistically and as it could be.[9] They attempted to present the world from a child's perspective, as writer Robert Morrow put it, "an idealized world of learning and play",[10] or as director Jim Martin put it, "an urban show kids could relate to" and "a reality show with a sprinkling of fantasy".[11] As researcher Gerald S. Lesser stated, "With all its raucousness and slapstick humor, Sesame Street became a sweet show, and its staff maintains that there is nothing wrong in that".[12]
When Sesame Street premiered, most researchers assumed that young children did not have long attention spans, so the new show's producers were concerned that an hour-long show would not hold their audience's attention. As a result, each episode was structured like a magazine that would allow the producers to use a mixture of styles, paces, and characters. It allowed for flexibility and for segments to be dropped, modified, or added without affecting the rest of the show.[13] As Lesser stated, "It is unlikely that any other approach would have provided enough room to present material on the wide range of goals we had selected".[14] Lesser reported that they found that if the segments within the show were sufficiently varied in character, content, style, pace, and mood, children's attention was able to be sustained throughout each episode.[15] Morrow reported that the show's magazine format accommodated both the curriculum and its demanding production schedule.[13]
At first, the show's "street scenes", which referred to the action taking place on the brownstone set, were not story-based. Instead, they consisted of individual segments connected to the curriculum and interrupted by "inserts", or puppet skits, short films, and animations. By season 20, research had shown that children were able to follow a story, so the street scenes were changed to depict storylines.[16] The writers presented a story, separated by several inserts, dispersed throughout the hour-long show. Although the stories usually lasted about ten-to-twelve minutes in length, it would take forty-five minutes to tell them.[17][18][note 4] According to writer Tony Geiss, the addition of storylines changed the nature of the show.[16]
During Sesame Street's development stage in 1968, the producers decided to follow the recommendation of child psychologists and not feature the human actors and Muppets together because they were concerned it would confuse and mislead young children.[19] Shortly before the show's premiere, the producers created five one-hour episodes for the purpose of testing whether children found them comprehensible and appealing. They were never intended for broadcast. Instead, they were presented to preschoolers in 60 homes throughout Philadelphia in July 1969. The CTW found that the results were "generally very positive".[19] Children attended to the shows during the Muppet segments, but their interest was lost during the "street scenes", which featured only humans and was called "the glue" that "pulled the show together",[20] by CTW researcher Edward Palmer. As a result, the appeal of the test episodes were lower than they preferred,[21] so significant changes were made.
Lesser called the producers' decision to defy the recommendations of their advisers "a turning point in the history of Sesame Street".[20] The producers went back and re-shot the Street segments; Henson and his team created Muppets that could interact with the human actors,[20][22] specifically, as CTW researchers put it, "two of Sesame Street's most enduring Muppets: Oscar the Grouch and Big Bird".[23] The test episodes were responsible for what writer Malcolm Gladwell called "the essence of Sesame Street—the artful blend of fluffy monsters and earnest adults".[20]
Sesame Street's format remained intact until the show's later decades. By the 1990s, its dominance was challenged by other programs, and its ratings declined. New research, the growth of the children's home video industry, and the increase of thirty-minute children's shows on cable demonstrated that the traditional magazine-format was not necessarily the most effective way to hold their attention.[24] For Sesame Street's 30th anniversary in 1999, its producers researched the reasons for the show's lower ratings. For the first time since the show debuted, the producers and a team of researchers analyzed Sesame Street's content and structure during a series of two-week long workshops. They also studied how children's viewing habits had changed in thirty years. They found that although the show was produced for three- to five-year-olds, children began watching it at a younger age. As a result, the target age for Sesame Street shifted downward, from four years to three years.
In 1998, a new 15-minute long segment that targeted the show's younger viewers began to be shown at the end of each episode. The segment, called "Elmo's World", used traditional elements (animation, Muppets, music, and live-action film), but had a more sustained narrative,[25] followed the same structure each episode, and depended heavily on repetition. Unlike the realism of the rest of the show, "Elmo's World" took place in a stylized crayon-drawn universe as conceived by its host.[26] Elmo, who represented the younger audience, was chosen as the host of the closing segment because younger toddlers identified with him[27] and because he had always tested well with them.[28][note 5]
In 2002, Sesame Street's producers went further in changing the show to reflect its younger demographic. They decided, after the show's 33rd season, to expand upon the "Elmo's World" concept by, as San Francisco Chronicle TV critic Tim Goodman called it, "deconstructing"[29] the show. They changed the structure of the entire show to a more narrative format, making the show easier for young children to navigate. Arlene Sherman, a co-executive producer for 25 years, called the show's new look "startlingly different".[29]
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