Sesame Street Sucks

The fading of a former colossus

A toddler’s pop culture obsessions, in the age of streaming, can neatly map onto eras. If there’s something out there good enough, not annoying enough, for a toddler to watch over and over and it doesn’t make you run from your one-bedroom apartment screaming, then they are fully in that era of that show, and can watch whatever to their heart’s content. So far, my daughter’s eras have included Gabby’s Dollhouse, Disney Princesses en masse, Moana, Frozen, The Little Mermaid, Wicked (sort of, she doesn’t actually really understand it but she likes The Wizard of Oz and she likes Glina), and Sesame Street.

But it’s wildly disappointing to admit that her Sesame Street era was a matter of months. Two months of loving Elmo, three months of obsession with Abby Cadabby, and now she never mentions it. As the adult viewer in the room, I would argue that Sesame Street has, in its own way, become somewhat enshittified — which is hugely disappointing, considering I was very excited to watch decades of Sesame Street with Porter. I thought we had time.

But the initial strike against any interest in Sesame Street came from David Zaslav. (Who among us doesn’t love corporate intrigue?) As the former head of the Discovery Channel was named the guy in charge of Warner Brothers Discovery, his job was to slash stuff all around, and he buried already-finished films so that he could get the tax return, took low-ranking shows off the newly christened “Max” streaming hub, added all the reality crap from Discovery of the last 20+ years so that a formerly boutique-feeling brand ended up seeming unseemly, and took decades of streaming Sesame Street off the service, leaving simply the first season and the years 2000 - on.

I mourn the fact that I can’t raise Porter with the Sesame Street I remember. One-hour episodes that had an overarching plot and the kind of random animation that you remember years down the line (the free jazz of the Pointer Sisters’ Number Counting Song! You know you can recite that from memory.) The kind of show that felt like a nourishing meal, every time. You could watch one episode at 3pm and another at the same time the next day.

Sesame Street has been around, mind you. It started in 1969 and was conceived of as a show that explicitly reached out to city kids, showing their adventures in the brownstones and streets that made up their lives. When I was watching it in the 80s, it was a show that centered around Big Bird, a puppet I could’ve sworn was an adult (he’s canonically 6), and how he learned about things like kindness and respect and even death, and all sorts of other lessons from being in a city and bouncing off people. Big Bird starred in the Sesame Street movies - Follow that Bird, etc. There’s even a Big Bird cameo in The Muppet Movie.

But in the 90s, things changed. Elmo, a puppet who was a mere extra in early seasons, became the center of the show. Kids were obsessed with Elmo, a straight up always 3-year-old toddler. His voice was high. His lessons were simplified, addressing the things that toddlers need to figure out. Eating well, what’s up with that sibling, negotiating things with friends.

But 2000s Sesame Street? Well. They cut the show to merely a half-hour, so that it was best for kids’ technology-rotted attention spans. The shows followed Elmo and only Elmo, to the detriment of everyone else. (Wither Telly?) And while the previous decade’s shows pandered to the adults watching it, with silly spoofs of things like, god, Monsterpiece theater, and other goofy pop culture things, Sesame Street did away with that wittiness, all to refocus the show on kids. But the thing is, kids want to figure out stuff they don’t get. Spoofs help develop those brains!

Monster Foodies … the one good recent Sesame Street segment.

So recent Sesame Street is boring. Simple. Repetitive songs like “letter of the day”. A vibe that feels like the art kids, you know, like Jim Henson, have left the building. It felt like it wasn’t made by the weirdos as much as it had been before. And maybe some of the problem is that the show is worse these days, and because it’s worse, its pleasures grow old quickly, as it’s binged. I really wanted to have Sesame Street be part of Porter’s childhood, but a complete technological overhaul of the way we view things now and the perennial question of funding children’s programming and the way that cheap money in the 2010s made mergers possible and so many more factors made that impossible.

Cookie Monster’s still funny though. A monster who just wants to eat a chocolate chip cookie? Comic perfection.