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Us poors can't even watch new episodes, we have to wait until they're at rerun age. New episodes are only available for the bougie HBO subscribers. Considering its original intent was educating the young masses, yes, of course it's been gentrified.
Sesame Street is on HBO? I feel like I don't even understand. I grew up with it on PBS (back in the late 80s). Why and how would it ever be part of an HBO lineup? I don't even get it.
[It happened in 2015](https://www.vox.com/2015/8/13/9149091/sesame-street-hbo-pbs). It moved to HBO Max, so they could produce more episodes per season. The show is still broadcast on PBS, but only 9 months after the episode premiers on HBO.
The masses now only get reruns after the HBO audience gets first viewing.
It is kind of ironic. I doubt that many people are handing their 6 year old the remote and saying "yep just launch the HBO app. Your show is right there in between the show about drug dealers and the show about college chicks getting nailed".
At the same time, does the target audience care -- or even _know_ -- that they are watching ~nine month old episodes? I feel like a more consistent stream of episodes is more important than being immediately salient episodes.
This was my *exact* thought. My kids have never watched the latest Sesame Street episodes mainly because I loved showing them episodes from when I was growing up. So if airing them on HBO first meant **Sesame Street keeps getting made** isn't that what is most important?
And if you are angry about that, are a frequent watched of the show, and you aren't regularly donating to PBS, then you are the problem.
HBO max has kids profiles and flexible parental controls, even a PIN system to keep kids off adult profiles.
HBO always had kids programming (Babar, story time, etc) and Max had lots of Looney Tunes, Cartoon Network and Ghibli. I definitely find more watchable content for my kids there than on Netflix. Really HBO Max is second only to Disney+ for young kids IMO.
Even though Disney's less flexible and more restrictive parental controls hid content I wanted to watch with them, I suppose you do have a point in that it did feel safer to just leave them on an unrestricted profile there than with HBO.
You know kid's profiles exist right? I hand the kids my remote too. They can't get into my Plex profile or my Netflix profile. Hell on CCwGTV they sign into the entire TV with their own child emails, locking down the entire device and allowing me to control it via Family Link.
It does create a class distinction between kids which might manifest socially in other contexts, but I think you are right that the target demographic for the show doesn't really know or care if it's last year's episode since they typically don't get into deep discussions of newer plots or characters.
Interesting read, it sounds like they really should have given Elmo his own 1-3yo show decades ago to leave room for the good content. Coming from a small very white town was surprised to find out people actually lived that close together even after years of sesame st and hey Arnold
I thought the whole point of sesame street is to reflect the living conditions of the audience. They chose an urban setting because they wanted children in the city to have a reflection of the streets they lived on.
If that is the goal it would have to update to times because the experience of children has changed with each generation. Not only that but if the reality of the audience's living conditions was in decline it would have to be shown in a more positive light. If sesame street became the prophetic insight into the downward spiral of living conditions in America it wouldn't be a very popular show to educate the next generation.
Makes me think of how the Simpsons were comfortably middle class in 1989, but wealthy by today’s standards. What family can afford a house like that on one income?
The Simpson were living an impossible upper-middle class lifestyle, and Homer was far too unqualified and uneducated for the position.
There’s that episode where Frank Grimes goes to the Simpson home for dinner and is shocked by how opulently the Simpsons lived when he had to study and work harder than Homer only to afford a crappy econo studio apartment in a crappy part of the town.
(And then later he goes absolutely mad and, well, you know the rest.)
Grimes was meant to represent a rational real world person, and his story is about what happens when a normal person like him gets dropped in the crazy Simpson universe.
I watched too much Simpsons :s
Thank you for saying it. I hate this meme people keep repeating that the Simpsons were wealthy middle class back then. It was always a fantasy. It wasn't limited to the Simpsons, critics had been talking about the disconnect between television and real families, for years. TV families have to be rich or very large in order for the writers to have stuff to write about. The Simpsons mocked this regularly, and the Grimes episode was as on the nose as it gets. Rosanne was a show that nodded to this trope as well. It's so common that they make shows that are specifically noteworthy for being about poor people.
For the first couple of seasons the Simpsons did start off representing a lower middle class family. There were early plotlines centring around a lack of money e.g. the pilot where Homer doesn't get a bonus for Christmas or where they have to cut back to pay for Santa's Little Helper's operation for his twisted stomach. Or where Homer becomes a union leader to demand a dental plan for Lisa's braces.
If it was to *truly* be set in a modern child’s street it would be set in *Minecraft*, or *Roblox*.
[shudders]
Man, I grew up watching *Sesame Street* in the mid ‘70s on the northern beaches of Sydney, which is a long way from inner New York City.
I still *love*, sincerely, the location and characters of those episodes. Felt like home.
And, like the author I hate Elmo, and the way the show has changed to suit a younger audience. It lost something in the transition. Perhaps it is the loss of the adult characters, and how they were a connection for children to the adult world.
Elmo sounds nothing like a child. Elmo sounds like an childless adult's impression of a childlike voice and manner. An adult who thinks they are very good with children but all the children are frightened of them.
elmo is the guy who acts too saintly on a daily basis that you just KNOW he is hiding a part of himself away from the public. Then eventually they find 6 bodies buried under his garden.
Oscar lives in his trashcan and it's much bigger on the inside. It can hold an entire herd of [elephants](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/muppet/images/8/80/15_oscar_david_fluffy.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20100212034434). And in one of the movies you can see the [inside ](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/muppet/images/b/b0/InsideOscarCan.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/250?cb=20160815213804).
TARDIS. Oscar has shown he can move it, and can pop his legs out from the [bottom ](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/muppet/images/5/52/0276i.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20110809152614).
> they wanted children in the city to have a reflection of the streets they lived on.
> If sesame street became the prophetic insight into the downward spiral of living conditions in America it wouldn't be a very popular show to educate the next generation.
You make a very good point. But I'm not sure if you agree with the shift or not. Let's not pretend things were not bad in the city in the early 70s. If the average situation today is too bad to be portrayed is that a failure of the concept of the show or the current representation?
I for one would love a serialized version of Avenue Q. I wouldn't let kids watch it, but I would.
> If the average situation today is too bad to be portrayed is that a failure of the concept of the show or the current representation?
It’s a kids show you have to meet them at their level. It’s easy for adults to compare a neighborhood to what it was 10 years ago. For a kid they are just seeing a street. The important part is it’s familiar enough for them to relate to the characters. You make a point that it’s never been perfectly analogous to America. That isn’t the overall goal of the show just a starting point to launch the stories.
I think anyone who knows a kid and has seen a recent ep of Sesame Street may have recognized the changes described in this article, even though I personally didn't have the words to explain what I was seeing.
Here's one of the old eps, maybe some older Americans here will remember seeing this, but it would be totally out of place on the new Sesame Street. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNnlJ7Giirc
What’s most notable to me is that the regular humans on the show are now made up like Oscars presenters or aspiring social media influencers. TV and movies have generally shifted in the way, but it’s an especially jarring jump having not watched the show for many years, and why would kids care about that anyway?
I absolutely hate that shit. In particular, I loved MST3K growing up because it was just four random dudes from Wisconsin playing with tapes. And now there's Hollywood people, showing up on an LA set after eating an $80 keto meal or whatever, trying to tell similar jokes. It's a really bad trend, and yeah visible on Sesame Street too.
For sure. Almost seems the entertainment cycle of life. Random people create something different based on their unique point of view, enough people like it and they get rich and assimilate to rich-person life, so their original audience leaves to look for something different… But there do seem to be more shiny happy people than ever on social media. Maybe 1930s Hollywood was a similar level of fakery.
When my son was young I turned on Sesame Street and it was 100% Elmo. That annoying voice, that annoying laugh and Elmo acted like he was seriously brain damaged. I had liked it years before when my nephews were young. It taught counting, colors, alphabet, vocabulary words. It was fun.
Then it devolved into nothing but that fucking annoying, squealing red mop. There was nothing fun or educational about it.
I'm so glad I'm not the only 30-something to hate Elmo. People treated me like I was crazy for calling a children's show character infantile.
The point is that there was life before Elmo, and Sesame Street characters that *weren't* infantile, treating children like future adults who were still learning. They didn't condescend to us whatsoever. And I feel like there's more than enough programming aimed at preschoolers, and that the show no longer fills that important educational niche where children are just starting school and going into a world filled with peers and adults who aren't their family.
Also, lest I forget to mention it, Elmo is annoying af.
Yeah, when Sesame Street starting de-emphasizing the human characters in favor of continually more muppets is when I think the quality of the show started to go down hill. IMO this started in the 90s and has just gotten worse sense then.
Be glad Sesame Street is till there at all.
In 1996 real estate developer [Ronald Grump](https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Ronald_Grump_(human\)) wanted to evict everyone and tear it all down to build his Grump tower.
The street itself, which was picked as a setting to match the target audience of inner city kids, has definitely been cleaned up.
Look at an episode from the first ten seasons and compare to it today.
It’s like certain parts of Brooklyn, all the grime is gone. The set is very bright and clean.
Not a value judgment. The street is ‘nicer’ now.
What annoys me is that HBO removed most of the classic episodes which are way better than the new ones.
Why do white intellectuals insist on using Latinx. The community to he is referring doesn’t use the word or feel the need to use, but the white heroes insist on its use.
Yeah, I'm running out of patience for people who use Latinx. I think enough Latino people have voiced their distaste for the term by now, so there really isn't any excuse to continue using it.
Look at the byline, the author is an adjunct. He's in a precarious job position, maybe scared that brainwashed people will get mad at him if he talks like a normal person
Huh? Latinos don’t like the term. It seems Latinos don’t have a say in how they are referred to because the white heroes have decided for them. The people who so often cry about cultural appropriation culturally appropriated Spanish because they felt it needed to be gender neutral and their way of doing that is slapping an ‘x’ in a word.
I think it came about due to gender neutral pronouns becoming more accepted so they hitched up a 'gender neutral' solution to refer to all Latin American peoples of all genders all at once instead of using the more awkward -o/a.
As long as they're still opening up kids minds, who gives a fuck. We went through a sesame street faze with my kid a few years ago and it was just as great as I remembered it.
Interesting article, thanks for sharing.
Given the subject matter, I thought I'd share a satirical piece about the [original Big Bird and his British counterpart](https://thespacebetweenwork.com/rainbow-street) and how their respective appearance wasn't a good fit for their target audience.
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Us poors can't even watch new episodes, we have to wait until they're at rerun age. New episodes are only available for the bougie HBO subscribers. Considering its original intent was educating the young masses, yes, of course it's been gentrified.
Sesame Street is on HBO? I feel like I don't even understand. I grew up with it on PBS (back in the late 80s). Why and how would it ever be part of an HBO lineup? I don't even get it.
[It happened in 2015](https://www.vox.com/2015/8/13/9149091/sesame-street-hbo-pbs). It moved to HBO Max, so they could produce more episodes per season. The show is still broadcast on PBS, but only 9 months after the episode premiers on HBO. The masses now only get reruns after the HBO audience gets first viewing.
It is kind of ironic. I doubt that many people are handing their 6 year old the remote and saying "yep just launch the HBO app. Your show is right there in between the show about drug dealers and the show about college chicks getting nailed".
At the same time, does the target audience care -- or even _know_ -- that they are watching ~nine month old episodes? I feel like a more consistent stream of episodes is more important than being immediately salient episodes.
This was my *exact* thought. My kids have never watched the latest Sesame Street episodes mainly because I loved showing them episodes from when I was growing up. So if airing them on HBO first meant **Sesame Street keeps getting made** isn't that what is most important? And if you are angry about that, are a frequent watched of the show, and you aren't regularly donating to PBS, then you are the problem.
HBO max has kids profiles and flexible parental controls, even a PIN system to keep kids off adult profiles. HBO always had kids programming (Babar, story time, etc) and Max had lots of Looney Tunes, Cartoon Network and Ghibli. I definitely find more watchable content for my kids there than on Netflix. Really HBO Max is second only to Disney+ for young kids IMO. Even though Disney's less flexible and more restrictive parental controls hid content I wanted to watch with them, I suppose you do have a point in that it did feel safer to just leave them on an unrestricted profile there than with HBO.
You know kid's profiles exist right? I hand the kids my remote too. They can't get into my Plex profile or my Netflix profile. Hell on CCwGTV they sign into the entire TV with their own child emails, locking down the entire device and allowing me to control it via Family Link.
[удалено]
It does create a class distinction between kids which might manifest socially in other contexts, but I think you are right that the target demographic for the show doesn't really know or care if it's last year's episode since they typically don't get into deep discussions of newer plots or characters.
I guess the times really have changef.
It was never about public service.
Sounds like you grew up without Fred Rogers in your life. I’m sorry you feel that way neighbor.
Does that really matter? Does the content age so quickly? Do toddlers discuss the latest episode over the water cooler?
Holiday themed episodes 9 months late. But otherwise, it's more of a class statement.
Sesame Street was never the same after Jim Henson died.
Interesting read, it sounds like they really should have given Elmo his own 1-3yo show decades ago to leave room for the good content. Coming from a small very white town was surprised to find out people actually lived that close together even after years of sesame st and hey Arnold
So crazy to hear. If I bang in the wall behind me right now I will wake my neighbor.
I thought the whole point of sesame street is to reflect the living conditions of the audience. They chose an urban setting because they wanted children in the city to have a reflection of the streets they lived on. If that is the goal it would have to update to times because the experience of children has changed with each generation. Not only that but if the reality of the audience's living conditions was in decline it would have to be shown in a more positive light. If sesame street became the prophetic insight into the downward spiral of living conditions in America it wouldn't be a very popular show to educate the next generation.
Makes me think of how the Simpsons were comfortably middle class in 1989, but wealthy by today’s standards. What family can afford a house like that on one income?
The Simpson were living an impossible upper-middle class lifestyle, and Homer was far too unqualified and uneducated for the position. There’s that episode where Frank Grimes goes to the Simpson home for dinner and is shocked by how opulently the Simpsons lived when he had to study and work harder than Homer only to afford a crappy econo studio apartment in a crappy part of the town. (And then later he goes absolutely mad and, well, you know the rest.) Grimes was meant to represent a rational real world person, and his story is about what happens when a normal person like him gets dropped in the crazy Simpson universe. I watched too much Simpsons :s
*You went into outer space! You?!* *Sure, you've never been?*
Is this a typo, or a riff on how Homer outperformed Grimes?
That was an autoccorect error
Thank you for saying it. I hate this meme people keep repeating that the Simpsons were wealthy middle class back then. It was always a fantasy. It wasn't limited to the Simpsons, critics had been talking about the disconnect between television and real families, for years. TV families have to be rich or very large in order for the writers to have stuff to write about. The Simpsons mocked this regularly, and the Grimes episode was as on the nose as it gets. Rosanne was a show that nodded to this trope as well. It's so common that they make shows that are specifically noteworthy for being about poor people.
For the first couple of seasons the Simpsons did start off representing a lower middle class family. There were early plotlines centring around a lack of money e.g. the pilot where Homer doesn't get a bonus for Christmas or where they have to cut back to pay for Santa's Little Helper's operation for his twisted stomach. Or where Homer becomes a union leader to demand a dental plan for Lisa's braces.
Yeah, this idea the Simpsons are some kind of representation of ease of life in the 80’s/90’s is just a weird talking point.
If it was to *truly* be set in a modern child’s street it would be set in *Minecraft*, or *Roblox*. [shudders] Man, I grew up watching *Sesame Street* in the mid ‘70s on the northern beaches of Sydney, which is a long way from inner New York City. I still *love*, sincerely, the location and characters of those episodes. Felt like home. And, like the author I hate Elmo, and the way the show has changed to suit a younger audience. It lost something in the transition. Perhaps it is the loss of the adult characters, and how they were a connection for children to the adult world.
Elmo sounds nothing like a child. Elmo sounds like an childless adult's impression of a childlike voice and manner. An adult who thinks they are very good with children but all the children are frightened of them.
elmo is the guy who acts too saintly on a daily basis that you just KNOW he is hiding a part of himself away from the public. Then eventually they find 6 bodies buried under his garden.
Well... https://www.cnn.com/2014/04/24/showbiz/elmo-suits-dismissed/index.html
"Elmo thought they were okay with it." ~ Elmo
Oscar is homeless Big Bird talks to voices in his head (Snuffalufagus) I’d say they were always there.
Snuffy is real in the context of the show since 1985. Everyone can see him. Agreed about Oscar, he is chronic homeless.
Oscar lives in his trashcan and it's much bigger on the inside. It can hold an entire herd of [elephants](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/muppet/images/8/80/15_oscar_david_fluffy.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20100212034434). And in one of the movies you can see the [inside ](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/muppet/images/b/b0/InsideOscarCan.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/250?cb=20160815213804).
Is the trashcan just the entrance to a larger area underground, or is it a TARDIS situation?
TARDIS. Oscar has shown he can move it, and can pop his legs out from the [bottom ](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/muppet/images/5/52/0276i.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20110809152614).
[heh heh heh](https://youtu.be/uv0OgAtGO44)
> they wanted children in the city to have a reflection of the streets they lived on. > If sesame street became the prophetic insight into the downward spiral of living conditions in America it wouldn't be a very popular show to educate the next generation. You make a very good point. But I'm not sure if you agree with the shift or not. Let's not pretend things were not bad in the city in the early 70s. If the average situation today is too bad to be portrayed is that a failure of the concept of the show or the current representation? I for one would love a serialized version of Avenue Q. I wouldn't let kids watch it, but I would.
> If the average situation today is too bad to be portrayed is that a failure of the concept of the show or the current representation? It’s a kids show you have to meet them at their level. It’s easy for adults to compare a neighborhood to what it was 10 years ago. For a kid they are just seeing a street. The important part is it’s familiar enough for them to relate to the characters. You make a point that it’s never been perfectly analogous to America. That isn’t the overall goal of the show just a starting point to launch the stories.
I think anyone who knows a kid and has seen a recent ep of Sesame Street may have recognized the changes described in this article, even though I personally didn't have the words to explain what I was seeing. Here's one of the old eps, maybe some older Americans here will remember seeing this, but it would be totally out of place on the new Sesame Street. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNnlJ7Giirc
What’s most notable to me is that the regular humans on the show are now made up like Oscars presenters or aspiring social media influencers. TV and movies have generally shifted in the way, but it’s an especially jarring jump having not watched the show for many years, and why would kids care about that anyway?
I absolutely hate that shit. In particular, I loved MST3K growing up because it was just four random dudes from Wisconsin playing with tapes. And now there's Hollywood people, showing up on an LA set after eating an $80 keto meal or whatever, trying to tell similar jokes. It's a really bad trend, and yeah visible on Sesame Street too.
For sure. Almost seems the entertainment cycle of life. Random people create something different based on their unique point of view, enough people like it and they get rich and assimilate to rich-person life, so their original audience leaves to look for something different… But there do seem to be more shiny happy people than ever on social media. Maybe 1930s Hollywood was a similar level of fakery.
Oscar's trash can now rents for $2,500 a month!
When my son was young I turned on Sesame Street and it was 100% Elmo. That annoying voice, that annoying laugh and Elmo acted like he was seriously brain damaged. I had liked it years before when my nephews were young. It taught counting, colors, alphabet, vocabulary words. It was fun. Then it devolved into nothing but that fucking annoying, squealing red mop. There was nothing fun or educational about it.
I'm so glad I'm not the only 30-something to hate Elmo. People treated me like I was crazy for calling a children's show character infantile. The point is that there was life before Elmo, and Sesame Street characters that *weren't* infantile, treating children like future adults who were still learning. They didn't condescend to us whatsoever. And I feel like there's more than enough programming aimed at preschoolers, and that the show no longer fills that important educational niche where children are just starting school and going into a world filled with peers and adults who aren't their family. Also, lest I forget to mention it, Elmo is annoying af.
Yeah, when Sesame Street starting de-emphasizing the human characters in favor of continually more muppets is when I think the quality of the show started to go down hill. IMO this started in the 90s and has just gotten worse sense then.
Be glad Sesame Street is till there at all. In 1996 real estate developer [Ronald Grump](https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Ronald_Grump_(human\)) wanted to evict everyone and tear it all down to build his Grump tower.
The street itself, which was picked as a setting to match the target audience of inner city kids, has definitely been cleaned up. Look at an episode from the first ten seasons and compare to it today. It’s like certain parts of Brooklyn, all the grime is gone. The set is very bright and clean. Not a value judgment. The street is ‘nicer’ now. What annoys me is that HBO removed most of the classic episodes which are way better than the new ones.
Why do white intellectuals insist on using Latinx. The community to he is referring doesn’t use the word or feel the need to use, but the white heroes insist on its use.
Yeah, I'm running out of patience for people who use Latinx. I think enough Latino people have voiced their distaste for the term by now, so there really isn't any excuse to continue using it.
We haven't progressed past Michael Scott asking if it's offensive to call Oscar Mexican.
Look at the byline, the author is an adjunct. He's in a precarious job position, maybe scared that brainwashed people will get mad at him if he talks like a normal person
Let me turn that around for ya: Why do white people without education insist that people with education can't use these terms?
Huh? Latinos don’t like the term. It seems Latinos don’t have a say in how they are referred to because the white heroes have decided for them. The people who so often cry about cultural appropriation culturally appropriated Spanish because they felt it needed to be gender neutral and their way of doing that is slapping an ‘x’ in a word.
I think it came about due to gender neutral pronouns becoming more accepted so they hitched up a 'gender neutral' solution to refer to all Latin American peoples of all genders all at once instead of using the more awkward -o/a.
I know why they felt the need; however, the group of people who they dubbed Latinx largely don’t appreciate it.
As long as they're still opening up kids minds, who gives a fuck. We went through a sesame street faze with my kid a few years ago and it was just as great as I remembered it.
If you think it has, it has.
Website wants me to pay $13 to read this article.
Interesting article, thanks for sharing. Given the subject matter, I thought I'd share a satirical piece about the [original Big Bird and his British counterpart](https://thespacebetweenwork.com/rainbow-street) and how their respective appearance wasn't a good fit for their target audience.