Format of Sesame Street
Sesame Street is an American children's television series that is known for its use of format and structure to convey educational concepts to its preschool audience, and to help them prepare for school.
The producers of Sesame Street, which premiered in 1969, used elements of commercial television such as music, humor, sustained action, and a strong visual style, in structuring the format of the show.
[6][note 2] Co-creator Joan Ganz Cooney was the first to suggest that they use commercial-like 12–90-second shorts that consistently repeated several key concepts throughout an episode.
[3] They reproduced their viewers' neighborhoods—as writer Cary O'Dell described it, "a realistic city street, complete with peeling paint, alleys, front stoops, and metal trash cans along the sidewalk".
[1] Director Jon Stone was convinced that in order for inner-city children to relate to Sesame Street, the show had to be set in a familiar place.
[17] Producers found that if the show's segments were sufficiently varied in character, content, style, pace, and mood, children's attention was able to be sustained throughout each episode.
[19] During Sesame Street's development in 1968, the producers followed the recommendation of child psychologists, who advised them to not allow the direct interaction of the human actors and Muppets because the experts were concerned it would confuse and mislead young children.
[22] Shortly before the show's premiere, the producers created five one-hour episodes so that they could test if children found them comprehensible and appealing.
[25] 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".
[23] CTW researcher Gerald Lesser called the producers' decision to defy the recommendations of their advisers "a turning point in the history of Sesame Street".
[26] The first piece of animation commissioned by the CTW for Sesame Street was "the J commercial", in 1968, which they used in a study about its effectiveness in daycare centers in New York City.
[30] Gikow reported, "Virtually all animators and filmmakers supplying the show cite the enormous freedom given by producers, calling it a liberating force that let creativity explode on screen".
[32] Animators who created pieces for Sesame Street included Bud Luckey, Jeffrey Hale, Ernie Fosselius, and others who went on to work at Pixar.
[34] By 2009, Sesame Workshop started a new website containing a large library of classic and more recent free video clips, as well as a series of podcasts.
By then, the show was faced with heavy competition from other preschool television programs such as Barney & Friends and Blue's Clues, which caused its ratings to decline.
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.
The segment, called "Elmo's World", used traditional elements (animation, Muppets, music, and live-action film), but had a more sustained narrative,[49] 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.
They expanded the "Elmo's World" concept by, as San Francisco Chronicle TV critic Tim Goodman called it, "deconstructing"[45] the show.
