History of Sesame Street

Featuring Jim Henson's Muppets, animation, live shorts, humor and celebrity appearances, it was the first television program of its kind to base its content and production values on laboratory and formative research, and the first to include a curriculum "detailed or stated in terms of measurable outcomes".

In recent decades, Sesame Street has faced societal and economic challenges, including changes in the viewing habits of young children, more competition from other shows, the development of cable television and a drop in ratings.

[19] The field of developmental psychology had grown during this period, and scientists were beginning to understand that changes in early childhood education could increase children's cognitive growth.

Because of these trends in education, along with the great societal changes occurring in the United States during this era, the time was ripe for the creation of a show like Sesame Street.

[21] In early 1966, Cooney and her husband Tim hosted a dinner party at their apartment in New York; experimental psychologist Lloyd Morrisett, who has been called Sesame Street's "financial godfather",[22] and his wife Mary were among the guests.

[23] As a vice-president at the Carnegie Corporation, Morrisett had awarded several million dollars in grants to organizations that educated poor and minority preschool children.

[24] A few days after the dinner party, Cooney, Freedman, and Morrisett met at the Carnegie Corporation's offices to make plans; they wanted to harness the addictive power of television for their own purposes, but did not yet know how.

[4] The following summer, Morrisett hired her to conduct research on childhood development, education and media, and she visited experts in these fields across the United States and Canada.

She suggested using the television medium's "most engaging traits",[31] including high production values, sophisticated writing, and quality film and animation, to reach the largest audience possible.

In the words of critic Peter Hellman, "If [children] could recite Budweiser jingles from TV, why not give them a program that would teach the ABCs and simple number concepts?

[32] To this end, she suggested that humor directed toward adults be included,[33] which, as Lesser reported, "may turn out to be a pretty good system in forcing the young child to stretch to understand programs designed for older audiences".

[35] As a result of Cooney's proposal, the Carnegie Corporation awarded her a $1 million grant in 1968 to establish the Children's Television Workshop (CTW) [36] to provide support to the creative staff of the new show.

[48][note 6] At first, Cooney planned to divide the show's production of five episodes a week among several teams, but she was advised by CBS vice-president of programming Michael Dann to use only one.

[50][51] The CTW hired Harvard University professor Gerald S. Lesser to design the show's educational objectives and establish and lead a National Board of Advisers.

[56] Instead of focusing on the social and emotional aspects of development, the producers decided to follow the suggestions of the seminar participants and emphasize cognitive skills, a decision they felt was warranted by the demands of school and the wishes of parents.

[63] The producers were reportedly "frantic for a title";[61] they finally settled on the name that they least disliked:[64] Sesame Street, inspired by Ali Baba's magical phrase,[63] although there were concerns that it would be too difficult for young children to pronounce.

[82] During the production of Sesame Street's first season, producers created five one-hour episodes to test the show's appeal to children and examine their comprehension of the material.

[86] The producers reshot the Street segments; Henson and his coworkers created Muppets that could interact with the human actors,[86][88] specifically Oscar the Grouch and Big Bird, who became two of the show's most enduring characters.

[93] An executive at ABC, while recognizing that Sesame Street was not perfect, said the show "opened children's TV to taste and wit and substance" and "made the climate right for improvement".

By the mid-70s, Morrow reported that "the show included Chicano and Puerto Rican cast members, films about Mexican holidays and foods, and cartoons that taught Spanish words".

By the second season, Sesame Street had become so popular that the design of ETS' experiments to track the show's educational outcomes had to be changed:[106] instead of comparing viewers with a control group of non-viewers, the researchers studied the differences among levels of viewing.

[124] Richard Hunt, who, in Jon Stone's words, joined the Muppets as a "wild-eyed 18-year-old and grew into a master puppeteer and inspired teacher", created Gladys the Cow, Forgetful Jones, Don Music, and the construction worker Sully.

[128] The CTW wanted to attract the best composers and lyricists for Sesame Street, so songwriters like Joe Raposo, the show's music director, and writer Jeff Moss were allowed to retain the rights to the songs they wrote.

There was birth and death, love and loss, courtship and calamity, pain and pleasure, all from a little show whose aims at first were simply to test television's ability to stimulate the brain.

For the 1983 season, the show's producers and research staff decided they would explain Mr. Hooper's death to their preschool audience, instead of recasting the role: the writer of that episode, Norman Stiles, said, "We felt we owed something to a man we respected and loved".

[149] Several people involved in the show from its beginnings died during this period: Jim Henson in 1990 at the age of 53 "from a runaway strep infection gone stubbornly, foolishly untreated";[150][note 20] songwriter Joe Raposo from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma fifteen months earlier;[151] long-time cast member Northern Calloway of cardiac arrest in January 1990;[149][note 21] puppeteer Richard Hunt of AIDS in early 1992;[125] CTW founder and producer David Connell of bladder cancer in 1995;[153] director Jon Stone of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 1997;[154] and writer Jeff Moss of colon cancer in 1998.

[156] With Michael Loman as the new executive producer of the show, new human and Muppet characters were introduced, including Zoe (performed by Fran Brill), baby Natasha and her parents Ingrid and Humphrey, and Ruthie (played by comedian Ruth Buzzi).

[163][164] Beginning in 1998, a new 15-minute segment shown at the end of each episode, "Elmo's World", used traditional elements (animation, Muppets, music, and live-action film), but had a more sustained narrative.

[182][note 24] In late 2015, as part of a five-year programming and development deal, it was announced that premium television service HBO would air first-run episodes of Sesame Street.

[189] In 2020, CNN had aired a few town hall segments with Sesame Street characters to help children understand difficult topics during the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter riots.