Saving “Sesame Street”
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Thank you. This is a different scene. It's getting a little loud. Quiet, folks, please. Quiet. It's about to get a lot louder. Last year, post-education reporter Laura Meckler was able to get incredibly close access to the making of an iconic television show. The performers are holding their Muppets ready to go.

The show was Sesame Street. Let's read from line 41, please. Here we go. And Ernie enters and action. Sesame Street is one of the longest running shows currently on TV. It started in 1969 as an educational program on public television. The goal was to prepare young kids for kindergarten.

Laura Meckler watched Sesame Street as a kid. And when she had children of her own, she showed them Sesame Street.

I have always just felt a connection with Sesame Street because it's something that just feels like it's always been around. It's really part of our culture. And I think that there's just something about Sesame Street that gives those of us who have had it as part of our lives kind of the warm fuzzies. Back in 2022, in the wake of the pandemic, Laura and the education team were thinking a lot about the mental health and emotional well-being of young children.

Because we knew, like, there were so many signs that this was a real problem, that kids had really been battered through the lockdowns and the lack of social interaction. And I was like, you know what would be cool? What if Sesame Street was doing an episode about emotional well-being and we could watch them put it together? ♪♪

It turned out that Sesame's upcoming season is going to be heavily focused on emotional well-being. Season 55 is meant to teach kids how to identify emotions like anger and frustration and sadness and give kids strategies to deal with those feelings.

Laura was invited to follow along over the course of two years as the team behind Sesame Street researched, wrote, and filmed their upcoming season. All right, folks, let's start again from the top, please. On one hand...

I just learned a lot about how television is made, and in particular, the way that Sesame Street is made, which is not your typical show. You know, I knew that it had economic roots, but now I really understand now sort of what that looks like in practice. But, you know, I also learned something else while I was reporting this, and this wasn't the story I set out to report, but that Sesame Street is facing some really difficult headwinds. The competitive landscape of children's television is tough these days. Sesame is an expensive show to produce.

And they have some real questions about whether they're reaching the kids that they need to, whether they're reaching enough kids, and what their model is going to be going forward to sustain this program that so many people do care about.

From the newsroom of The Washington Post, this is Post Reports. I'm Martine Powers. It's Monday, December 23rd. Today, we go deep into the making of Sesame Street and how the show is trying to adapt to today's kids and fight for its own survival. ♪

Okay, so Laura, I have a confession to make, which is that I didn't really grow up with much Sesame Street in my house or in my life. We were much more of a Barney family, which is sort of embarrassing to admit. But I'm curious, for anyone who is like me, who might not be super familiar with the show or might just have a passing awareness of it,

Are there any specific moments or clips from Sesame Street that you love and could share to explain why you love this show and why it feels so special to you? Well, there are a few Sesame Street videos out there that I just can never get enough of. Like what? Well, there's one that I discovered when I was parenting little kids. It's this...

Really fun video from 2010. It's a music video that Sesame produced with the musician Will.i.am. And he's singing a song with the Muppets called What.i.am. And this song is so inspirational that sometimes I just listen to it on my own, no kids around, just to kind of put myself in a good mood for the day. What.i.am is small.

I love that you are so well-versed in the lyrics.

So that's one clip that I really love. There's another one that's a little bit older. It's from the 70s. Right from the beginning, Sesame Street was all about teaching kids their numbers and their letters to get them ready for school. And they had a number of the day segment. And there were sometimes these animated videos that would teach kids their numbers. And this is one of those. And

It is, I swear to God, the best advertisement out there for the number 12. It's called Ladybug Picnic. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. Ladybugs came to the Ladybug Picnic.

It's just so clever. You know, the ladybugs are sitting around playing knock-knock jokes and they're knocking their little heads together. And it's just such a great way to teach. And in fact, if you look at that video for Ladybug Picnic, it's about the number 12. And the way they count them off, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, there are four sets of three. That's like early set grouping. That's teaching. That's math. Yeah, it's like getting to multiplication. And it's like 4 times 3 is 12. Exactly.

Describe walking into the studio of Sesame Street. It's funny. It's in Queens, New York, Astoria, the Astoria neighborhood. And from the outside, you just kind of look like you're on any other street corner in New York. Then you go inside and you realize, okay, you're kind of in an office building. And then you go down a couple corridors. And then there are these big, heavy double doors. And they're swung open when the studio is open. And you walk in and suddenly it's like you're in another world. ♪

The first thing you notice is off to the right, there's the brownstone steps of 123 Sesame. That's the place that the center of Sesame Street. It's been there since the very beginning. And then you look a little to the left and there's Mr. Hooper's grocery store. And then back tucked in the corner, you see Big Bird's Nest.

It has this amazing feeling of warmth. You look around and you feel like, wow, this is a place that I know. Walking on this set for the first time is a surreal experience. One of the first people I met when I arrived was Shannon Flynn. She was directing the episode that I was there to watch. And I talked to her about what it was like for people when they arrived to this soundstage. Two reactions happen. Either people get really over the top.

Or they get so introspective and they're like overwhelmed and in awe.

It's just a really neat place to be because you do really have that sense that this is something special. In fact, while I was talking to Shannon, she picked up a little yellow feather from the floor and she handed it to me. It was a big bird feather that had just fallen onto the floor. And she said, I believe this has magic. Oh, do you still have that feather? Did you hold on to it? I do have that feather. Oh, my gosh. You have it here.

I have it in the back of my iPhone case. Oh, that is so sweet. So tell me about the episode that you were there to watch being filmed and made. Yes. The episode I was there to watch is called Happy Birthday. Happy Birthday.

It's about, I would imagine, the character Bert. You got it. Bert and Ernie. Exactly. Bert and Ernie, who are a classic comedy duo in the spirit of Felix and Oscar or Abbott and Costello. Bert is the straight man. Ernie is the jokester. Bert, it like sings quiet and neat and organized and...

Ernie is a chaos agent, and they're best friends and roommates, and they've been that way for a very long time. And in this episode, Ernie is planning a surprise party for Bert, and he wants to do something so special for Bert because he's his best friend. Surprise! What is all of this? It's your special, secret, special surprise party for you, Bert, my best friend in the whole wide world. Oh, my God. I can't believe it.

But Bert doesn't want a big party. He just wants to spend the day working on his jigsaw puzzle. And Ernie doesn't really understand that. And as the party is raging, Bert isn't having fun. And friends are telling Ernie that Bert isn't having fun. And Ernie's upset about this, but his response is to just keep making the party bigger, bigger, bigger. More friends. More music. Louder music. A disco ball. There's all sorts of things. He just dials up the chaos.

And as a result, Bert just keeps getting more and more frustrated until finally there's a breaking point when Ernie accidentally drops Bert's puzzle and the puzzle pieces go flying and Bert just loses it. And it's like, that's it. That is it! That is it! This party is all about! Go! Go!

And then there's a moment of repair. And this is the teaching part where they're able to name their emotions. Ernie's feeling excited. Bert's feeling frustrated. They're able to

talk about with the help of a way, a strategy to manage their emotions. In this case, it's a lion's breath. And there's a little Muppet lion who had been at the party comes to help them out with the lion's breath where they take a breath in and then let it out with a roar. And the idea is to just like let that tension out and

And this is what that moment will sound like in the final version of the episode, which is set to air sometime in 2025. First, we breathe in slowly through our noses like this. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. And now roar like this. Wow.

Wow, Lion, that really helped. My body feels calmer now. Yeah, I feel better too. That's amazing. That's also a very complex episode. It is a complex episode. It's just such, you just, you see this tension and they want kids to understand that you can be friends and like different things and that's okay. Yeah.

So I'm curious, for you watching this episode being made in real time, what was that like and what did you notice about how this cast and crew were doing their work? Well, the first things I noticed were well before I got to that studio. It was about the process of making this episode, which started off, you know, over a year and a half ago. ♪

In April 2023, the entire Sesame Brain Trust gathered for their annual, right, called a curriculum seminar. And they brought in four experts in early childhood and emotional well-being. And they talked about what are the messages that kids need to receive. This is a day-long seminar, very academic, with the writers having a chance to ask questions and playing out various scenarios. So the first thing I noticed was like, this whole thing is really grounded in research and

And the next thing I noticed was the level of editing that goes into these scripts was incredible. They look at each and every word, and they have those academic experts come back and look at every single word, too. And they look at what could the implications be of this word, and will this work? And will this send a message we don't want to send? And they have meetings about this. So there's a lot that goes into this script. And then there's another step where they actually...

show the episode, not all of them, but a handful get chosen for testing. And this one was chosen for testing where they show the episode to young kids, three and four year olds. And they will show the episode before they make it. They make an animated version of the episode. So it's not it's like a very kind of a rough cut. It's all it's a cartoon version of the episode. And they want to see, well, the kids understand what it's about. Well, they get the messages. And we actually got to watch some of these testing sessions, which they were doing with kids and their parents over Zoom.

So what were they doing in that video? That video was an angry, young, skinny... The long, skinny guy was angry? Yeah. Oh, okay. What was he angry about? He was angry about the other bear knuckled over the puzzle.

Oh, when he knocked over the puzzle. Yeah, I remember that. And then they make, they have meetings after that and they make revisions after the research. And then we get to the shooting day.

So tell me more about how the story of this episode ends up evolving and, like, decisions that are made because of all these, like, writers and editors and experts who are being brought in to vet the script and, like, make adjustments to exactly what it needs to be. Yeah, it's really interesting because that input from these academic experts does not end with the end of the script. They're right there in the studio when this episode's being taped. So, yeah.

Over the course of the day that I was there, the director, Shannon Flynn, wanted to make some changes and she would run these by folks. I'm going to get Ernie to the puzzle so that Ernie can use it like a maraca because the puzzle piece is inside and then he drops it. Oh, he accidentally drops it. It was near the end of the episode where we see, you know, Bert's frustration building and building. He just wants to do his puzzle. And the

The way the episode is supposed, this part of the scene is supposed to end is that his puzzle gets kind of knocked off of a table and falls to the floor. And that's when Bert loses it. Shannon's idea was to raise the stakes a bit. And she suggested that instead of him just knocking off of a table, that Ernie pick up the puzzle and shake it like a maraca, like a musical instrument. Oh, no. And that through the shaking, that's how it falls. But then it's like hard.

So Shannon takes this idea over to this group of writers, including head writer Ken Scarborough and other academic experts who were on the set with them. The thing that he's not just picking up his thing to wreck it. He's thinking he's helping the music. When he shakes it, it's got to be a riff. It's got to be a riff. And he's got to

He's got to use it like an instrument, not like a... And I don't think towards Bert either, because you don't want it to seem like it's... He's taunting him. Like taunting him. Right, exactly. 100% not. And they work out all of this, both technically and also in terms of story. And then they reshot the scene, and everyone agreed it worked.

It's amazing to hear how much thought and care goes into coming up with a story and filming it and making sure that it's absolutely perfect. But of course, so much of what people see is dependent on the puppeteers. Tell me a little bit more about the puppeteers and about some of your conversations with them. The thing that struck me the most was the incredible talent of the puppeteers and what they are able to do. These Muppets are...

have very few variables that you can manipulate. So they might have a mouth that opens and closes. They might have eyes that googly around like Cookie Monster. Or in the case of Bert, he has a unibrow eyebrow that can be up or down. And that's it. That's the only thing that changes about this. But they manage to evoke this enormous range of emotion out of these Muppets. This is a smile.

You know? Yeah. Which turns into a laugh if you bob up and down. It could be. It could be a laugh. Which also can turn into... Or it could be an earthquake and I'm terrified. On set, I got to talk with the puppeteers who play Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street, Eric Jacobson and Peter Lentz. And I can look down, but I can also look sad. But I can also look thoughtful.

You know, it's always kind of the same. That was amazing. As you did each one of those things, I was feeling what you were saying, even though you were doing the exact same thing. You're an act—as an audience member for puppetry, you're an active participant. Some actors do play multiple characters. Eric Jacobson, in addition to playing Bert, he also plays Grover and Oscar the Grouch. And so I sheepishly asked him if maybe he would, you know, just introduce us on tape here to some of the characters that he plays.

Hello there. My name is Grover. I like to help people. And, oh, look, Oscar. Oscar, come over here. Come on. What is it? What do you want? Oh, I just wanted to introduce you to, what is your name? Laura with the Washington Post. Laura. This is Laura with the Washington Post.

Oh, is that right? Yeah, I use your newspaper to put on the floor of my can. Who is this? Who are you talking to? Oh, this is Laura from the Washington Post. The Washington Post? Oh, oh, well, I read you every day.

Yes, yes. What do you write about? Well, right now I'm writing about Sesame Street. Sesame Street? What do you want to know? I'm an expert on that. So it sounds like

I mean, honestly, it sounds like watching an episode of Sesame Street be made is delightful. But you had mentioned earlier that Sesame Street is also in a challenging moment and that they're facing some real headwinds. Can you talk more about that and the kinds of challenges that Sesame Street is staring down right now?

So one thing I learned as I was reporting this story is that there's a lot of thinking going on right now at Sesame Street, what they call a reimagining of the show. And they're really making a lot of changes because they're worried. They're worried that the audience isn't big enough. They're also worried that the audience is too young.

Too young? What does that mean? Well, some parents are putting like really little, little, little, littles in front of the show, like 18 months old, which is really too young to really actually appreciate what the show is trying to teach. The problem right now is that the four-year-olds are, by the time they get to that age, they feel like Sesame Street, like they're done with it. That was like a baby show. They watched it when they were two. Wow. So they're moving on to something else. And that's a problem for Sesame Street.

They need those viewers. They need those viewers both to sustain their model and to fund this show. They need those viewers because that's who they're trying to reach with their messages. So this reimagining is trying to look at everything they do, and they really made some very big changes about the format of the show and about who is in the show. After the break, the huge changes coming to Sesame Street. We'll be right back.

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See Mint Mobile for details. So, Laura, you said that Sesame Street is about to undergo some major changes. What kind of changes? Well, the Muppets, to be honest. So there are a lot of Muppets on the street. I mean, there's like

hundreds and hundreds introduced over 55 years. But even in what we might think of as sort of the main cast, there's, you know, close to a dozen who regularly appear. And that's a lot of Muppets to keep track of. And the powers that be at Sesame have decided that it's too hard for kids to develop relationships with these characters. So they're not necessarily

necessarily like getting fully nixed, but they are doubling down on what they call a core cast. And that core cast is just going to be four Muppets. Those Muppets are Elmo, Abby Cadabby, Cookie Monster, and Grover. They say those are the characters that resonate most deeply with the audience. And then that means everybody else, characters who many of us think of as core to Sesame Street are going to be in secondary roles. And that includes...

Bert and Ernie, and it also includes Oscar the Grouch and The Count and Big Bird.

And those guys are still going to be on the show, but they're not going to have leading parts. And the result of this is characters that many of us view as iconic Sesame Street characters, many of them have already been downgraded and don't appear as often. But under this reimagining, starting not this coming year, but the following year, we're supposed to see really those four core cast members in every episode and these other characters really playing maybe a secondary role.

You know, and it made me realize as I was reporting this that this episode that I got to see made about Bert and Ernie. Bert's birthday. Bert's birthday. That this may be one of the last episodes featuring them in starring roles. Wow. That seems like a huge change. Like when I think of Sesame Street, I think of Big Bird. Right.

Right. It sort of has been an iterative change, but what I think the Sesame folks would say is, you know, this show isn't for you. Yeah, that like a two-year-old, a three-year-old who's starting Sesame Street Fresh, like they don't have a relationship with Big Bird or...

or Bert or Ernie, and they don't know who these people are. They're not going to miss them if they don't show up. Right, or if they just show up in the background or if they have sort of a supporting role or maybe the B story. The other thing they're doing is they're making longer stories instead of these little 9 to 10-minute street stories. They're going to be a little longer. Oh, interesting. They're going to be a couple of them, and they're not doing the shorter segments. They're just doing two long segments. Why is that?

They think that in order to get older kids engaged, that they really need deeper storytelling, narrative-driven storytelling. They say that older kids, and when we mean older, we mean four-year-olds, five-year-olds, they need more peril. They need more higher stakes. They need deeper character development. And that you get that with longer storytelling. And things like the Ladybug Picnic, where they were learning the number of the day or the letter of the day. Just like a very cute little 60-second thing. Yeah.

Yeah, that those things like kids already know their letters and their numbers. They don't need this. They don't need Sesame for that anymore the way they did in 1969. And that those things, you'll still be able to find that stuff on YouTube. I can still watch my lady big picnic every few months just to keep

keep my mood up, but that that isn't the kind of thing that the show needs today. That's their theory. You have to be able to meet the needs of today's children. So keeping us in 1969 would make us stagnant and irrelevant.

This is Rosemary Trulio. She's the Senior Vice President of Curriculum at Sesame. And I think that's the reason why we're still around 55 years later, because we are willing to change and adapt and learn and be nimble as we are focusing on what are the current needs of kids today? What do they need most from the content that we can produce for them? Though I wonder...

I wonder more about the flip side of that. I mean, I can imagine that deprioritizing some of these iconic characters like Big Bird, like Bert and Ernie, that that might be controversial. Like, I'm curious about the cast and crew of, like,

If everyone's on board with these changes. Well, it's a good point. I mean, some of the biggest defenders of the classic characters are the cast, the puppeteers themselves, who really revere the legacy of Sesame Street and view themselves as the keeper of the flame and feel like these are characters that are iconic and are iconic for a reason.

If you have characters like Bert and Ernie and only use them very sparingly or only for nostalgia pieces or only for adult things,

they die because you have a whole younger generation who has no idea who they are. So one of the actors who has been vocal about this is Peter Lentz, who plays Ernie. It's like, great, we can use these for this fundraiser and this app, this commercial, whatever. But if you're not continually introducing them to kids, to kids who are going to grow up with them, then they're just going to die out. But characters like Bert and Ernie, particularly now,

Having characters that seem to have very little in common and have very different likes from one another getting along, I think is just hugely important and topical now. I mean, probably more than it ever was. But even these characters were created along those lines to show that, you know, I can be different from you. I can like different things, but we can still be friends. Yeah.

And I think that's a universal message and one that's really important to show for children. Interesting. So you have this show that's grappling with a lot of creative decisions about which characters to focus on, how to resonate with the audience that they have, this younger audience, or how to cultivate relationships.

relationships with this new generation watching Sesame Street. But I'm also wondering about, like, the business side of things. I mean, you mentioned that this is an expensive show to make. It sounds like a complicated show to make. It sounds like there are a lot of people involved. And, like, tell me more about, I don't know, the money here, right? Like, can Sesame Street sustain itself? Yeah.

it's an open question right now. Sesame Street, about 10 years ago, was very much in the red. They were losing money every year. Oh, really? And they solved that problem with what was at the time a controversial solution, which is that they

signed a contract with HBO that the shows would air first on HBO, which, of course, is a subscription service, and then nine months later on PBS, which had been its home since the beginning. Oh, I had no idea. I just think of Sesame Street as, like, synonymous with PBS, but I didn't know they're on HBO with, like, Sex and the City and Game of Thrones.

Right. Well, exactly. And that's actually part of the problem. You know, Sesame has made a lot of money through this contract with HBO. It was initially a five-year contract and then it was renewed for another five years. And it brought in millions of dollars that is critical to paying for this show. But from HBO's point of view, they looked at their data and they saw that, you know, families are not coming to HBO for children's programming. You know, they're coming for some very adult contact. And at least...

Ten, nine, ten months ago, Warner Brothers Discovery, which now owns HBO and Max, told Sesame that they were not going to be renewing the contract for another term. And that has left Sesame with a hole. They need to fill this revenue hole or the place is just not going to have balanced books. So they've been out there talking to other streaming services, looking for a new partner. But, you know, they do not yet have a deal to announce. So.

So my understanding is that there was one question that you posed to a lot of the people that you got to meet who were part of the Sesame Street world. And that was, will Sesame Street last forever? What did people say when you asked them this? Interestingly, almost everybody answered that question almost the exact same way.

It will go on forever. That's how Rosemary Trulio, the head of curriculum at Sesame, answered the question. We have been going on for 55 years. Yes, there are business challenges. Yes, there are media landscape challenges. But it's our mission. And while it's always challenging to change and to make some hard changes,

We know that change is needed. And that's why if you could focus on what are the needs of children, staying close to children through our formative research, that is the recipe for our longevity and our future. Sesame is not going to go away.

There are too many needs in the lives of children and the lives of families. We've seen many shows come and go, and Sesame is still here 55 years later. So I think that's a pretty good track record. And I think, not think, I know that we have the right recipe ingredients to keep the show evolving. That's the best strategy to keep us alive is that we're willing to change and adapt. ♪

Obviously, I don't know what the future is going to be for Sesame Street. When you listen to people there talk about it, it's easy to believe what they say, which is that this show has persisted because it's adapted. And I'm not betting against it. That doesn't mean there aren't challenges. There are very real challenges. You know, nostalgia and warm feelings, you know, don't pay the bills. And I think that there will just have to be some decisions made by a whole lot of people, including today's parents.

about whether this is something that they care enough about to make sure it lasts for another 55 years. Laura, thank you so much for sharing this story. It was a real pleasure. Thanks so much for having me and bringing this story to life. Laura Meckler is a national education writer for The Post. ♪

If you want to read Laura's incredible story, which has behind-the-scenes pictures and video from the Happy Birthday segment, you can find the link in today's show notes. ♪

That's it for Post Reports. Thanks for listening. This episode was edited by Maggie Penman, it was mixed by Sam Baer, and it was produced by the amazing Peter Bresnan. This is actually Peter's last episode with us, for now, anyways. So, Peter, thank you so much for your incredible work. We will miss you a ton. Best of luck. I'm Martine Powers. We'll be back tomorrow with more stories from The Washington Post.

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