Sesame Street

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Speaker 2 It's the late afternoon on a Monday. I'm four years old, sitting crisscross applesauce on the floor of my parents' apartment.
The carpet is shaggy, ugly, and brown.

Speaker 2 I have a cherubic face and bold haircut, you know, like the one Jim Carrey has in the film Dumb and Dumber.

Speaker 2 In front of me is a TV with an antenna and dial. It's the late 1980s.
And on the screen is my daily companion, Sesame Street.

Speaker 3 Today is a

Speaker 3 special day because today's the day when my little sister Alice meets my best friend, Bird.

Speaker 3 Bird!

Speaker 2 My family had only recently moved to the US from Iran and I was lonely. I couldn't speak English.
I couldn't make sense of where we were or what had brought us here.

Speaker 2 In that moment, where I needed a lifeline, Sesame Street with its weird cast of characters was there. The giant animals, monsters, Muppets, the kind adults and children everywhere on the street.

Speaker 5 It's a puppy! Oh, hey! You're right, Bird. Oh, look at him.

Speaker 2 Isn't he cute? I learned English watching Sesame Street. I learned how to deal with loss, anger, sadness, loneliness.

Speaker 2 When my parents, who were dealing with their own trauma and working constantly to make rent, weren't there, I learned from Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Susan, and Gordon.

Speaker 2 It was a window into a whole new world. A safe, accepting, beautiful,

Speaker 2 American world.

Speaker 3 Wake up!

Speaker 6 The name's Kermit.

Speaker 7 Whatever you say, Frocky, it is.

Speaker 4 Just open my mouth and.

Speaker 4 That's just amazing!

Speaker 2 But I wasn't alone. In millions of other homes, millions of other young children like me were sitting in front of their TVs watching the same show I was.

Speaker 2 And some of those children grew up to work right here on Through Line.

Speaker 8 I watched Sesame Street in the early 90s when I was a kid.

Speaker 9 From the early 1970s. So right, you know, right when Sesame Street started.

Speaker 10 I always joked that it was created just for me because it was made about a year after I was born.

Speaker 11 My sister and I actually weren't allowed to watch a lot of TV, but Sesame Street was one of the very few shows that we were allowed to watch.

Speaker 8 I would watch from the couch of my family's apartment in the Bronx.

Speaker 9 I was in Wichita, Kansas.

Speaker 11 On the floor in our living room, way too close to the TV.

Speaker 10 And actually, my earliest memory of Sesame Street is actually my earliest memory.

Speaker 8 I think it made me feel like I could be on the show. Like, I could be on Sesame Street.

Speaker 9 Only child being raised by a single dad, so I spent a lot of time in front of the TV.

Speaker 8 I think a big part of this was because there were kids on the show who looked like me.

Speaker 6 I came to show you the moon, Maria.

Speaker 11 My favorite character was Big Bird.

Speaker 13 Look up in the sky.

Speaker 9 My favorite, favorite character was Roosevelt Franklin.

Speaker 15 I have a letter.

Speaker 4 He is here with me.

Speaker 9 I'm in my 50s and even now, I find myself walking around and randomly hearing Roosevelt Franklin Elementary School.

Speaker 8 One of these things is not like the other.

Speaker 5 I saw the beautiful moon.

Speaker 10 Just kind of felt like friends. It just felt like a place I wanted to spend time.

Speaker 8 I learned everything on Sesame Street. Things that taught you how to, you know, navigate the world.
And I feel like, in a way, I'm still learning from Sesame Street.

Speaker 9 I don't know. I think it really, really has played a major role in my worldview.

Speaker 9 So, yeah, Sesame Street.

Speaker 2 For many of us, Sesame Street was our first taste of education. It taught us how to read and count and be nice people in this society.

Speaker 2 But the road to creating this show and sustaining it decade after decade has come with its own struggle.

Speaker 2 A struggle that can tell us so much about the role of education in socializing children and developing cultural norms and shared values.

Speaker 8 Arguments over what those are and how they're communicated tend to flare up during moments of cultural anxiety, like the one we're in now.

Speaker 2 This is a story about how a TV show made to represent a block in Harlem, New York, has sustained its mark in educating children around the world.

Speaker 2 And it's a story about the questions we're still asking about who the people are in our neighborhood.

Speaker 8 In this episode of Through Line from NPR, the story of Sesame Street.

Speaker 9 Roosevelt Franklin.

Speaker 9 Elementary school.

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Speaker 8 Part one:

Speaker 8 A symphony, orchestra, brain power.

Speaker 2 Today, it may be easy to think of Sesame Street as a show that was created by some massive government program, carefully concocted in some laboratory to teach kids how to read and write.

Speaker 2 But the reality is, Sesame Street began at a dinner party at the Manhattan apartment of a local TV producer named Joan Gans-Cooney.

Speaker 6 She and her husband hosted

Speaker 6 a classic 1960s dinner party, and she prepared beef Bougognon from Julia Child's cookbook for some of her colleagues and friends.

Speaker 2 I have never actually had beef bogogne,

Speaker 2 but I figured I would tell you that just as an excuse for me to say the word.

Speaker 2 But anyway, this group of people at this party were basically just Joan Gans-Cooney's friends and colleagues, except there was one hotshot there.

Speaker 6 Fellow named Lloyd Morissette.

Speaker 2 Lloyd Morissette.

Speaker 6 Who worked in the philanthropic world working on projects devoted to children.

Speaker 2 By the way, this is Michael Davis.

Speaker 6 Author of Street Gang, the complete history of Sesame Street.

Speaker 2 Okay, so back at the dinner, all the guests gobbled down the beef Bourgognon, and then the conversation turned to kids and education, something Joan had been thinking about in a television special she'd made.

Speaker 6 That

Speaker 6 investigated a program in Harlem where they were enriching the lives of preschool children with educational materials and instruction and essentially giving young kids in Harlem who were younger than school age the opportunities and influences that kids who in more privileged homes were getting.

Speaker 6 Books and records and being read to and those kinds of things.

Speaker 2 And that program ends up becoming the model for what we now know as the National Head Start program, a federally funded education program designed to prepare children for kindergarten.

Speaker 6 And there came a moment in the after-dinner conversation when somebody said, you know, I wonder if television could provide the same thing.

Speaker 2 Because by the 1960s, basically everyone had a TV. And this electric picture box was like a direct pipeline into living rooms all across the country.
Joan saw this as an opportunity.

Speaker 6 Could television teach?

Speaker 6 And Joan at that very moment said, I don't know that it can, but I'd sure like to be the person who would try.

Speaker 2 And then, boom.

Speaker 6 Just like that, at that moment, in her head, an idea

Speaker 6 came into clear focus.

Speaker 6 that some of the things that she saw in Harlem could very well be translated to the screen. Let's see if we could do that.

Speaker 2 Lloyd Morissette, a vice president at the Carnegie Foundation, decided to give her a grant to conduct research on whether a TV show to educate kids was even possible.

Speaker 2 At the time, this idea was sort of novel because most children's programming on television was not educational at all.

Speaker 2 And ah

Speaker 2 dog, howdy to you.

Speaker 6 This is Detachative Huckleberry Hound.

Speaker 18 The Flintstones. Brought to you by Miles Products, Division of Miles Laboratories, makers of...
Well, look, where's the Alkaseltzer?

Speaker 13 Where it always is. Next to the one-a-day multiple vitamins.

Speaker 2 What was the hole that they were trying to fill?

Speaker 6 Well, the hole was a

Speaker 6 gaping, wide

Speaker 6 gap. I mean,

Speaker 6 the world of children's television,

Speaker 6 circa 1968,

Speaker 6 was sort of a cavalcade of mayhem

Speaker 6 cartoons that really weren't all that worthy afternoon shows in local markets that were, you know, just put on the air to sell products. And

Speaker 6 it was a minefield of junk.

Speaker 19 At the time, the only show on the air for preschoolers that was quality was Captain Kangaroo.

Speaker 4 Then one day some hunters came hunting along.

Speaker 19 And it wasn't educational. It was a nice show for kids.

Speaker 8 This is Joan Gans-Cooney from a television interview on a show called The Open Mind back in 2009, talking about that question from the dinner party. Could TV teach?

Speaker 19 So I did a report saying, yes, the answer is yes, and here's how it might proceed.

Speaker 8 That report was called The Potential Uses of Television for Preschool Education.

Speaker 6 And she felt that famously that, you know, kids could sing beer commercials, beer jingles.

Speaker 6 If television had the power to teach that to children, maybe it could teach something a little more pro-social, like, you know, some basic rudiment concepts of learning.

Speaker 8 It went all the way back to what she saw in Harlem, making that TV special about the project that was part of the foundation for Head Start.

Speaker 6 Joan's fundamental idea was, if we're going to try to see if television can teach, let's do it in a bona fide way. Let's get educators to help us craft a curriculum for the show that can be measured.

Speaker 6 We want to be able to prove to our funders that it worked. Now, that was a real part of the brilliance behind Sesame Street.

Speaker 6 To ground it in bona fide scientific educational research.

Speaker 8 Joan and Lloyd had been able to raise about $1 million from foundations to support their idea of a children's TV show, but they had to come up with a budget of $8 million to actually do it.

Speaker 8 In today's money, that's about $62 million.

Speaker 8 So who else was going to invest that much money into an idea that probably offered no kind of financial return?

Speaker 20 I propose that we begin a program in education to ensure every American child the fullest development of his mind and skills.

Speaker 19 This was the era of Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society. But Washington had various pilot projects around the country that they were researching to see if early intervention could make a difference.

Speaker 19 And the research showed that it did make a difference.

Speaker 8 The administration of Lyndon Johnson was laser-focused on eliminating poverty and reducing inequality. To that end, they made education, especially for black children, a priority.

Speaker 8 Joan and Lloyd were completely on the same page with the administration.

Speaker 6 The civil rights movement

Speaker 6 gave energy to this

Speaker 6 initiative.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 these were, you know, New Yorkers,

Speaker 6 liberals.

Speaker 6 They were convinced that the government could and should be in the business of helping preschool children with media.

Speaker 8 After months and months of pitching, it worked. In 1968, Sesame Street got almost $4 million from the Office of Education, facilitated by the LBJ administration.

Speaker 8 That made up about half the budget to kickstart the show. The rest came from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Carnegie, and Ford Foundations, along with other funders.

Speaker 6 I think they had a holy crap of it.

Speaker 6 It was like, okay, you know, Joan spent a year, you know, doing research and talking to people,

Speaker 6 educators and psychologists and doctors, pediatricians, you know, and then, you know, all of a sudden it became very real. And they realized that

Speaker 6 we've got to put a show on the air. And within a year, you're talking about something that had never been done before.

Speaker 6 They

Speaker 6 summoned the brightest people they could find from disparate worlds, the world of education, psychology, psychiatry, medicine, artists, musicians.

Speaker 6 And they had a series of seminars seminars and they brainstormed together. No one had ever created this symphony orchestra of brain power.

Speaker 21 I think it's fair to say that by the time our program goes on the air, it will be the most thoroughly researched show in the history of the medium.

Speaker 8 The show was developed under a non-profit called the Children's Television Workshop. All they needed was an audience, and Joan had to sell it.

Speaker 21 The short, simple, 60-second form used by TV advertisers in commercials to sell products is used here to teach numbers and letters.

Speaker 8 This is from a promo that was filmed before Sesame Street's debut.

Speaker 3 You know what this is, Kermit? A really bad triangle? Oh, come on, Kermit. It's a circle.
Okay, so it's a circle. So?

Speaker 3 Well, you know that, but a lot of little kids don't.

Speaker 2 It's hard to overstate how revolutionary this was. It was a show whose goal was to reach black audiences at a time when black families were struggling for equality in education.

Speaker 2 It was a show inspired by Harlem, which many people thought wouldn't resonate with the national audience. No one knew if anyone would watch.

Speaker 2 So the creators were literally hitting the streets to spread the word.

Speaker 6 A woman named Evelyn Davis, African-American woman

Speaker 6 who was a community activist in New York City,

Speaker 6 very, very well connected, knew everybody. It was her job to raise awareness that this show was coming.

Speaker 6 And she was able to convince Con Edison, you know, the big utility in New York City, to donate a bus.

Speaker 6 And on that bus, they had an early PCR, a tape machine, and a monitor.

Speaker 6 And they invited people onto the bus to have a look at, you know, basically a reel of what Sesame Street was going to look like. She went from church to church, preschool to preschool,

Speaker 6 community house to community house, just selling this idea.

Speaker 6 and doing her best to get excitement generated about

Speaker 6 its promise.

Speaker 6 That work was so important

Speaker 6 because she had credibility in the Black community, high credibility.

Speaker 8 It was 1969, three years after the dinner party at Joan's apartment, and Sesame Street's first episode would air on November 10th.

Speaker 8 Millions of dollars had been invested, yet no one knew for sure if the show would work. Nothing like it had ever existed before.

Speaker 2 When we come back, Sesame Street launches and legends are born.

Speaker 22 Hi, this is Regina from Washington, D.C.

Speaker 22 And you are listening to the best sound design podcast there is, not to mention the best NPR podcast.

Speaker 4 Through line.

Speaker 22 Thanks for all your work, guys.

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Speaker 8 Part 2. How the people spoke.

Speaker 6 I was a senior in high school when Sesame debuted,

Speaker 6 and I already was

Speaker 6 determined to watch it.

Speaker 8 That first episode opens with weird animated creatures. One looks kind of like a cross between a unicorn and an alligator.
The other, an armless, grinning blue guy wearing a bowler hat.

Speaker 8 It has a very 60s vibe.

Speaker 6 Number one, I had seen a special on NBC that aired a couple of days before that hailed the show. But number two, I love the Muppets.

Speaker 4 I call my bathtub Rosie.

Speaker 6 Here I was, you know, like 17, watching a show meant for kids age four.

Speaker 11 Why do you call your bathtub Rosie?

Speaker 4 Because every time I take a bath, I leave a ring around Rosie.

Speaker 6 And I thought, man,

Speaker 6 this is really great.

Speaker 23 Sally, you've never seen a street like Sesame Street. Everything happens here.

Speaker 4 You're going to love it.

Speaker 8 In the first scene of the very first episode, you meet the store clerk, Mr. Hooper, Bob the music teacher, and in the background, two kids, black and white, play with a ball.

Speaker 8 And then Gordon, the guy who owns the Sesame Street Brownstone, calls into the window of his house.

Speaker 4 Susan's my wife.

Speaker 17 You love her. Susan, come here.

Speaker 23 Why don't you say hello to Sally?

Speaker 14 Hi, Sally.

Speaker 4 What are you doing home here?

Speaker 14 Susan is not a name that you name black children, okay?

Speaker 14 I inherited Susan. However, Susan was from the Midwest.
She grew up on a farm. She had a father and a mother and a brother.
And I use my own story.

Speaker 2 Susan is you.

Speaker 14 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 14 It's me.

Speaker 8 This is Dr. Loretta Long, who played Susan starting from that very first episode in 1969.

Speaker 14 I was born in Kansas, but I was raised in rural Michigan, 20 miles from Kalamazoo Zoo Zoo.

Speaker 8 Dr. Long has been an entertainer since she was a kid.
She used to sing show tunes while helping her family sell produce at the roadside stand.

Speaker 14 When I graduated from Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, I immediately moved to Detroit.

Speaker 14 My dream was really to work for Motown.

Speaker 14 I wanted to be part of the Motown sound, but all the slots were taken. The Supremes didn't need nobody.
Martha had all the Vandelas, so

Speaker 14 I had to branch out.

Speaker 8 Dr. Long went to New York City in 1960.
She wanted to make it big, be a star. But she needed a day job that would give her the flexibility to go on auditions.

Speaker 8 And so, with a degree in education, she landed substitute teaching gigs in Harlem and the Bronx.

Speaker 14 I knew if I got the right phone call, I was history.

Speaker 8 When she finally got that call, it was 1969, and she'd been co-hosting a show on New York public television that was all about Black music, Black culture, and black identity.

Speaker 8 It was a show called Soul.

Speaker 17 It's Soul, and this is your announcer, Jerry V.

Speaker 14 No train. We didn't have the money for a train, just Soul.

Speaker 14 The young man who is a set director, every time the camera went off, you heard

Speaker 14 he was building the mock-up for Sesame Street.

Speaker 14 He said, Oh, I'm doing this for this children's show. And

Speaker 14 you're a teacher. Why don't you? And

Speaker 14 I'm an actor who happens to be teaching. I am not a teacher.
He said, right now, you're a teacher who can sing, okay?

Speaker 14 So he sent me to the audition.

Speaker 14 It was just a regular room with a bunch of judgmental people sitting at a long table with their arms folded looking at you. But I was used to that.
I mean, I had auditioned for Broadway.

Speaker 14 They were looking for an acoustic folk guitar,

Speaker 14 Joan Baez looking, and I looked like I looked like Angela Davis. I had a big fro, short skirts, and show tunes.
They looked me up and down and said, Where's your guitar? I said, Excuse me.

Speaker 14 My what?

Speaker 14 They said, So, very New York, so sing sing already.

Speaker 14 One, two, you know what to do. Hey, I'm a little teapot, short, and style.
Here is my handle.

Speaker 14 And I said, hold it, hold it. See, I knew we were singing to children.
And I looked right in the camera and I said, now you all know this song. Now I'm going to start it again.

Speaker 14 And you stand up and sing it with me, okay?

Speaker 14 One, two, you know what to do. Hey.

Speaker 14 Ed Palmer, who's head of research, said the kids all stood up and sang. And I have a career because of some kids in Harlem that stood up and sang with me.

Speaker 24 Anyone see any more rectangles right around in this neighborhood?

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 24 Some pictures. Oh, the pictures, those are good rectangles.

Speaker 8 Look at this. The thing about Dr.
Loretta Long is that she really did embody what Sesame Street has been doing since the very beginning, mixing education and entertainment.

Speaker 24 One of these things is not like the others. One of these things doesn't belong.

Speaker 8 In fact, during the first few years the show ran, Dr. Long was earning her PhD in urban education from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Speaker 24 I have a riddle for you. What's closer to you than the air?

Speaker 24 And what stretches like a rubber band and comes in a lot of pretty colors like white, all shades of brown.

Speaker 14 The fact that we could put entertainment and educational concepts together and make it more palatable for children, it fit me like a glove.

Speaker 24 Well, did you guess?

Speaker 8 It was skin.

Speaker 14 I was hired for one week.

Speaker 14 We shot a pilot from a Monday through Friday to show how we would teach and utilize every day to reinforce the lesson we were teaching. I was only hired for a week, so that wasn't any big celebration.

Speaker 2 And that brings us back to that first episode in November 1969.

Speaker 4 E-E-C-Me, milk.

Speaker 17 Did you ever wonder where it came from?

Speaker 2 That first episode is trippy.

Speaker 4 Sure it is. Hello, Big Bird.
Oh, hi, Gordon.

Speaker 2 Big Bird is this big, dopey, disheveled-looking creature with sort of creepy eyes, a rough sketch of what we see today.

Speaker 6 You're letting all the fresh air and sunlight, head boy.

Speaker 2 Oscar the Grouch is orange.

Speaker 4 Go away, close my can, Lydia.

Speaker 2 And Sesame Street was born at a time when the government was taking a bigger role in people's lives.

Speaker 2 Medicaid and Medicare had been created, the Civil Rights Act was passed, and the government was getting involved with what was on TV.

Speaker 2 Sesame Street first aired on the National Educational Television Network, which would become the Public Broadcasting System, PBS, the next year, which is why even today, Sesame Street can feel so synonymous with PBS.

Speaker 6 I was there, man, in 1969. Nobody knew what the hell PBS was, believe me.

Speaker 6 In a lot of markets, you couldn't even find it. It was on a UHF station, and you were lucky if you could get rid of the fuzz and get a decent picture.

Speaker 2 But the picture was pretty clear. In its second week, Sesame Street was reaching almost 2 million homes and the reviewers loved the show.

Speaker 6 I think the majority of people hailed it and loved it and you know it was an immediate success. It was a blockbuster success.
It was everywhere.

Speaker 6 But

Speaker 6 there were opponents from the very start.

Speaker 6 Notably, Mississippi Public Television refused to air the show.

Speaker 6 Why? Because black and white children were portrayed as being friends on the show and, you know, did things together and it was as normal as normal could be.

Speaker 6 That was not going to fly in Mississippi until, aha, the parents said, wait a minute, we want this show.

Speaker 6 We think our children should be able to see this show. And they resolved that conflict in the best of all ways.
The people spoke.

Speaker 2 The ban lasted less than a month, but the Mississippi government wasn't the show's only critic. Some educators themselves were questioning whether a TV show could really do a good job teaching kids.

Speaker 6 They thought that the pace was too frenetic. They thought it was going to create a generation of kids with attention deficit disorder.
And there were people who were really

Speaker 6 angry with it, suspicious of it,

Speaker 6 didn't like it one little bit.

Speaker 14 I had a guy say, well, am I supposed to be entertaining my kids in the class? And I said, why not?

Speaker 8 But Sesame Street was changing the game.

Speaker 6 Kindergarten teachers had to rip up their curriculum. They had to start over because no longer were kids showing up, not understanding the basics.
They showed up ready to learn and to learn more.

Speaker 8 A 2015 study showed that a whole generation of kids in the 70s were coming to school more prepared. By 1979, around 9 million kids under the age of six were watching Sesame Street every day.

Speaker 8 And it wasn't just reaching quote-unquote disadvantaged children.

Speaker 6 Within

Speaker 6 weeks of its premiere, it was clear that all boats were going to to rise as a result of this show.

Speaker 6 A lot of people questioned the idea of the government getting involved in television, and the whole idea of a public television network seemed to them to be like just more liberal brainwashing.

Speaker 6 But, but, but, but, but, but,

Speaker 6 moms,

Speaker 6 grandmoms, dads,

Speaker 6 older siblings, I mean, once they started watching this show when it debuted in November of 69,

Speaker 6 immediately defended it, immediately took to it, immediately saw that it was like nothing else on television. And, you know, within a year, Big Bird was on the cover of Time magazine.

Speaker 6 The tone of Sesame Street and the tempo of it was extraordinary too.

Speaker 6 It was very fast-paced. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
There were quick cuts.

Speaker 5 Roy, you're really weird.

Speaker 6 It was animation.

Speaker 6 There were songs.

Speaker 19 Two whipped cream pies on the wall.

Speaker 6 There were parodies.

Speaker 5 And now, time for TV's favorite game show, Beat the Time.

Speaker 5 And here's TV's favorite moderator, Guy Smiley.

Speaker 8 And the show wasn't just about numbers and letters.

Speaker 14 The diversity was the soft skill that laid right in there with the ABCs and the one, two, threes and Kermit singing, it's not that easy being green.

Speaker 4 It's not that easy being green.

Speaker 4 Having to spend each day the color of the leaves.

Speaker 8 And all the while, educators and researchers, directors and writers work together trying to figure out how to do all this right.

Speaker 13 Hi, Mr. Looper.

Speaker 22 What you doing?

Speaker 4 Hooper, Hooper. Hooper.

Speaker 6 Life presented. Children's Television Workshop with a real dilemma when Willie, the actor who portrayed Mr.
Hooper, died

Speaker 6 fairly suddenly.

Speaker 13 I'll sweep for you.

Speaker 13 And that way you can sit down and study because that's what you should be doing.

Speaker 4 I say

Speaker 14 he rode in the Thanksgiving Day parade, went in the hospital.

Speaker 8 And less than two weeks later, Will Lee and with him, Mr. Hooper died.

Speaker 6 They

Speaker 6 had to decide

Speaker 6 what would become of that character.

Speaker 8 Since the show spent so much time researching each episode, the episode where they addressed the death of Mr. Hooper wouldn't air for almost a year after his death.

Speaker 13 I just drew pictures of all of my grown-up friends on Sesame Street, and I'm going to give it to you.

Speaker 14 They said, we have to say the words, Mr. Hooper died.

Speaker 14 And it has to be put in Big Bird's mouth because he's a child.

Speaker 6 Big Bird was a stand-in for like a six-year-old child. He's the child's representative on the street.

Speaker 14 And if he had a question, we figured that the children were questioning that as well.

Speaker 14 So we were all in the alcove and sitting around, and he had drawn caricatures of each of us, and he brought them to give them to us.

Speaker 13 Hey, it's time for your present.

Speaker 14 And then he went to give Mr. Hoopers his.

Speaker 13 and last but not least, ta-da!

Speaker 14 And that's when we said, well, Big Bird, you know, you remember Mr. Hooper died.

Speaker 13 Oh, yeah, I remember. Well, I'll give it to him when he comes back.

Speaker 24 Big Bird, Mr. Hooper's not coming back.

Speaker 4 Why not?

Speaker 24 Big bird, when people die,

Speaker 4 they don't come back.

Speaker 4 Ever?

Speaker 4 No,

Speaker 4 never.

Speaker 4 Why not?

Speaker 14 We did it one time. The assistant director came out, Lisa, crying, there were a few things wrong.
Anyone want to do it again? And everybody said, No, and we ran, we ran for our dressing rooms.

Speaker 14 You know, that was it, man.

Speaker 8 Coming up, how Sesame Street takes on empathy, diversity, and some of the country's most divisive issues.

Speaker 25 Hi, my name is Stephen Barrera and I'm a graduate student at Indiana University here in Bloomington, Indiana. And you're listening to Tuline from NPR.

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Speaker 4 Part 3:

Speaker 8 Don't dish big bud.

Speaker 24 Now where is that Roosevelt Franklin?

Speaker 23 Somebody call me by my first and last name.

Speaker 24 Yes, I called you, and it's about time you got

Speaker 6 really interesting to me is

Speaker 6 the character Roosevelt Franklin.

Speaker 15 Here I am, here I am, and there you are.

Speaker 15 And that's just what we're going to get into today who was an identifiably black character here

Speaker 4 and there

Speaker 6 and funny and fresh and the bits were always set in the schoolhouse in the classroom where he clearly spoke in the black vernacular rhyme time rhyme time everybody ready for rhyme time

Speaker 6 while some in the black community were delighted to see it and thought it was something that Sesame Street absolutely needed to do if your target audience is black.

Speaker 6 Other members of the black community said, oh, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 15 It was over here.

Speaker 15 Now it's over there.

Speaker 4 Uh-huh. Right.

Speaker 4 Well, that's the difference between here and there.

Speaker 6 The pressure amounted

Speaker 6 and they did drop the character.

Speaker 8 Here's the thing, though. The guy who created that character was Matt Robinson, the same guy who played Gordon, Susan's husband.
And he was proud of Roosevelt Franklin.

Speaker 8 Which brings us to a question that Sesame Street has been forced to deal with throughout its entire existence. Who should be included in the neighborhood?

Speaker 6 While there were conservative voices saying that the show was trying to sell something that they didn't necessarily want their children to buy, voices on the left were saying, you folks aren't going far enough.

Speaker 2 In the early 1970s, you started to see pushback on representation on Sesame Street. There were feminists who were angry that the Susan character was too subservient to her husband.

Speaker 2 Two new human characters, Luis and Maria, joined the show after activists asked for more Latino representation in the neighborhood.

Speaker 6 There were

Speaker 6 individuals throughout the history of Sesame Street saying, you know, why aren't you showing a gay or lesbian family on the show?

Speaker 6 It's the rare television show that can claim getting criticism from both flanks.

Speaker 28 We are looking at the public spat between Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Big Bird.

Speaker 26 Big Bird put out a tweet after getting the COVID vaccine. He called Big Bird's tweet government propaganda for your five-year-old.

Speaker 2 Over the years, Sesame Street has become known for taking on more and more of these culturally sensitive topics, trying to help families navigate how to talk about them.

Speaker 2 It's right there, along with the ABCs.

Speaker 29 Do you tell everybody that it is okay to hug someone who is HIV positive like me?

Speaker 2 My dad's in jail.

Speaker 5 In jail?

Speaker 4 Why?

Speaker 8 I don't like to talk about it.

Speaker 2 Most people don't understand.

Speaker 6 What does divorce mean?

Speaker 26 Well, divorce means that Abby's mommy and daddy aren't married anymore.

Speaker 7 We see ebbs and floats.

Speaker 8 This is Dr. Kira Hunting, associate professor at the University of Kentucky, who specialized in children's media.

Speaker 7 We see these moments where Sesame Street introduces something...

Speaker 10 new

Speaker 7 and sometimes you get pushed back from the larger culture relationship to that or more frequently politicians relationship to that and then we move on and maybe perhaps we don't have something new for a little while and then we have something new again.

Speaker 30 Children don't need this kind of access at such an early age. They're simply not ready for it.
They're not prepared for it. And really we're taking away our children's innocence.
We're taking away.

Speaker 2 In a country that's so politically divided, what does a show like Sesame Street represent in terms of either exacerbating that divide or bridging it?

Speaker 7 Well, I don't think it exacerbates it. I think it can be used by people who want to further the divide, right?

Speaker 7 I think we've certainly seen politicians take moments from Sesame Street and tweet about them and be like, oh my god, Big Bird got a vaccine. Well, Big Bird also got a vaccine in the 70s.
He was fine.

Speaker 24 You're gonna have to do it. I want to get a measles shot.

Speaker 26 Well, I don't want to get the measles.

Speaker 7 So I don't think that Sesame Street can really fulfill its goals and its purposes without engaging in some representations and some content that is going to be perceived as political in a negative way by at least some commentators and some politicians.

Speaker 6 There was in the early days some critique of the government's place in funding Sesame Street, but I think the volume on that was increased later in the 80s and during the Newt Gingrich era of the Republican Revolution.

Speaker 6 I mean, it was later when that drumbeat of criticism of the show really grew louder.

Speaker 8 By the mid-1980s, Sesame Street had been relying less and less on government funding and more and more on merchandising Sesame Street products like stuffed animals, t-shirts, and books.

Speaker 8 But because of its reach and because it symbolized a public, more liberal media, it was an easy target.

Speaker 27 When Newt Gingrich, the leader of the Republican Revolution, was asked what in the federal budget would first feel his acts, he answered, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Speaker 8 All this criticism hasn't stopped Sesame Street, Children's Television Workshop, and now Sesame Workshop from trying to represent what they feel is right for the moment.

Speaker 8 In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, Sesame Street partnered with CNN to host a town hall on racism called Coming Together.

Speaker 4 Racism? What's that?

Speaker 4 Oh,

Speaker 12 racism is when people treat other people unfairly because of the way they look or the color of their skin.

Speaker 7 If you look at some of the specials or the episodes that are being critiqued by some conservative groups and other commentators, you can really see that they're mostly just about children and Muppets in the community dealing with difficult experiences.

Speaker 24 Well, my friend Big Bird, he was bullied by some other birds because of his yellow feathers.

Speaker 7 So Sesame Street having these direct depictions is very consistent, but it's always done in just a a slightly more explicit way that is consistent with this historical moment.

Speaker 28 They won't stop with their push for woke politics.

Speaker 26 It's the innocence of kids that's being attacked earlier and earlier.

Speaker 7 And I think what really I want to ask is why that's controversial. Why talking about

Speaker 7 self-esteem and inclusion and being a good friend and dealing with people who have excluded you or been mean to you or treated you badly for part of who you are is okay in some instances but in other instances is being treated as inappropriate or as quote too political

Speaker 6 i will tell you this it's always a mistake to diss big bird

Speaker 6 bad idea why can't you diss big bird over time, what's happened is that we really deeply understand these characters. We know who they are.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 to suggest that Big Bird was doing something stupid

Speaker 6 or not good for kids just rings false with the viewer.

Speaker 2 Like the time presidential candidate Mitt Romney said he'd cancel subsidies to PBS and use Big Bird as a stand-in.

Speaker 2 There were all these memes and media coverage about it, and it was used against him in the election in 2012.

Speaker 6 Thank goodness somebody is finally getting tough on Big Bird.

Speaker 4 We didn't know that Big Bird was driving the federal deficit.

Speaker 2 In December 2024, the streaming service Max announced that it was ending its decade-long partnership with Sesame Street. Some Sesame Workshop staff have announced their intent to form a union.

Speaker 2 Sesame Workshop announced layoff plans shortly after.

Speaker 2 A Sesame Workshop spokesperson told NPR in an email that the decision was made, quote, amid the changing media and funding landscape.

Speaker 8 It's impossible to say how much of the rhetoric for or against Sesame Street helps anyone's cause, but there is something deeply ingrained in many of us about Sesame Street.

Speaker 8 Something that's decades in the making that makes some adults feel like kids, that makes dissing Big Bird off-limits for many people, including me.

Speaker 14 Big Bird, I said, was the prototype of the child. You were messing with their childhood.

Speaker 2 Sesame Street started as a way to reach underprivileged kids.

Speaker 2 It was going above the noise and really above the politics that can slow down and sometimes obstruct real change in schools and governments.

Speaker 8 And because it was started by white liberals from New York City and kick-started with government funding and aired on public television and meant for black children, the question still remains: who gets to control the neighborhood, the messages, the music they choose, the Muppets who have continued to teach us, generation after generation?

Speaker 14 One, two, you know what to do. Hey, I'm a little teapot short and stout.

Speaker 8 I'm a little teapot short and stout.

Speaker 9 Here is my handle.

Speaker 9 Here is my spout.

Speaker 4 When I get all steamed up, give me a shout.

Speaker 8 Tip me over and

Speaker 4 pull me out.

Speaker 8 That's it for this week's show. I'm Randad Dirfata.

Speaker 2 I'm Ramteen Arab Louis.

Speaker 8 This episode was produced by me and me and Lawrence Wu.

Speaker 19 Julie Kane.

Speaker 7 Anya Steinberg, Yolanda Sanguin, Casey Minor, Christina Kim, Devin Katiyama, Amiri Tullu, Jennifer Etienne.

Speaker 8 And a big, huge special thanks to the throughline kids you heard at the end: Reed, Roomi, Soleil, and Finley.

Speaker 2 Fact-checking for this episode was done by the one and only Kevin Vokel.

Speaker 2 Thanks also to Kimberly Sullivan, Micah Ratner, Taylor Ashe, Samantha Belgard, Tamar Charney, and Anya Grunman. This episode was mixed by Josh Newell.

Speaker 8 Music for this episode was composed by Ramteen and his band Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani, Naveed Marvy, Show Fujiwara.

Speaker 8 And as always, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline at npr.org.

Speaker 2 Thanks for listening.

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Speaker 12 They donate thousands of mattresses each year to those in need, while also partnering with organizations like Clean Hub to help remove harmful plastic waste from oceans.

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