Out of the box, “Sesame Street” was a rara avis: a mass-market hit on public TV, a kids’ show with sophistication and a wild countercultural energy. It even surprised the people who made it.
“We’re shooting this show, and you see this ugly bird,” the cameraman Frank Biondo says in the documentary. “I remember thinking, ‘Who’s gonna watch this [expletive brought to you by the letter S]?’”
But it was not universally loved. A Mississippi state TV commission refused to air “Sesame Street” after complaints about the racially integrated cast. Local commercial affiliates picked up the show, knowing a hit when they saw one, and the board eventually reversed the vote.
It’s easy today to feel superior to this racial history, or to forget it. When Sesame Street introduced a Korean American Muppet this year, Matt Schlapp, the president of the Conservative Political Action Committee, called the addition “insane” on Twitter. “I grew up watching, and it was never about race,” he said on Fox News. (Someone inform Roosevelt Franklin.)
“Street Gang” cuts off around the end of the Jim Henson era (Henson died in 1990); Elmo gets just a fleeting glance, and decades of history, including the move of the flagship show to HBO, go unnoted. So the documentary doesn’t examine the show’s cast and format changes, or the question of whether it would or could have been created today, in an era of many more TV options for children (albeit more commercial ones).
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/12/arts/television/sesame-street.html
Speak Your Mind
You must be logged in to post a comment.