It’s hard for me, a former child superfan of “Sesame Street,” to write about the show without sounding mawkish. It’s even harder now that I’ve got two small children of my own. So I might as well admit that when I first heard Netflix was swooping in to save the beloved children’s program from the brink of financial ruin, and that new episodes would run on the streaming service at the same time they aired on PBS, it felt like getting a good health prognosis after a worrisome scan.
For a lonely little kid growing up in the sticks, ‘Sesame Street’ was my only portal into lives lived by other children.
I grew up on an unpaved road outside a town of 1,100 people, a place so remote that when I was a kid, we couldn’t have gotten cable TV installed if we’d tried. We did have an antenna on top of our house that could pick up five television channels from the Twin Cities, though: one of them PBS.
For a curious but ultimately kind of sheltered and lonely little kid growing up in the sticks, “Sesame Street” was my only portal into lives lived by other children and the excitement of cities, and it was my evidence of the existence of people who weren’t white and rural.
“Sesame Street” wasn’t made with kids like me front and center; its creators deliberately crafted the show to reach underresourced kids in urban areas. My parents read books to me every night and even acquiesced to my nerdy requests for preschool workbooks. But the effect “Sesame Street” had on me was distinct from anything my parents could do.
“Sesame Street” made racial diversity and kindness look like the way the rest of the world worked. It was the first place that I heard Spanish spoken — courtesy of Maria and Luis, played by Sonia Manzano and Emilio Delgado, respectively. The show was my first exposure to the concept of adoption — when Susan and Gordon Robinson (played by Loretta Long and Roscoe Orman, respectively) adopted Miles (Miles Orman). Since my parents didn’t let me watch sitcoms, the Robinson family was the first Black family I saw dramatized on TV.
I still distinctly remember a 1980s-era interstitial that featured a boy doing tricks in his wheelchair. Bert and Ernie introduced me to the concept of roommates.
The show’s pop music parodies were my primary exposure to pop outside of my parents’ Steely Dan- and Allman Brothers-heavy record collection. The first time I heard Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” out in the world, I thought it was a new version of the “Sesame Street” rendition “Born to Add.” Same goes for Madonna’s “Material Girl.” To me, it was “Cereal Girl” first. The Pointer Sisters’ counting song featuring a pinball machine is stuck in my head right now.
My mom told me Sesame Street was in New York City, and so I decided, at age 4, that I was going to live in New York City one day. (And I did, for several years, including a time in a wonderful part of Harlem that looked an awful lot like Sesame Street and, like Sesame Street, was home to all kinds of people.)
I’ve tried to tell my own children how to get to Sesame Street, in part because I think it was good for me, but also for selfish reasons. I can watch “Sesame Street” with my girls without wanting to claw my face off after a few minutes. No shade to Ms. Rachel, because in this house she’s the closest thing we have to a saint, but her program is not something I’d watch willingly; it’s something that I turn on so that my children will have something to pay attention to while I get things done around the house.
I hate Cocomelon so much that I won’t even have it playing in the background, and I’ve gone to great lengths to limit the kids’ exposure to it. Same goes for “Blippi”; I find the title character so irksome that every time my 3-year-old asks to watch him on YouTube, I make up a lie about him being in a meeting or taking a nap. “Bluey” is a wonderful show, but it’s more about the value of imaginative play than about learning and literacy. “Sesame Street,” for my money, is the only children’s TV program that is both educational and watchable.
I can watch ‘Sesame Street’ with my girls without wanting to claw my face off after a few minutes.
Revisiting “Sesame Street” as a parent, I’m struck by how funny it can be. The writing is great. Oscar the Grouch delivers sassier and less hacky jokes than any of the sitcom characters my parents valiantly shielded me from as a child. All of the “Sesame Street” Muppets are allowed a range of emotions that more saccharine children’s fare eschews. “Sesame Street” doesn’t pretend that things like racism, death, jealousy and disagreements don’t exist.
Another reason that “Sesame Street” is still the best children’s show: Everybody who has beef with it seems like a miserable killjoy — Ted Cruz, panelists on Fox News’ “The Five,” Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ben Shapiro, wraparound shade-wearing Twitter users who went apoplectic when the official Elmo account wished its followers “Happy Pride.”
Netflix’s move to save “Sesame Street” won’t fix the systemic reasons public media is threatened in the U.S. Nor will it undo educational inequality baked into a system nobody in power seems intent on actually fixing. But, for the time being, it’s comforting to know it’s still there — and that kids like me, kids like mine and kids I’ll never meet can still get to Sesame Street simply by walking to their television.