As Sesame Street kicks off its 45th season this week, it looks to maintain its cultural place by doing what it’s always done: teach basic learning skills to preschool-age children.
“At this point, the show is such a well-oiled machine, there are times I think if all of us went away, the show would still get done,” says Carol-Lynn Parente, executive producer of Sesame Street. “And that’s the challenge: not to let the machine get in the way of evolution and innovation.”
Since Parente took over as executive producer in 2005, the show has continued to tinker with format and content, going from magazine style to something more segmented and easily digestible in the YouTube era. Meanwhile, it’s also taking “deep dives” into subjects deemed essential to today’s children as determined through extensive educational research.
It’s no longer just about learning your ABCs. This season, the show will broaden its psychological scope to include strategies for managing a tough issue for humans in general, and children in particular. Executives call it “self regulation” and for the show, that will mean it will focus on giving children ways to navigate an environment awash in everything from junk food to computer games.
And who best to journey down that path with them than Cookie Monster, the unrestrained kid of the Sesame Street Muppets? The big blue devourer of all the cookies will learn the fine art of delayed gratification this season in a new series of movie parodies titled Cookie’s Crumby Pictures, short film parodies with titles such as Furry Potter and the Goblet of Cookies and Twilight Breaking Cookie.
If choosing the least likely cast member to become the paragon of virtue seems like a head-scratcher, it may make more sense to know that the decision was not reached lightly.
“We conduct an annual content advisory seminar,” says Rosemarie Truglio, senior vice president of content and research. “We bring in all the people creating content [for Sesame Street] and the research scientists, psychologists and educators share their research and advice.”
Using the latest child development research has always informed the content of Sesame Street and, increasingly, the data has shown that helping children keep their bodies calm and their emotions in check will benefit their future learning.
But putting scientific findings in the hands of the anarchic Sesame Street Muppets is sometimes a tricky proposition. Truglio is mindful of “boomerang effects” in which children can focus on the funny negative effect instead of the more desirable (but less humorous) positive effect.
“With Cookie Monster, we never focus on the failed attempts,” Truglio says. “We try to show what strategies work for him.”
Cookie Monster hasn’t sworn off the cookies, but maybe he won’t be quite the glutton he once was.
