Date: 2025-01-07 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00027762
US CULTURE
US TV ENTERTAINMEMT
Inside ‘Sesame Street’ as it fights to survive
With a lucrative HBO deal ending, the show tackles emotional
well-being and remakes itself to win over a new generation.
US TV ENTERTAINMEMT
Inside ‘Sesame Street’ as it fights to survive
With a lucrative HBO deal ending, the show tackles emotional
well-being and remakes itself to win over a new generation.
Original article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/interactive/2024/sesame-street-wellbeing-hbo-struggles/
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
I remember the very early days of Sesame Street'. Our family lived on the Upper East Side in Manhattan and 'the Muppets' were emerging as a 'thing' under Hanson leaderhip somewhere in the neighborhood.
Decades later, Sesame Street is alive ... though maybe in not such good health.
I hope Sesame Street is able to figure out a way forward ... though I am rather pessimistic that this will be possible.
Sorry ... but I am quite angry that in the modern economy we do what is profitable for owners at 100% of effort, but activities that are good for people have an epic struggle to survive. This is a formula for societal failure ... but it is essentially what we have in this fragile modern world!
Peter Burgess
With a lucrative HBO deal ending, the show tackles emotional well-being and remakes itself to win over a new generation.
Scenes from the set of “Sesame Street” in Queens, where an episode called “Happy Bert Day” — directed by Shannon Flynn — was taped in February. The episode aims to help children manage big feelings.
Story by Laura Meckler
Photography by Matt McClain
December 22, 2024 at 10:30 a.m. EST
NEW YORK — Muppet voices bounced around the room as the puppeteers ran through the new script for the first time. The story was a classic conflict between Bert and Ernie — best friends, roommates and stars of this episode of “Sesame Street.”
As the group prepared to move on to the next script, Peter Linz, who plays Ernie, stopped them. Reading the script, which seeks to help children handle their big, sometimes out of control feelings, was emotional for him, he said. He loves Bert and Ernie, but not enough kids today feel the same, and these two don’t star in many episodes these days.
“Thank you for keeping these characters alive for little children,” Linz told the writers, “and not just having them be nostalgia pieces.”
Linz didn’t know it yet, but this script, called “Happy Bert Day,” could be one of the last to feature Bert and Ernie. A “reimagining” of “Sesame Street” was underway to overhaul the show’s format and focus on just four core characters — Bert and Ernie not among them.
It’s part of a larger effort to save “Sesame Street,” which is facing significant business and creative hurdles as it enters its 55th season. HBO, where episodes have debuted since 2016, told Sesame Workshop at least nine months ago that it was not renewing its contract, and the show has not yet found a new streaming service to replace that critical revenue. The audience for the show has shrunk as competition has grown. And the street is filled with Muppets — so many that some fear it’s tough for kids to form strong connections with any of them.
Leaders of Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit corporation that produces the show, hope that children will develop deeper relationships with the characters — and with the show — if they see the same Muppets every episode, really get to know them. But that means downgrading beloved Muppet stars who have been there since the start to supporting roles: Bert and Ernie, Big Bird, the Count and Oscar the Grouch.
On this day in November 2023, though, Bert and Ernie were in the spotlight as “Sesame Street” moved through its time-tested creative process: academic research, writer inspiration, meticulous editing, rigorous testing and, eventually, shooting the script on the show’s famous sound stage. At each step, they wrestled with the same question: how to keep the show relevant for today’s children.
Monitors positioned on the floor of the “Sesame Street” studio allow puppeteers to see how their performance will appear to viewers as they shoot the scene.
In “Happy Bert Day,” Ernie is determined to throw Bert the biggest and best surprise party, but Bert just wants quiet to work on a jigsaw puzzle. As the party rages, an oblivious Ernie responds to suggestions that Bert doesn’t seem to be having fun with more, more, more: Louder music! More friends! More chickens! Ernie is excited — too excited. Bert’s frustration builds and builds.
This is one episode in a season devoted to the emotional well-being of children — a theme born of the pandemic and its toll on children’s mental health. The scripts, which begin airing in January, do what “Sesame Street” has always done: use the Muppets to teach lessons — though not necessarily academic lessons.
At the read-through, where the cast gathered for a first run at the new season’s scripts, the room crackled with energy and inside jokes and excitement — the show had just been nominated for 12 Emmy Awards. The puppeteers slipped in and out of their character voices as they offered the writers insights gained from years of performing these roles.
Sitting beside Linz was his friend and scene partner, Eric Jacobson, who plays Bert as well as Oscar and Grover. He, too, rejected the view that today’s children don’t or won’t relate to Bert and Ernie.
“I don’t know where the show is going exactly, but I’m going to be there waving the flag for the characters I play and all the classic characters,” he said. “The more they’re seen, the more they’ll be loved.”
1 Trouble on a storied street
Walk through the heavy double doors of the “Sesame Street” studio in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens and a world opens up. To the right are the brownstone steps of 123 Sesame Street, where some of the nation’s biggest stars have sung with gaggles of Muppets. A trash can sits out front, ready for Oscar the Grouch to pop out, complaining. Big Bird’s giant nest is nestled back in a corner, but if you look carefully, you might see one of his yellow feathers on the shiny floor, waiting to be treasured. “I believe this has magic,” director Shannon Flynn says as she rescues a runaway feather.
The entire enterprise is dusted with a bit of magic, such that when Elmo, the furry red monster, asked “How is everybody doing?” on X earlier this year, his message got more than 220 million views and tens of thousands of responses, even one from President Joe Biden. Many people confessed they weren’t doing well at all.
Because “Sesame Street” occupies a rare space in American media, akin to “Saturday Night Live” or “The Price Is Right” — though it’s been on the air longer than both.
Today’s puppeteers revere the legacy of Jim Henson, who created the Muppets. “It’s a tremendous honor and tremendous responsibility” to carry the show forward, says Peter Linz, who plays Ernie.
Henson used to also play Ernie, but here he holds Bert during a rehearsal in 1970. (David Attie/Getty Images)
When “Sesame” debuted in 1969, its founders knew that screens could deliver children televised junk food. They set out to serve something more nutritious: lessons on letters and numbers, how to be kind and how to be strong.
But the world of children’s entertainment is far more fragmented than it was when “Sesame” premiered and had almost no competition. A Sesame Workshop official said Nielsen ranked the show 14th among programs for children on streaming platforms at the end of 2023 — no longer the unquestioned king of the screen. A 2022 internal Sesame review of challenges and opportunities identified four shows with substantially greater shares of 3-to-5-year-olds watching and said that among kids ages 3 to 5, “Sesame Street” ranked 10th in appeal.
“Sesame’s engagement has been waning,” the review warned, “and if the brand continues without doing anything, it will not survive.”
2 Welcome to Season 55
There was a back-to-school buzz as the writers, producers and researchers who create “Sesame Street” gathered in the show’s Manhattan offices, greeting one another with hugs and laughs and how’ve-ya-beens. It was a Monday morning in April 2023, and they were here to begin the process of turning academic ideas about emotional well-being into entertaining scripts.
This annual ritual, called a curriculum seminar, has marked “Sesame Street” since Season 1, and the headliners were four early-childhood experts with presentations on how to help children process big emotions.
At 10 a.m. sharp, Rosemarie Truglio, who runs the curriculum department, stepped to the lectern before rows of bright orange seats, dozens of people in the room and 100 watching on Zoom.
“Welcome to — I can’t believe this number — Season 55!” she said, leaning on the lectern, a huge smile on her face.
Puppeteer Leslie Carrara-Rudolph, left, who plays Abby Cadabby, gathers with cast members to hear from director Shannon Flynn as filming of the “Happy Bert Day” episode begins in February at Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens.
Rosemarie Truglio directs the “Sesame Street” curriculum department, responsible for making sure the show delivers academic messages in a way children will understand.
Truglio gave the assembled brain trust a clear message about the upcoming season: Scripts will need to dig deeper into the characters’ emotional lives, including skills for managing big feelings and relationships.
“Someone said, ‘ “Sesame Street” is so nice. There’s no conflict,’ ” she told the group. “We have to show conflict to renegotiate and fix relationships.”
The expert panel offered advice and suggestions in what felt like a high-level parenting seminar: Losing doesn’t need to be horrible. Adults should praise effort, not outcome. Parents need to stop swooping in to rescue their kids. Writers, in turn, posed their own questions about how to help children navigate emotions.
Listening to the discussion, one staffer was struck by how, well, serious it all felt.
“How do we make this fun and entertaining?” she asked the room. “We’re up against ‘Paw Patrol’ and ‘Daniel Tiger’ and all these entertaining kid shows. …
“Is there any fun to it, or is it ‘Please stop crying?’”
3 The writers room
Coming out of the curriculum seminar, writer Liz Hara had an idea for Bert and Ernie.
The pair date back to the very beginning of “Sesame Street,” a classic comedy duo performed by Jim Henson, the revered creator of the Muppets, and his partner, Frank Oz. They embody the spirit of Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Oscar and Felix. Bert, the straight man, is tidy, quiet and a bit uptight. Ernie is messy and loud, known for waking up Bert in the middle of the night for something urgent like counting sheep or playing the drums.
“The Bert and Ernie dynamic is so perfect for learning different social-emotional cues,” Hara said. “Their whole shtick is Ernie not being able to read the room and Bert getting frustrated.”
She brought her idea to the first writers meeting in early May 2023.
Head writer Ken Scarborough talks with senior producer Autumn Zitani. The paper clips hanging above them were among the many Bert-specific details that peppered the set. Other ideas for storylines about emotional well-being began tumbling out, too. Telly Monster and Baby Bear could be reporters interviewing characters from classic nursery rhymes about their feelings. Another pitch was for Rudy, who is disappointed that he can’t go to fairy school with his sister, Abby Cadabby. “He’s not a fairy so he can’t go,” writer Raye Lankford explained.
For years, Hara had wanted to write a show where all the Muppets wore party hats that look like Bert’s pointy, party-hat-shaped head (complete with his signature unibrow). Seeing opportunity, she pitched the “Bert Day” party. Ernie would fail to understand that Bert just doesn’t like big parties and respond to every suggestion that he was not having fun by making the problem worse.
The potential for comedy became clear as the group brainstormed all the ways Ernie could dial up the chaos: farm animals, spicy food, loud music — all things that Bert would hate.
Another point became clear quickly. In this story, two emotional journeys will collide: Ernie’s excitement and Bert’s frustration.
4 The script review
The script for “Happy Bert Day” was written and ready to be dissected, edited and tweaked through a process involving some two dozen producers, writers, researchers and academic experts who would flyspeck every sentence — every word.
Hara opened the story with all the Muppet friends hiding in the community garden outside Hooper’s Store. They are primed to yell “Surprise!” when Ernie arrives with Bert and says the secret word: asparagus. But Ernie can’t remember the word. He yells “Aardvark!” — and when that doesn’t work: “Artichoke? Apple. Adventure! Antidisestablishmentarianism.” Eventually he gets it right and the groups yells “Surprise!”
Reviewing the script during a Zoom meeting, someone asked, “Do we want to keep ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’?”
“I think we don’t,” Truglio replied.
Her concern was that kids wouldn’t get the joke. “Sesame Street” used to have lots of jokes aimed at adults, but most parents aren’t watching with their kids anymore. It’s just kids. And a word like that, she reasoned, was likely to confuse them.
Director Shannon Flynn, center, gives notes to puppeteer Eric Jacobson, who plays Bert, as filming begins for the day. Success of the episode, called “Happy Bert Day,” depended on Bert’s emotional journey.
In the story, the party presses forward, with various friends noticing that Bert seems unhappy and Ernie adding more and more chaos.
Bert eventually reaches his breaking point, and one of the human characters, Alan, helps the two friends name their feelings. Bert is frustrated, Ernie is excited. He then guides them (and viewers) to use one of the calming strategies that experts recommended, in this case a lion’s breath, where you breathe in air and exhale with a roar. It’s demonstrated by a Muppet lion, of course.
In an email, Ken Scarborough, the show’s head writer, shared the feedback on the script with Hara.
Hara was fine with the suggestions for how Bert and Ernie would manage their conflict. But she wasn’t okay with losing “antidisestablishmentarianism.”
“It’s the longest word in the English language,” she wrote in an email to Scarborough, “and it is our duty as Sesame Street to introduce it to the proto-nerds of America. Please and thank you.”
5 A ‘reimagining’ for ‘Sesame Street’
In 2015, “Sesame Street” faced a financial crisis. Among the culprits: DVDs (a major source of revenue) were largely supplanted by free videos on YouTube, and merchandise sales also had fallen. Sesame Workshop was losing millions of dollars each year.
The problem was solved with a lucrative deal to stream new episodes first on HBO. Episodes still would run for free on PBS, where the show has appeared from the start, but nine months later. The move rankled some, but the new revenue turned losses into surpluses.
“If we didn’t change — don’t change — we don’t exist 10 years from now,” then-CEO Jeffrey Dunn told NPR in 2016. “I mean, we were losing large amounts of money.”
But the new money did not solve all of Sesame Workshop’s problems. Kay Wilson Stallings, who was promoted to chief creative development and production officer in 2020, wanted an overhaul, and Sesame commissioned the 2022 internal review to help shape it.
Her hope was that a refreshed show would help persuade HBO, then in the middle of its second five-year contract with Sesame, to renew the deal again.
Wilson Stallings sought to address several problems. First, many viewers are very young — some just 18 months old, or even younger. Parents trusted “Sesame Street” — which was reassuring — but those kids are too young to benefit from the show’s educational messages. The show works for most 2- and 3-year-olds, Sesame research shows, but by the time viewers reach 4 or 5, they see it as a baby show and are ready to move on.
Oscar the Grouch has lived in a trash can outside 123 Sesame Street since the show’s first season. He is not included in the core cast the show plans to feature in future seasons. She concluded the show needed more sophisticated stories that would appeal to older children, and she decided to ditch short sketches that had long marked the show — even the iconic letter- and number-of-the-day. Instead, episodes that will begin airing in 2026 will be anchored by two longer, character-driven stories with “more conflict and more peril” and deeper character development.
“Four-year-olds know their numbers and letters,” she said.
Hoping to deepen the connection children feel with the characters, Wilson Stallings pared the core cast down to just four Muppets: Elmo, Abby Cadabby, Cookie Monster and Grover. The others — including Bert and Ernie — will still be in the show but not be the stars. Competing shows featured just a handful of central characters. Too many, she reasoned, and kids would not connect with anyone.
Still, this shift would be tough to pull off. Leaders had talked for years about culling the cast, and yet new characters kept being created. Several were added in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, for instance, to tell stories about identity and belonging: Tamir, who is Black, joined in 2020, and Ji-Young, who is Korean American, arrived in 2021.
And the downgraded characters are loved by millions of people. Wilson Stallings was matter of fact about the decision, saying it was based on market research, not nostalgia. “We’re leaning into the characters that resonate most with our audience,” she said.
6 The testing
As the “Happy Bert Day” episode took shape, the research department began work to make sure it landed with children. The script was one of four chosen for rigorous testing.
Rosemarie Truglio, the curriculum head, had a fundamental concern she hoped testing would address. She suspected most kids would not be familiar with Bert and Ernie.
“The reason why we’re testing this script is to see if kids comprehend their relationship and friendship and opposites,” Truglio told the group in a meeting to develop the research questions. “Do kids understand they don’t have the same likes?” If not, she feared, the children would miss a key message: the importance of seeing the world through someone else’s point of view.
The testing involved Zoom calls with 20 squirming 3- and 4-year-olds, who each would watch a rough, animated version of the episode with a parent. A researcher would then ask the children if they understood the story. Did they get that friends can like different things? And do they even know who Bert and Ernie are?
‘Sesame Street’ works to stay relevant for a new generation 2:07
The upcoming season of “Sesame Street,” which centers on children’s emotional well-being, comes as the show prepares to pare down its core cast. (Reshma Kirpalani and Hadley Green/TWP)
The results were mixed.
Most children were moderately or highly engaged in the story. Almost all of them understood that Bert was angry, though only one used the term “frustrated.” Three-quarters understood that Bert didn’t want a party.
“Bert was angry about his party,” said one 4-year-old girl. “Because he wanted to do his puzzle party.”
“He was mad,” said another girl. “His eyebrows were down.”
Every episode on emotional well-being this season would teach a skill for regulating those big feelings. Several involve breathing; others suggest kids wiggle it out or give themselves a hug.
Most remembered the lion’s breath, and four of the kids inhaled and roared along with the Muppets, which delighted the team.
But not all children understood the episode.
During most of the interviews, researchers never got to the question of whether friends can like different things, because most kids didn’t understand the differences between Bert and Ernie in the first place.
As for whether kids even recognized Bert and Ernie: The short answer was no. Just four of the 20 children could identify Ernie before watching the story, and only three knew who Bert was.
“That’s Grover!” a 4-year-old boy said as Bert’s face appeared.
When showed a drawing of Ernie, he confidently replied, “That’s Elmo.”
At a follow-up meeting, the team discussed the results.
“I don’t know if kids will ever know who Bert and Ernie are,” said Scarborough, the head writer. He suggested putting the pair into a short scene that opens the episode, with someone saying something like, “Oh, it’s our two best ‘Sesame Street’ friends!”
They agreed Elmo would introduce the pair and they would explain how they like different things. “I like loud music,” Ernie would say in the intro, blasting a song on the radio and dancing. “And I like quiet games,” Bert would reply.
The team settled on that plan, but no one seemed confident it would solve the bigger problem.
7 Goodbye, HBO
Warner Bros. Discovery, which now owns HBO and the Max streaming service, told Sesame Street at least nine months ago that it would not be renewing the streaming contract, which ends in 2025. Neither party would say exactly when the decision was made, but in March, Wilson Stallings said she had begun looking for a new home for the show. Examining its internal data, the company concluded that HBO — home to some very adult content — was not a destination for young viewers looking for shows like “Sesame Street.” (Warner Bros., however, did strike a deal to continue to keep past episodes available on Max through 2027.) The parties announced the decision this month. “We’ve had to prioritize our focus on stories for adults and families, and so new episodes from Sesame Street, at this time, are not as core to our strategy,” a spokesman said.
Striking a new deal is financially critical. Neither party will say what HBO has been paying for the rights, but Sesame Workshop’s program services income immediately jumped from about $23 million to about $45 million per year after the 2015 deal was inked, tax records show. And Sesame became reliant on income from the deal.
For months, Wilson Stallings and other top executives have met with executives from a range of streaming services, looking for a new partner. No deal has been reached. Sesame said this month that it expects to have an announcement “in the coming months.”
Internally, too, they pressed for change. In January, Scarborough, the longtime head writer, was told his contract would not be renewed. Wilson Stallings said he was being replaced with an outside writer who helped conceive of the new format.
Then in February, Sesame Workshop CEO Stephen Youngwood announced he was leaving.
It meant that within about a year, Sesame would have a new format, new head writer, new CEO and, if all went well, new distribution channel.
8 The filming
It was finally time to shoot “Happy Bert Day,” and the writers and producers arrived early on a February morning to find a bespoke set peppered with Bert-esque details. The threshold to Hooper’s Store was decorated with a chain of colorful giant paper clips because Bert loves paper clips. Bert’s face had been rendered on a large board using colored bottle caps because Bert loves bottle caps. All the Muppets had “Bert Day” hats — Liz Hara’s original inspiration for the story.
The set was filled with laughter but also tenderness, especially for the Muppets, who were carried on and off the set with loving care, cradled in the arms of handlers like babies, their floppy heads resting on a shoulder, or like toddlers, perched on a hip and looking out at the world.
Every so often, the cast would gather into a semicircle to hear from director Shannon Flynn, with puppeteers seated low on scooters that they use to glide across the floor during scenes. Together, they looked like a classroom of preschoolers gathered for story time, and, like the children they sought to teach and entertain, they exuded excitement and joy.
Flynn opened the morning with a pep talk.
“Before we get started I just want to say, today’s going to be an awesome day,” she said.
They began with a read-through of the script, with the friends gathered to surprise Bert on his birthday. (Ernie struggled to remember the surprise word and tried a few — but not “antidisestablishmentarianism” — before getting it right.)
The most crucial detail came down to Bert’s emotional journey. The key to the entire story was for Bert to ever so slowly grow more and more frustrated so that when, at the end, he explodes, the moment lands.
As shooting began, Flynn pulled Eric Jacobson, the veteran puppeteer who plays Bert, aside to talk through what would need to be a nuanced and calibrated performance, puppeteering Bert from quiet to frowning to shaking to seething.
“Everything just piles on,” she told him. “So at first it’s just uncomfortable, then it gets worse and worse and worse until we hit that freak-out.”
“Absolutely,” Jacobson replied.
This was one of 25 scripts being filmed in winter and spring 2024. Ernie would appear in only six of them, Bert in five.
At the end of “Happy Bert Day,” Ernie joined Bert to do what Bert wanted all along for his birthday: to complete his jigsaw puzzle.
The 13 scripts on emotional well-being explored emotions that, as Truglio hoped, went beyond happy and sad. Elmo got angry when a beach ball hit his block tower, and Cookie Monster was nervous about going to cooking school. At the Nursery Rhyme Feelings Fair, Elmo and Abby interviewed a spider, who was feeling shy as he prepared to meet Miss Muffet.
In each case, the characters followed the same four-step routine that Sesame’s academics hope children will learn: noticing a big feeling, naming it, validating it and then practicing a strategy to manage it.
Skillful puppetry conjured a wide range of emotions from Muppets who have very few variables. For Bert, the only part of his face that moves is his eyebrow — it can be up or down, and down is where it was for most of the day.
That required Jacobson to tightly squeeze a spring for hours, and by late afternoon, his arm was red and in pain. “I’m losing it,” Jacobson said, rubbing his arm. A camera operator, Shaun Harkins, sat down on the floor next to him, massaged his arm and applied a lidocaine patch. “You got it, pal,” Harkins said, putting his arm around Jacobson’s shoulder.
As the cast waited to shoot the climax of the episode, Flynn had an idea for how to raise the stakes one notch higher. She grabbed her script and spun around to find a small circle of writers and experts who had been watching the taping.
The script called for Bert to finally blow his top after his puzzle fell to the ground. But what if, instead, Ernie grabbed the puzzle box and started shaking it like a maraca to the pulsing music, causing the pieces to fly all over the place?
“It continues to reinforce Ernie’s inability to read what’s happening with Bert and that he hasn’t heard him at all this whole episode,” Flynn told them.
The writers and experts weren’t sure. It has to be an accident, they said. It can’t look like Ernie is trying to mock his friend. Flynn assured them that it will play as careless, not mean.
“It is like the perfect last straw,” agreed Scarborough. “You want to try it?”
A scene from ‘Happy Bert Day’ 2:07 (TWP)
After a couple of attempts, the cast executed the scene perfectly.
By the end of the day, Jacobson was feeling better, and so were Bert and Ernie. They’ve been friends for 55 years, and that hasn’t changed. The episode ends with a moment of emotional repair between the two, who will go together into the future, whatever that might be.
About this story
Editing by Chastity Pratt. Video reporting by Reshma Kirpalani. Photo editing by Max Becherer and Mark Miller. Copy editing by Kim Chapman. Design editing by Madison Walls. Design and development by Agnes Lee.
Laura Meckler ... Laura Meckler covers the news, politics and people shaping American schools. She previously reported on the White House, presidential politics and immigration for the Wall Street Journal, as well as on health and social policy for the Associated Press. She is author of DREAM TOWN: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity, about her hometown.@laurameckler
Matt McClain ... Matt McClain is a staff photojournalist at The Washington Post. Before joining The Post, he was a staff photographer at the Ventura County Star in Ventura, Calif., and the Rocky Mountain News in Denver.@mmcclain75