History of Sesame Street

The preschool educational television program Sesame Street was first aired on public television stations on November 10, 1969, and is currently on its 56th season as of 2026. The history of Sesame Street has reflected changing attitudes to developmental psychology, early childhood education, and cultural diversity. Featuring Jim Henson's Muppets, animation, live shorts, humor and celebrity appearances, it was the first television program of its kind to base its content and production values on laboratory and formative research, and the first to include a curriculum "detailed or stated in terms of measurable outcomes". Initial responses to the show included adulatory reviews, some controversy and high ratings. By its 40th anniversary in 2009, Sesame Street was broadcast in over 120 countries, and 20 independent international versions had been produced. It has won eleven Grammys and over 150 Emmys in its history—more than any other children's show.

The show was conceived in 1966 during discussions between television producer Joan Ganz Cooney and Carnegie Corporation vice president Lloyd Morrisett. Their goal was to create a children's television show that would "master the addictive qualities of television and do something good with them", such as helping young children prepare for school. After two years of research, the newly formed Children's Television Workshop (CTW) received a combined grant of $8 million from the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation and the U.S. federal government to create and produce a new children's television show.

By the show's tenth anniversary in 1979, nine million American children under the age of six were watching Sesame Street daily, and several studies showed it was having a positive educational impact. The cast and crew expanded during this time, including the hiring of women in the crew and additional minorities in the cast. In 1981, the federal government withdrew its funding, so the CTW turned to other sources, such as its magazine division, book royalties, product licensing and foreign income. During the 1980s, Sesame Street's curriculum expanded to include topics such as relationships, ethics and emotions. Many of the show's storylines were taken from the experiences of its writing staff, cast and crew, most notably the death of Will Lee—who played Mr. Hooper—and the marriage of Luis and Maria.

In recent decades, Sesame Street has faced societal and economic challenges, including changes in the viewing habits of young children, more competition from other shows, the development of cable television and a drop in ratings. After the turn of the 21st century, the show made major structural adaptations, including changing its traditional magazine format to a narrative format. Because of the popularity of the Muppet Elmo, the show incorporated a popular segment known as "Elmo's World". In late 2015, in response to "sweeping changes in the media business", HBO began airing first-run episodes of Sesame Street. Episodes became available on PBS stations and websites nine months after they aired on HBO. As of its 50th anniversary in 2019, Sesame Street has produced over 4,500 episodes, 35 TV specials, 200 home videos, and 180 albums. Its YouTube channel had almost 5 million subscribers, and the show had 24 million followers on social media.

Background

In the late 1960s, 97% of all American households owned a television set, and preschool children watched an average of 27 hours of television per week; programs created for them were widely criticized for being too violent and for reflecting commercial values. Producer Joan Ganz Cooney called children's programming a "wasteland", and she was not alone in her criticism. Many children's television programs were produced by local stations, with little regard for educational goals, or cultural diversity. As writer David Borgenicht stated, the use of children's programming as an educational tool was "unproven" and "a revolutionary concept".

According to children's media experts Edward Palmer and Shalom M. Fisch, children's television programs of the 1950s and 1960s duplicated "prior media forms". For example, they tended to show simple shots of a camera's-eye view of a location filled with children, or they recreated storybooks with shots of book covers and motionless illustrated pages. The hosts of these programs were "insufferably condescending", though one exception was Captain Kangaroo, created and hosted by Bob Keeshan, which author Michael Davis described as having a "slower pace and idealism" that most other children's shows lacked.

Early childhood educational research had shown that when children were prepared to succeed in school, they earned higher grades and learned more effectively. Children from low-income families had fewer resources than children from higher-income families to prepare them for school. Research had shown that children from low-income, minority backgrounds tested "substantially lower" than middle-class children in school-related skills, and that they continued to have educational deficits throughout school. The field of developmental psychology had grown during this period, and scientists were beginning to understand that changes in early childhood education could increase children's cognitive growth. Because of these trends in education, along with the great societal changes occurring in the United States during this era, the time was ripe for the creation of a show like Sesame Street.

Pre-production (1966–1969)

Beginnings

Since 1962, Cooney had been producing talk shows and documentaries at educational television station WNDT, and in 1966 had won an Emmy for a documentary about poverty in America. In early 1966, Cooney and her husband Tim hosted a dinner party at their apartment in New York; experimental psychologist Lloyd Morrisett, who has been called Sesame Street's "financial godfather", and his wife Mary were among the guests. Cooney's boss, Lewis Freedman, whom Cooney called "the grandfather of Sesame Street", also attended the party, as did their colleague Anne Bower. As a vice-president at the Carnegie Corporation, Morrisett had awarded several million dollars in grants to organizations that educated poor and minority preschool children. Morrisett and the other guests felt that even with limited resources, television could be an effective way to reach millions of children.

A few days after the dinner party, Cooney, Freedman, and Morrisett met at the Carnegie Corporation's offices to make plans; they wanted to harness the addictive power of television for their own purposes, but did not yet know how. The following summer, Morrisett hired her to conduct research on childhood development, education and media, and she visited experts in these fields across the United States and Canada. She researched their ideas about the viewing habits of young children and wrote a report on her findings.

Cooney's study, titled "The Potential Uses of Television for Preschool Education", spelled out how television could be used to help young children, especially from low-income families, prepare for school. The focus on the new show was on children from disadvantaged backgrounds, but Cooney and the show's creators recognized that in order to achieve the kind of success they wanted, it had to be equally accessible to children of all socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. At the same time, they wanted to make the show so appealing to inner-city children that it would help them learn as much as children with more educational opportunities.

Cooney proposed that public television, even though it had a poor track record in attracting inner-city audiences, could be used to improve the quality of children's programming. She suggested using the television medium's "most engaging traits", including high production values, sophisticated writing, and quality film and animation, to reach the largest audience possible. In the words of critic Peter Hellman, "If [children] could recite Budweiser jingles from TV, why not give them a program that would teach the ABCs and simple number concepts?" Cooney wanted to create a program that would spread values favoring education to nonviewers—including their parents and older siblings, who tended to control the television set. To this end, she suggested that humor directed toward adults be included, which, as Lesser reported, "may turn out to be a pretty good system in forcing the young child to stretch to understand programs designed for older audiences". By 2019, 80% of parents watched Sesame Street with their children.

Development

As a result of Cooney's proposal, the Carnegie Corporation awarded her a $1 million grant in 1968 to establish the Children's Television Workshop (CTW) to provide support to the creative staff of the new show. Morrisett, who was responsible for fundraising, procured additional grants from the United States federal government, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Ford Foundation for the CTW's initial budget, which totaled $8 million; obtaining funding from this combination of government agencies and private foundations protected the CTW from economic pressures experienced by commercial networks. Sesame Street was an expensive program to produce because the creators decided they needed to compete with other programs that invested in professional, high quality production.