Big Bird, Bert and Ernie, Cookie Monster and the Count. These iconic muppets from our childhood were the product of a unique, hard-fought initiative that started more than 50 years ago. Armed with federal dollars and the reach of public broadcasting stations located around the United States, Sesame Street set out to harness the potency of television to better prepare American schoolchildren across the socioeconomic spectrum for academic success. Yet today, the show’s most popular product is a certain ticklish electronic doll and new episodes of the show air on a premium cable network before hitting the public airwaves. Sesame Street is finding it increasingly difficult to secure public funding and increasingly relying on the merchandising game, creating a world in which it is hard to imagine another show with the same educational principles finding the same reach or impact. In this episode of Pop Americana, Sana Saeed takes a critical look at America’s most iconic kid’s show and asks, could there ever be another Sesame Street?
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