Sesame Street

The Alphabet in the Asphalt

I’ve always been a little suspicious of how adults talk about children’s television. Nostalgia sands off the edges. We remember the comfort of a theme song and forget the machinery underneath it. Go back to those first episodes of *Sesame Street* in the fall of 1969, though, and the machinery is exactly what makes it thrilling. This wasn’t just a TV show arriving on the air. It was a carefully engineered ambush, and a brilliant one.

Television at the end of the sixties was mostly a noisy commercial swamp: sugar cereal, toy ads, bright cartoons built to hold a child’s stare for as long as possible. Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett looked at that hypnotic rhythm and asked a surprisingly radical question. What if you stole it? What if the same fast-cut language designed to sell junk could be used to teach the alphabet to inner-city kids instead?



What still feels radical is the setting. Cooney and her team didn’t tuck their world into a fairy-tale forest or a cheerful suburban lane. They built it on a slightly battered New York block full of garbage cans, stoops, and brick. That mattered. For millions of children—especially kids of color growing up in cities—television finally reflected their own surroundings instead of asking them to stare through a window into someone else’s impossible life. The street looked lived in because it was supposed to.

You can see how disruptive that felt in the backlash from Britain. In 1970, *The Guardian* ran Monica Sims of the BBC criticizing the series and rejecting it for British audiences, arguing that it was too commercial and too rigidly educational. That complaint misses what made the show alive in the first place. *Sesame Street* was never aiming to be a calm, progressive classroom. It moved with the speed and racket of a Harlem block party because it was trying to catch children the public school system had already started to fail.



Of course, curriculum alone doesn’t hold a toddler’s attention. That takes personality, which is where Jim Henson and Frank Oz enter the picture. If you watch Oz’s early work as Bert, what’s striking is how much feeling he gets out of felt and posture. Oz has said he was shy and initially used puppets almost as a shield, but there’s nothing hidden in the performance. When Ernie drives Bert crazy with a drum solo or a rubber duckie, Bert’s body seems to sag with pure, unmistakable fatigue. It’s funny because it’s so recognizably human.

Henson and Oz also loved trying to throw each other off on set, and that sense of play leaks straight into the frame. You can feel it in Grover’s manic explanation of "near" and "far," where the joke isn’t just the lesson but the way his whole body hurls itself through the space. The camera wisely stays back, letting the bit breathe. It doesn’t condescend to the preschool audience. It trusts them to get the gag and the concept at the same time.



Seen now, after 56 seasons and a modern life that includes premium-streaming arrangements with HBO, it’s easy to get cynical and treat the whole thing as a very durable piece of intellectual property. I’m not convinced the current version still carries the same scrappy, insurgent educational spirit it had at the start. Maybe that softening was unavoidable. Any project that lasts half a century eventually stops moving like a revolution and starts moving like an institution.

Still, the bones are strong. *Sesame Street* didn’t merely teach children letters and numbers. It modeled how to exist with other people in a loud, crowded world. It told kids that a giant bird, a grouch in a trash can, and a frantic blue monster could share a block with Black, white, and Latino neighbors and that the world wouldn’t crack apart. If anything, that messy sidewalk still looks like one of television’s most generous visions of how to live.