RedHanded - ShortHand: Sesame Street

Episode Date: January 27, 2026

Not many of us need convincing that Sesame Street is good; the Muppets have been chaotic TV icons for more than 50 years. But what not many people know is just how much good it did.Not just unmissable TV, but a revolutionary, massive-scale outreach program. One that used ad-land tactics and groundbreaking psychological research, to reset the balance of educational privilege – and teach disadvantaged, inner-city kids how to read. It’s a sunny day. We’re sweeping the clouds away. This is the ShortHand, sponsored by the letter ‘S’.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / InstagramSources and more available on redhandedpodcast.com

Hello. Welcome to another episode of Shorthand, your weekly dose of being more interesting. Yes, correct. And that is what is going to happen to you today, whether you want it or not. Now, when you look at the stuff that kids are watching these days, some of it is rough. But if you think Coca-Mellon is bad, and it is, the study show it is, you should see the kids' TV that they had in the mid-60s in America. It was a mind-numbing mix of insufferably condescending hosts and shameless product placement, with an ad or a jingle slotted in every few seconds. Preschool kids were watching on average 27 hours of TV a week,

and they all knew the beer and soap jingles better than their nursery rhymes. But then a small group of producers, activists and educators had a brilliant idea to use the same ad-land approach to teach kids how to read. Why not, instead of teaching them a song about Budweiser, get them to sing about literacy instead, or equality, or compassion? And what if, instead of being sponsored by Tutsi rolls, whatever they are, they're gross? They sound gross.

Each episode was sponsored instead by a letter of the alphabet. We probably don't have to do too much to convince you that Sesame Street is the goat. If you don't love the Muppets, I have very grave concerns about you as a person. And I do really, really, really, when I die, not open casket because I think it's barbaric, but I do want a Muppet version of myself in the casket at my funeral. I'll definitely die long before you. That's on you. In the casket?

Just to be clear. But then the casket's closed. No. I mean, you can see that I'm a Muppet. So it's open casket. It's just not me. It's just Muppet me. I see.

Okay, I just wanted to be clear. I mean, good. I don't have a will. I'm just done. Stop making this mop it out of for you. Does she need to be dressed in anything particular? Is she holding anything? Is she, what's her vibe?

Or it's up to me. That's up to you, I think. Okay, I love I think. But what you may not have realized listening ears is just how much good Sesame Street did. How it was started as, a multi-million dollar outreach program to teach disadvantaged inner city kids how to read. At the same time of huge changes in civil rights, Sesame Street was an unprecedented huge-scale campaign to level the playing field and make sure that kids of all backgrounds turned up to

school with the same opportunities. It's a sunny day. We're sweeping the clouds away and we're on our way to where the air is sweet. This is the shorthand. sponsored by the letter S-S. In the mid-60s, the US had some issues. Between the deeply unpopular Vietnam War, which had just reached its most bloody peak, and the Cold War, only getting warmer, people were polarised and politicised and ready for a fight.

And the country was at a real crossroads in civil rights, which the CIA tried to rectify by shooting all the civil rights leaders. Through the 60s, crucial legislation had been passed, finally bringing voting rights, fair housing rights and other important changes into law. But the US is a big country, and not everyone was totally on board right away. A lot of southern states still obstructed black voting. Some school districts wouldn't budge on segregation, and nationwide, things like housing, were still deeply impacted by race.

Economic inequality was still very real, with black Americans facing higher unemployment, lower. wages and worse housing conditions. Riots and rebellions broke out in black communities, which were met by harsher policing. All this meant that for the average non-white inner-city kid, the world wasn't looking very hopeful. Because when it came to opportunities,

it all started before they even got to school. Inner city kids of colour were just not getting the same start as the white kids in the suburbs. They got dramatically lower scores in preschool tests and more importantly, those same deficits continued after they started school. Back then, the field of developmental psychology was pretty new, but it was making waves, with the idea that your early childhood has an enormous impact on your cognitive development. And the early developmental psychologists said that learning the basics early didn't just give you a leg up.

it actually built your brain in a different way, which is something now we all just like completely take for granted. When lower income kids started kindergarten, they were an average of three months behind their peers. By the end of the first grade, they were a year behind. A wedge was being driven and the gap was only getting wider with time. And one person who saw an opportunity to change that was Joan Gans Cooney. Cooney was a season TV producer who'd worked at various public stations in and around New York State.

And from the start, she had a pretty laser-focused sense of purpose. She once put together a talk show in which poor people were brought on to directly confront politicians who'd failed to tackle poverty. She won an Emmy in 1966 for her documentary about a Harlem preschool program, and the experience of making it opened her eyes to the effect that early education was how much. having in classrooms. She could see clear as day that arriving at school already able to read was a huge determinant of later success. And so in winter 1966, she held a dinner party that would change everything. Present that night at Cooney's House were her boss and co-worker from public TV, as well as her friend and experimental psychologist John C. Lily, I'm joking,

this is not one of his, Lloyd Morissette. Morissette may not be. wanking off dolphins, but he is a pretty good egg. He was the vice president at the Carnegie Corporation, a philanthropic organisation that was founded by industrialist Andrew Carnegie to, quote, promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding, which is what millionaires used to do instead of building themselves space rockets. And that night, conversation around the dinner table turned to the woeful state of children's TV. Like we said, it was chock full of adverts, as jingles and sponsored segments. The hosts were patronising,

talking down to kids without any real message. It was the kind of stuff that would make adults instantly leave the room, but kids loved TV. In the mid-60s, 93% of American households owned a TV set, and some preschool kids were spending up to half of their waking time watching it.

So, Cooney put it to her dinner guests, what if they used all that hypnotic power, all those catchy songs and fun characters and jingles, to teach kids things they actually needed to learn? Lloyd Morissette was impressed. He'd been wondering himself about the potential of TV as an educational tool. But the dorks at the Carnegie Institute looked down on TV. Taylor's oldest time, as soon as a new media, pops its head above the parapet,

the old guard are like, no, back down, hate you, fuck off. Yeah, they thought it was for Philistines. And as far as they were concerned, the more time kids spent in front of the idiot box, the less time they had for reading or composing sonnets or whatever. So Morissette hired Cooney to put together a report. She interviewed experts all over the country and produced a study called

The Potential Uses of Television for Preschool Education. It set out a plan for how TV could be used to help young children, especially from low-income families to get ready for school. And the Carnegie Corporation must have been impressed because they actually gave Cooney a million dollars. In the 60s? Fuck. And that wasn't all.

Morissette secured more grants from foundations. And then he secured an even tastier chunk from the very top, the US Department of Education. All of this fundraising added up to $8 million, which in today money is 80, million dollars, ish. And with that $80 million, Cooney founded a non-profit called the Children's Television Workshop, CTW for short.

The aim was to help with the educational objectives for a new show. She put together a board of advisors. She hired Gerald Lesser, a Harvard professor, who ran three seminars in the summer of 1968 to hammer down this curriculum. She also brought on Chester Pierce. a black psychiatrist and fellow professor at Harvard, who advised on the curriculum too. After a lot of discussion, the board landed on their key categories.

Symbolic representation, that is, letters and numbers, as well as street signs and other symbols. Cognitive processes, so how to deal with emotions and navigate problems. And lastly, the physical and social environment, common jobs, responsibilities, how society works. And in the process of teaching all of this, they wanted to instill an attitude of confidence, hope and self-worth in every kid watching. Among the people attending Lesser's early seminars were academic psychologists and authors, including Maurice Sendark,

and a young puppeteer, Jim Henson. Henson had been the man behind the Muppets for years, but up until then, they'd only appeared in grown-up short-form comedy sketches on late-night TV. They'd come on after the news or as part of a grown-up variety show, or they'd be in ads and stuff like that. The Muppet's humour was dark and slightly surreal, aimed at a more edgy teenage sort of audience. Henson fancied himself as the subversive type,

making weird art for those who would appreciate it, but when he heard what the children's television workshop were planning, he wanted it. The vision was clear, a show that didn't just entertain children, but explained the world to. them too. It would appeal to older kids and adults too, with messages, jokes and stories that were genuinely compelling. And they wanted to make it as familiar to their inner city core as possible.

So, the set was made to look like a New York street, lined with brownstones, just like those in Harlem and the Bronx. And they even had a character who lived in a bin. And Oscar the Grouch is a great example of their other masterstroke, working with the writers to create a fun engaging program out of all this high-level didactic theory. The character of Oscar the Grouch was included to demonstrate positive and negative emotions, and Count von Count was a vampire who loved to count, and the developers involved real kids from the very beginning. When they put out casting calls to actors, they took the audition tapes and showed them to children.

If the kids responded well, the actor would get the part. And then the name. They called it Sesame. Street. After the phrase, open sesame from Alibaba. To hint at something magical waiting inside. And even when they'd made

the show, the research didn't end. They also kept tabs on how effective it was with a little thing they called the distractor. After they finished shooting, each and every episode, they would bring two children into a lab and play it for them on a monitor. Next to the monitor would be a slideshow

which cycled through a new picture every seven seconds. An observer would sit next to the kids and record every time they looked away from the screen. If the episode captured more than 80% of their attention, then the episode would go to air. If it was more like half, then they'd go back and reshoot some scenes. While they were developing the show,

child psychologists said that puppets on screen with actors would be confusing for kids. So in the test episodes, there were parts on the street featuring humans, and then separate skits featuring the Muppets. But when these scenes were put to The Distractor, kids lost interest every single time it went back to the street scenes. So the producers thankfully realized the experts were talking.

S. I very clearly remember as a child hating the human actors on Sesame Street. Why are you there? Yeah. So the team reshot the street scenes incorporating puppets like Big Bird and Kermit the frog with the human actors and the kids loved it and here's a fun fact the puppet that eventually became known as Elmo was originally just a furry red anything puppet who was used in the background he was sometimes known as baby monster or little red that went on for years it wasn't

until season 11 of Sesame Street that he was introduced as Elmo now I think about it Elmo isn't really in any of the Muppet's films no you're right it's just in the memes and Sesame Street they're when memes are the best. So with all this hard work behind it, Sesame Street finally premiered on the 10th of November 1969 on more than 180 educational stations across the country. It taught lessons in literacy, numeracy, emotional intelligence, diversity and social skills. The voice of Mufusso and Darth Vader, James Earl Jones, guested on the first ever episode, doing the most dramatic reading of the alphabet you'll ever see.

Let's have a lesson. A, B, C, D, E. And having one of the world's most well-respected black actors was also no accident. Sesame Street's themes of empowerment and diversity were part of its fabric from the beginning. It was a place where people of all backgrounds coexisted, and the fact that seven-foot birds, monsters, and frogs, lived there too, only drove that point home. As well as having black actors in the cast,

they hosted all kinds of prominent black figures over the years, from activists preaching direct messages of empowerment like Lena Horn and the Reverend Jesse Jackson, to Nina Simone singing, to be young, gifted in black. And most famously, Kermit the Frogs, It's Not Easy Being Green, snuck in a message about race into a catchy ballad. Not everyone was a fan right away. after the first episode aired on public television in Jackson, Mississippi,

it was met by an avalanche of complaints. The depiction of a black couple with white neighbours and life lessons from an influential black father figure did not sit right down in Dixie. A commission voted to pull it from the air, saying that the racially integrated cast was not acceptable to their constituents. And then one member of the commission leaked the vote to the New York Times, and it became national news, so they were forced to reverse their ban,

and children watched Sesame Street in their thousands. Because apart from being very educational and worthy, Sesame Street was also really funny, was fun and exciting for people of any age, and apart from a handful of segregation-loving pearl clutches in Mississippi, the world loved Sesame Street instantly. It was a sensational success. a live show toured the country to huge crowds of kids who lost their minds when Big Bird walked out on stage.

After the first season, the producers did some tests to keep track of how it was meeting its original objectives. And it turned out that children who watched Sesame Street did better in almost every way. They were matched by age and socioeconomic background, and they controlled for parental involvement and home environment. and children who regularly watch Sesame Street recognized significantly more letters and numbers had a wider vocabulary, scored better in cognitive skills like classification, shapes and patterns, and they showed better social-emotional knowledge

displaying more empathy and cooperation. They even showed a better understanding of the various attitudes towards people of different races and a greater willingness to interact with diverse peers. And it even scaled. Those who watched a lot did the best. Moderate viewers improved a bit, and non-viewers improved the least. Follow-up studies in the mid-70s showed that children who watched Sesame Street

had higher academic performance at school. On an average day in the 70s, more than 12 million children were watching Sesame Street. And a very quick tangent before we start wrapping up today's episode. In 1986, there was a very real plan at NASA to launch Big Bird into orbit on a space shuttle to help teach kids about space. The plan was sadly axed, however, at the last minute because the eight-foot-tall suit was too big for the shuttle. And I guess it's a good thing as well,

because the mission was the Challenger shuttle and 73 seconds into its flight, it exploded killing everybody on board, which would be pretty traumatic for all of those 12 million children who were watching Sesame Street. Oh, God. You can't Big Bird.

You have to explain why Father Christmas and Big Bird aren't real. Anyway. That's too much. Sesame Street stayed popular through the decades and grew with the issues

of the day. Over the years, it has introduced people of all races, including Latino and Native American Muppets and Spanish language segments. Muppet characters with disabilities

and serious illnesses described their experiences. In 2002, the South African version Takalani Sesame, introduced an HIV-positive Muppet character called Kami to help reduce the stigma around kids with the disease. In May 2019, the US cast met a Muppet character whose mother was battling opioid addiction to reflect the growing crisis.

And we are getting to the end now. So far, we've had an entirely Barmerino-free episode, which must be a record. I was talking to producer Alexa because this was my pitch. And he was like, it's not like the dark history of Sesame Street or is it like, is it nice? I was like, no, it's nice. Don't worry. As long as you leave Pido Elmo out of it, it's nice.

Pido Elmo. You don't remember Pido Elmo? No. The voice of Elmo is Pido. No, I didn't know that. Oh my God. I didn't know that. Okay.

God, I didn't know that. No, so the documentary about him came out and then I think subsequently there were loads of reports. Wow. Now that is a bumerino. Well, I think I've got another one. Okay. In 1981, the Reagan administration pulled Sesame Street funding, and that meant that Sesame Street introduced sponsorships from cereal brands and fast food, stuff like that,

to prop up the show's finances. And then in 2015, after four decades teaching kids on public access television, Sesame Street was moved from PBS to HBO, meaning new episodes were only available with an HBO Max subscription. which is the opposite of the whole point. That's very sad. That is a real bummery, no, because yeah, everything we've said in this episode is true. Like, when kids start school and there is a gap between the children that have had the most attention at home

and parents who have read to them and had the time to do all of that and the inclination to do all of that versus children that don't. And every year that that child continues in school, as we said, that gap becomes harder and harder and harder to close. And in some cases, that gap can never be closed because teachers can only do so much in the classroom. They can't cater to everybody. And of course, they try their best to close that gap. But it's very difficult. So to have a system that was not asking anything more of the parents. So it's all well and good to be like, read more to your kids because studies actually show the single greatest like predictor of a child's future success is reading for pleasure.

Is that child reading for pleasure when they're young? and if they are distracted by other things, it's hard. Like, let's be honest. Like, sitting and reading a book is not as much fun, arguably, as just watching, like, a cartoon. Like, it requires concentration, all of those things, which is why it's a predictor of success. So it's all well and good to tell parents to read to their kids or get their kids to read. But if you were at least creating a TV show, that parents who are strapped for time, strapped for the inclination to do that, can just put it on and let their kids and you know it's working.

to have that removed from them, that is a very, very sad thing. I think what sort of drew me to this story is how nice it is for these powerful people to be like, there is this problem and we can do something about it. And then they do. And it changes millions, millions of children's lives. And I think there are very few people who get to look at. look back on their life and be like, you know what? I did genuine good. Yeah. It's a remarkable story. I didn't know any of this. And I think also the fact that they not only hypothesized what

would happen, but that they got real people in to help them create the content that they were making and also that they tracked the like impact it was having. That's very important because you can put in place all sorts of like measures and things that just sound good. Like yeah, this is going to make a difference here. If you don't track the impact, it's worthless. And the fact that they did that, yeah, I'm fucking sold. If I have kids, they will not be fucking watching Cocoa Mellon. Actually, studies have shown that Cocoa Mellon actually pushes children's verbal development

back because the people in it aren't speaking in full sentences often. They're just making noises and the kids don't learn. So I'm sold. Olden days fucking 60s Sesame Street, here we come. But no, it's remarkable and it's very sad that. It ended up where it ended up. Well, one more curveball for the road. As of last year, Netflix made a deal with PBS.

So now Sesame Street is shown simultaneously on both channels. And Netflix goes out to like over 300 countries across the world, many of which have never had Sesame Street. So for now, at least, everyone is still welcome on the street. Black, white, vampire, mammoth, frog, pig, cookie monster. bin man and eight foot yellow bird alike and it is so nice to have done a short hand that has warmed my heart that is very nice i feel warmed same good so go watch sesame street now mm-hmm goodbye