Sesame Street

This week marks the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street. On the show, none other than the First Lady of the United States will drop by to mark the occasion. In the press, the looming milestone has gotten the show more attention than it has in years, with anniversary-linked stories about Sesame Street’s global reach (booming), its domestic popularity (shaky), and its place in the hearts of the vast cohorts raised on the show’s touchy-feely pedagogy (secure).

I’ve had a lot of occasion to think again about Sesame Street recently, now that I have a child for whom Elmo represents both a surrogate babysitter and a gateway drug for television addiction. That puts me in a demographic whose very existence attests to Sesame Street’s old age: The group that’s now watching the show for the second time, as parents rather than as kids.

My return to the Street has generally been a sweet one. Like returnees to all sorts of real old neighborhoods, I’m heartened to find so much that’s the same: There’s Hooper’s Store, albeit under new management; there’s the fix-it shop; there are the trash cans and the front stoops and so many of the old neighborhood characters. Welcome Back, Oscar.

But maybe because it’s essentially the same, I find myself dwelling on what’s different. For oldsters, some of the changes are quite jarring. Snuffleupagus, for instance, has been outed: Once visible only to Big Bird, he’s been a normal character since the 80s, when producers apparently decided that the spectacle of grown-ups not believing Big Bird’s stories might keep actual kids from confiding important things to adults. Thus did a recurring anxiety of my childhood–oh, how they laughed at Big Bird whenever he talked about this “friend”–get banished.

Other changes are merely confusing. One of my friends, father of a toddler around my daughter’s age, pointed out to me recently that, even though Ernie and his rubber duckie remain stars, Bert seems to have vanished, like an out-of-favor Soviet politburo member. What gives?

The really bizarre thing for Thirtysomethings returning to Sesame Street, though, has nothing to do with the characters or the story lines. It’s purely contextual.

Back when the show was born, one of its major ambitions was to serve as a kind of uplift for the sort of kids who didn’t show up on The Brady Bunch. The cast was multiethnic. The setting was urban. Even for kids who grew up in quasi-suburbia, that was part of its magical appeal: It took the sort of Safeway-deprived neighborhood that all of America was abandoning and made it into a wonderland of sweet neighbors and valuable lessons and appropriately-themed festivals.

Forty years on, the magic still crackles, but for a different reason, as my daughter takes in a show. I suspect that doesn’t look to her like a tough neighborhood up on her TV, and not just because the graffiti got painted over during a post-1980 set redesign. Seriously: Look at those brownstones! That cute corner store! The foot traffic, for heaven’s sake! This isn’t a neighborhood all of America is abandoning. No, it’s a neighborhood her parents could never afford.

Instead, here’s the magic of early-21st century version: In this happy neighborhood, Gordon and Luis have managed to avoid getting themselves gentrified out to some distant patch of Rockland County, and even the fix-it store–I mean, who fixes things anymore?–has managed to avoid losing its lease to Starbucks. And thus can the assorted kids and muppets experience another generation of those aforementioned lessons and festivals and sweet neighborly interactions. Magic!

What this really suggests is that the cultural image of urban life has shifted, at least a bit. It’s not pure dysfunction anymore. In at least some places, life is so commodious for young folks–whose soccer-playing, tree-climbing childhoods parents once moved to the ‘burbs to ensure–that the market is effectively off-limits to all but the Bugaboo-propelled among Sesame Street’s audience. (Side note: When was the last time, other than in Major League Baseball’s embarassingly cheese Reviving Baseball in Inner-Cities tv spots, that you heard anyone use that term as a euphemism for poor and minority).

Did Sesame Street hasten this change? Who knows–my hunch is that gas prices, traffic, sprawl, and immigration will continue to revive cities, both in real life and in popular culture. If the Children’s Television Workshop wants to make a new uplift show aimed at those kids whose lives have been erased from mainstream TV, perhaps they should set it in an inner-ring suburb somewhere.

On the other hand, the cultural evolution between when I watched Sesame Street and when my daughter began watching it has been both fast and unexpected. What will Hooper’s store symbolize by the time my daughter parks my grandchild in front of Sesame Street? I have a feeling we’ll eventually find out.