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If you grew up loving Sesame Street, this is going to be the issue for you! This week, we’re talking about HBO and Max’s choice to not renew the show for new original episodes and why the show deserves stable funding.

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Sesame Street deserves stable funding

by Liam Nolan

Well, Sesame Street may be dead, and that sucks.

News broke late last week that Sesame Street was back on the market, with HBO and Max deciding to instead focus on more adult and family-oriented content, as opposed to children’s content. While Sesame Street will still be available on Max for a few years, the show is going to find a new home.

As a bit of history, Sesame Street struck a deal to have new episodes first appear on HBO in 2016, with them later appearing on PBS. The show itself is owned by Sesame World, not PBS, and so that production company made the choice to partner with HBO to recoup hits it’d taken to its revenue over the years due to, among other things, lost revenue from DVD sales.

At the time, I, like many others, wasn’t particularly happy about gating a beloved staple of childhood TV behind a paid subscription. One of the things that’s always made Sesame Street great is that it was available to pretty much everyone. Kids from all economic classes had the opportunity to experience one of the best children’s shows around. Still, Sesame Street existing at all is something worth celebrating.

The issue that Sesame Street will probably always have is that it’s never going to necessarily be the biggest show on TV. It’s never going to be the thing that every single person is watching, and it’ll always have to compete with new attentions to grab the attention of children. At the same time, the show is, fundamentally, a public good. It exists to give children access to high-quality early childhood educational programming.

From a capitalistic perspective, public goods are rarely incredibly profitable. According to ProPublica, Sesame Workshop earned about $187 million in revenue in 2023, with expenses of $192 million, meaning that it lost money. However, it’s important to understand that Sesame Workshop is more than just Sesame Street the show. Instead, that’s one facet of an organization that, among other things, tries to better childhood education.

Having Sesame Street’s budget and production tied to the whims of a major corporation is, more than anything, the problem. Sesame Workshop shouldn’t have to be concerned about whether an executive such as David Zaslav (RIP Raised by Wolves, Scavengers Reign, Our Flag Means Death, Batgirl, Coyote vs. Acme, Westworld, Infinity Train, and many, many more) decides Sesame Street isn’t making enough money.

The solution is then to properly fund public broadcast networks like PBS so that they can cover the production costs for shows like Sesame Street. I’m aware that, with everything happening, that’s a pipe dream, but at the same time, children deserve high-quality programming that isn’t tied directly to a profit motive. They deserve to learn unimpeded by capitalism’s demand that everything be a product.

They deserve Sesame Street.

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