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Home > Even 'Sesame Street' Is Gentrified Now: TV Show Drops Its Radical
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Even 'Sesame Street' Is Gentrified Now: TV Show Drops Its Radical Notion
That the Urban Working Class Are People Too
By Arthur Chu [1] / Salon [2]
August 17, 2015
Well, it's been a long time coming, but it's time to admit that like every
other trendy NYC neighborhood that gets spotlighted on a TV show, "Sesame
Street" has succumbed to gentrification.
I admit I haven't been a regular viewer of the program since I hit puberty,
having long ago familiarized myself adequately with the alphabet and basic
shapes and colors for the sake of my career goals.
But I don't know what else you can call it when the show will be delivering
its new season as an exclusive for HBO [3], a premium cable channel that
makes it notoriously difficult to view its exclusive "prestige" content
without a pricey subscription.
Apparently some annoying right-wing prudes at the Parents Television Council
provided an easy strawman for HBO apologists by saying the problem with this
move is that there's lots of "offensive" content on HBO-"Game of Thrones,"
"Boardwalk Empire," "Girls" and "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver." They
say that "Sesame Street" has damaged its wholesome brand by associating
itself with these programs.
Well, I have no problem with graphic violence and sex and profane bons mots
from John Oliver's filthy, clever little mouth.
I do have a problem with the fact that the fans of "Game of Thrones" and
Lena Dunham and John Oliver-affluent hipsters and yuppies like me-are the
people whose children are in the least need of "Sesame Street."
Tom Scocca at Gawker has already pointed out that this move is a betrayal of
"Sesame Street"'s mission [4] to provide open access educational materials
for all kids, one that takes the viral support [5] of PBS and "Sesame
Street" as a democraticizing cultural force from the 2012 election and
throwing it back in those supporters' faces.
But he doesn't go into detail about just how big of a shift in priorities
for "Sesame Street" this is, and how long it's been coming.
I'm going to play hipster here and say that "Sesame Street" was a very
different show back in the old days, "before they got big." "Sesame Street"
was originally not just radical but downright culturally utopian. "Sesame
Street"'s parent organization, formerly known as the Children's Television
Workshop [6] (now the Sesame Workshop), was born of Lyndon Johnson's Great
Society culture in the 1960s; the driving force behind the CTW, a woman
named Joan Ganz Cooney [7], came to children's educational TV after a
background in activist documentaries and televised "teach-ins."
The basis of Ganz Cooney's famous "little dinner party [8]" where a small
group of TV executives and developmental psychologists came up with the idea
for "Sesame Street" was a simple formula-poor kids watch more TV than rich
kids, thanks to poor kids having busy parents and being more likely to be
"raised by TV." Poor kids get less education than rich kids. Make TV that's
educational-good TV that's educational, TV that was "addictive" in the way
successful shows are rather than the crappy low-budget afterthought TV that
most children's programming was back then-and you might level the
socioeconomic playing field.
The idea has its obvious flaws, which were criticized at the time. (Doesn't
all of this just train kids to watch more TV? Doesn't the constant need to
entertain necessarily distort your message? Neil Postman [9], etc.) But the
mission is undeniably noble and shockingly radical even for today.
"Sesame Street" was never "culturally neutral"; "Sesame Street" was, in its
original conception, specifically aimed at reaching the American underclass,
the urban poor. (Ganz Cooney originally conceived of "Sesame Street" as
being set in the Alphabet City [10] area of the East Village, hence the name
of the parody "Avenue Q [11].")
The original setting revolves around 123 Sesame Street, a brownstone whose
smallest apartment is a basement studio (inhabited by unemployed bachelors
Ernie and Bert) and whose largest is a cozy, modest two-bedroom inhabited by
Gordon and Susan (who are the building's live-in landlords). The
neighborhood kids hang out at a simple playground next to 123 Sesame Street
that consists of an asphalt lot with a slide, a jungle gym and a chalked-in
hopscotch court.
While it would be a stretch to say that Oscar the Grouch directly represents
a homeless guy (as Dave Chappelle postulates [12]), it's true that the
overflowing trash can and pile of discarded lumber Oscar lives in (with a
giant bird's nest in it [13]) evokes a downscale neighborhood. The first
episodes of "Sesame Street" contain a delightfully dark, cynical take on the
daily frustrations of life as an urban subway rider that would never make it
on the show today.
As a somewhat coddled child of the suburbs, watching "Sesame Street" in the
1980s and 1990s meant being plunged into a foreign environment-watching
without really understanding why the kids' playground was so barebones
compared to the one at my school, seeing professions like "local grocer" and
"taxi driver" and "lunch counter server" that were meaningless to me in my
neighborhood of supermarkets, universal car ownership and chain restaurants.
It was a big deal that "Sesame Street"'s human actors were a white-minority
cast, and that the show regularly included Spanish lessons as part of its
curriculum. It was a big deal that the show recruited real, non-actor kids
from the inner city as its child cast-taking a page from Cooney's earlier
"Poverty, Anti-Poverty and the World," which forced government officials to
confront real poor people affected by their policies. (The first child actor
wouldn't be hired until they cast Desiree Casado [14] as Gabi in 1993.) It
was a big deal that they did a segment about a white kid visiting his black
friend's home in an "ethnic" neighborhood that frankly addressed feeling
culturally out-of-place but overcoming difference-something I didn't
appreciate the significance of at that age.
At its best, "Sesame Street" was a show defiantly for and about the urban
poor, demanding that the rapidly growing demographic of middle-class
suburban kids who watched it-kids like me-adapt to that culture, rather than
adapting itself to us. This message was most explicit in "Sesame Street"'s
first feature film, "Follow That Bird [15]," which is-seriously-about Big
Bird being taken off the mean streets by a meddling social worker determined
to place him with a nice family in the suburbs.
It was a great vision. I would argue, despite my lack of familiarity with
2000s-era "Sesame Street," that it's persisted, even if it's been diluted by
the merchandising and consumerism that have kept "Sesame Street" going all
this time. I'm okay with spoiled suburban kids' parents shelling out
ridiculous sums for Tickle Me Elmo dolls if it kept "Sesame Street" free for
the rest of the world.
"Sesame Street" held out a long time. It survived the ill-conceived attempt
to gentrify the street with the 1993-1999 "Around the Corner [16]" set,
adding upscale locations to the street like the Furry Arms luxury hotel and
a big new park and playground. It survived the slimy businessman "Ronald
Grump [17]" attempting to buy out the property to build a luxury hotel in
the 1994 25th anniversary special [18]-a joke that, given this year's
events, seems less funny today.
But now "Sesame Street," facing a revenue crunch, has given in and welcomed
the hipsters in [19].
Yes, I know, HBO isn't the bad guy here [20]. The episodes will still be
available to poor kids for free, just on a nine-month (!) delay. It was this
or watch "Sesame Street" go off the air completely.
But it still stinks, especially because it reflects the degree to which
times have changed. "Sesame Street" was able to raise $8 million in funding
from donors-in 1969 dollars-back when it first started, fully half of which
came from the federal government and its newly created Corporation for
Public Broadcasting. A while ago Twitter was passing around a video of Fred
Rogers testifying to the Senate Subcommittee on Communications in 1969-his
recitation of the lyrics to his "What Do You Do With the Mad That You Feel"
so moved the committee that they immediately approved a grant to PBS for $20
million.
For a while, out of the 1960s came a burning belief that the media and its
effect on our children mattered, and that giving children alternatives to
exploitative commercial schlock was a worthy use of the public purse.
But by 1999 that money had dried up. "Sesame Street" broke one of its
original cardinal rules, to never accept direct corporate funding-the joke
behind its "Brought to you by the letter Z" tagline-and started airing
commercial messages from Discovery Zone [21], which Ralph Nader called out
as the beginning of the end for the show's integrity.
"Sesame Street" is still around for now. But the HBO deal means it now
exists at the sufferance of affluent families, families nothing like the
ones "Sesame Street" portrays-people who are, even if they don't acknowledge
it, slumming it. A good percentage of HBO's predicted viewership might even
be young childless millennial assholes like me who will be watching the show
ironically.
And that's the way all children's TV seems to be going. Ganz Cooney created
"Sesame Street" to end inequality; Jim Henson frankly stated his goal in
putting "Fraggle Rock [22]" on HBO way back in 1983 was to "save the world."
When Fred Rogers testified in defense of "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" he
testified to starting out with a budget of $6,000 per episode to make his
show-a paltry sum even in 1969, as he says, enough to pay for less than two
minutes of a typical cartoon-but he felt it was worth it to provide children
with an "expression of care."
Where's that utopian idealism today? That iron-willed determination to find
the money in order to make good TV for kids, rather than to make good TV for
kids in order to make money?
I'm not saying today's shows for kids are bad. A lot of them are excellent.
But they're also generally very clearly entertainment products, made with
turning a profit in mind, and aimed at affluent kids who make good
consumers. I'm as happy as anyone that LeVar Burton revived "Reading
Rainbow," but it says something that the only way he could make it
sustainable was a subscription-based freemium app [23] for iPad and Kindle
Fire. (Thankfully, there was a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign [24]
to bring it to other platforms and waive the subscription fee for
underprivileged classrooms.)
Despite what marketers would have you think, not everyone has an iPad or a
Kindle [25]. Not everyone has cable TV or HBO. Hell, not even everyone has
Internet access [26].
The vision behind "Sesame Street" was once specifically to reach the kids
that couldn't be reached any other way, kids who had over-the-air TV and not
much else-households that still make up about 15 percent of America [27].
ADVERTISEMENT
Now, the first thought everyone turns to when trying to fund a kids' show is
to get on a specialized cable network for kids, to Nick Jr. or Sprout or
Cartoon Network-or better yet to make a smartphone or tablet app that can be
monetized directly. Now it's pretty much assumed that you're going to go
after the kids whose parents can afford to keep your show going.
Plenty of good work still gets done. Plenty of kids are still helped. But
the kids who need help the most generally aren't. We can't afford to do it.
No one's willing to make the multimillion-dollar grants to do so, the
financial sacrifice to reach out to our nation's neediest and most
vulnerable.
If anything it's the opposite-the trend has been for the most successful
kids' shows to end up "gentrified," to be appropriated by hipsterish young
adults [28], and for the grownup fans with the disposable incomes and the
social media megaphones to take up all the attention from the show's
original purpose.
Again, not that that's bad. I cop to being one of those adults-I'm a huge
fan of "Steven Universe." But I don't need children's shows to appeal to me.
I have plenty of shows that already appeal to me. Every time I see something
else tailored to appeal to me and to people like me-educated, well-connected
18-35-year-olds-I wonder what invisible impoverished kid some marketer
decided to ignore.
Absent the will to make financial sacrifices to make quality products for
the poor, the poor get cheaply made dreck. In 1961 television-the preferred
entertainment of the poor-was condemned by FCC chairman Newton N. Minow as a
"vast wasteland [29]," a race to the bottom of violent spectacle, shitty
jokes, exploitative manipulation and crass commercialism.
If there's an Internet equivalent to over-the-air TV, it's YouTube-the
totally-free, watchable-from-anywhere alternative to the Kindle apps and HBO
Go walled gardens of the Web. If I had to guess where the kids whom Ganz
Cooney wanted to reach in 1969 are hanging out online, it's randomly
browsing YouTube videos, not using the Reading Rainbow app or streaming
episodes of "Sesame Street" through the official PBS app.
And no one has bothered to replicate Ganz Cooney's heroic efforts to
establish an oasis in the wasteland. When it comes to free, easily
accessible content on the Web, it's a wasteland so vast and so blighted as
to make the quiz shows and Westerns of the 1961 TV listings seem like
paradise-an endless torrent of cat videos and porn and screaming racist
rants.
I have a couple of friends-who are affluent enough to afford an HBO
subscription and iPad apps and all the rest of that jazz-who tell me stories
about how their kid's favorite thing to browse is YouTube streams of people
playing video games, and how they're getting worried because the vast
majority of these streams are peppered with profanity and racial slurs that
he's getting old enough to understand.
I'm only 31, but I'm already deeply worried about Kids These Days. I'm
worried that nobody my age seems to really give a damn about kids, that the
mercilessly efficient logic by which the post-Mr. Rogers media runs leaves
kids out of the equation entirely. I'm worried about 14-year-old kids [30]
whose formative learning experiences apparently came from deranged bigoted
dudes ranting into the camera about feminazis, because that's a huge portion
of YouTube's content base thanks to being a great way to make click-based
revenue.
In "Sesame Street"'s 25th anniversary special, Ronald Grump comes in vowing
to bulldoze Sesame Street and build something more profitable in its place,
saying that as a hardnosed capitalist he won't let any question of sappy
sentiment stand in his way. The tearful pleas of Sesame Street's residents
leave him stonily unmoved.
Who saves the day? Oscar the Grouch, who is the only one who's enough of an
asshole-enough of a grouch-to openly defy him, to tell him that it doesn't
matter how much financial sense it makes, he can take his plans to "improve"
Sesame Street and shove them.
One of the lessons I learned from "Sesame Street" is that ornery grouches
have their place in criticism. And when it comes to the ongoing segmentation
of our media-our children's media-into premium content for the affluent and
trash for everyone else, I'm very grouchy indeed.
Arthur Chu is an actor, comedian and blogger.
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ops-its-radical-notion-urban-working-class-are
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/arthur-chu
[2] http://www.salon.com
[3]
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-sesame-street-
hbo-20150814-story.html
[4]
http://gawker.com/sesame-street-teaches-poor-kids-educational-tv-isnt-fo-172
3980319
[5]
http://www.denverpost.com/politics-national/2012/10/big-bird-mitt-romney-and
-how-pbs-is-actually-funded/
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sesame_Workshop
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Ganz_Cooney
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Sesame_Street
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sesame_Street_(fictional_location)
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avenue_Q
[12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVW-FB1q8FM
[13] http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Big_Bird%27s_nest
[14] http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Desiree_Casado
[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sesame_Street_Presents_Follow_That_Bird
[16] http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Around_the_Corner
[17] http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Ronald_Grump_(human)
[18]
http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Sesame_Street_All-Star_25th_Birthday:_Stars_and
_Street_Forever!
[19] https://twitter.com/odiolasgalletas/status/459699819007975425
[20]
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2015/08/14/sesame-street-gets-a-new-h
ome-on-hbo-pundits-react
[21] http://lubbockonline.com/stories/100798/LA0633.shtml#.VdFk5HUViko
[22] http://mentalfloss.com/article/66611/17-fun-facts-about-fraggle-rock
[23] http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/20/reading-rainbow-ipad/
[24]
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/readingrainbow/bring-reading-rainbow-ba
ck-for-every-child-everywh
[25] http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/06/10/tablet-ownership-2013/
[26]
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2015/0730/Who-are-the-Americans-with
out-Internet-access
[27] http://www.tvb.org/blog/?p=170
[28]
http://www.usatoday.com/story/popcandy/2013/09/12/bronies-movie/2805503/
[29] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_and_the_Public_Interest
[30] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgF8r8dq-RA
[31] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Even 'Sesame
Street' Is Gentrified Now: TV Show Drops Its Radical Notion That the
Urban Working Class Are People Too
[32] http://www.alternet.org/
[33] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Even 'Sesame Street' Is Gentrified Now: TV Show Drops Its Radical
Notion That the Urban Working Class Are People Too
Even 'Sesame Street' Is Gentrified Now: TV Show Drops Its Radical Notion
That the Urban Working Class Are People Too
By Arthur Chu [1] / Salon [2]
August 17, 2015
Well, it's been a long time coming, but it's time to admit that like every
other trendy NYC neighborhood that gets spotlighted on a TV show, "Sesame
Street" has succumbed to gentrification.
I admit I haven't been a regular viewer of the program since I hit puberty,
having long ago familiarized myself adequately with the alphabet and basic
shapes and colors for the sake of my career goals.
But I don't know what else you can call it when the show will be delivering
its new season as an exclusive for HBO [3], a premium cable channel that
makes it notoriously difficult to view its exclusive "prestige" content
without a pricey subscription.
Apparently some annoying right-wing prudes at the Parents Television Council
provided an easy strawman for HBO apologists by saying the problem with this
move is that there's lots of "offensive" content on HBO-"Game of Thrones,"
"Boardwalk Empire," "Girls" and "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver." They
say that "Sesame Street" has damaged its wholesome brand by associating
itself with these programs.
Well, I have no problem with graphic violence and sex and profane bons mots
from John Oliver's filthy, clever little mouth.
I do have a problem with the fact that the fans of "Game of Thrones" and
Lena Dunham and John Oliver-affluent hipsters and yuppies like me-are the
people whose children are in the least need of "Sesame Street."
Tom Scocca at Gawker has already pointed out that this move is a betrayal of
"Sesame Street"'s mission [4] to provide open access educational materials
for all kids, one that takes the viral support [5] of PBS and "Sesame
Street" as a democraticizing cultural force from the 2012 election and
throwing it back in those supporters' faces.
But he doesn't go into detail about just how big of a shift in priorities
for "Sesame Street" this is, and how long it's been coming.
I'm going to play hipster here and say that "Sesame Street" was a very
different show back in the old days, "before they got big." "Sesame Street"
was originally not just radical but downright culturally utopian. "Sesame
Street"'s parent organization, formerly known as the Children's Television
Workshop [6] (now the Sesame Workshop), was born of Lyndon Johnson's Great
Society culture in the 1960s; the driving force behind the CTW, a woman
named Joan Ganz Cooney [7], came to children's educational TV after a
background in activist documentaries and televised "teach-ins."
The basis of Ganz Cooney's famous "little dinner party [8]" where a small
group of TV executives and developmental psychologists came up with the idea
for "Sesame Street" was a simple formula-poor kids watch more TV than rich
kids, thanks to poor kids having busy parents and being more likely to be
"raised by TV." Poor kids get less education than rich kids. Make TV that's
educational-good TV that's educational, TV that was "addictive" in the way
successful shows are rather than the crappy low-budget afterthought TV that
most children's programming was back then-and you might level the
socioeconomic playing field.
The idea has its obvious flaws, which were criticized at the time. (Doesn't
all of this just train kids to watch more TV? Doesn't the constant need to
entertain necessarily distort your message? Neil Postman [9], etc.) But the
mission is undeniably noble and shockingly radical even for today.
"Sesame Street" was never "culturally neutral"; "Sesame Street" was, in its
original conception, specifically aimed at reaching the American underclass,
the urban poor. (Ganz Cooney originally conceived of "Sesame Street" as
being set in the Alphabet City [10] area of the East Village, hence the name
of the parody "Avenue Q [11].")
The original setting revolves around 123 Sesame Street, a brownstone whose
smallest apartment is a basement studio (inhabited by unemployed bachelors
Ernie and Bert) and whose largest is a cozy, modest two-bedroom inhabited by
Gordon and Susan (who are the building's live-in landlords). The
neighborhood kids hang out at a simple playground next to 123 Sesame Street
that consists of an asphalt lot with a slide, a jungle gym and a chalked-in
hopscotch court.
While it would be a stretch to say that Oscar the Grouch directly represents
a homeless guy (as Dave Chappelle postulates [12]), it's true that the
overflowing trash can and pile of discarded lumber Oscar lives in (with a
giant bird's nest in it [13]) evokes a downscale neighborhood. The first
episodes of "Sesame Street" contain a delightfully dark, cynical take on the
daily frustrations of life as an urban subway rider that would never make it
on the show today.
As a somewhat coddled child of the suburbs, watching "Sesame Street" in the
1980s and 1990s meant being plunged into a foreign environment-watching
without really understanding why the kids' playground was so barebones
compared to the one at my school, seeing professions like "local grocer" and
"taxi driver" and "lunch counter server" that were meaningless to me in my
neighborhood of supermarkets, universal car ownership and chain restaurants.
It was a big deal that "Sesame Street"'s human actors were a white-minority
cast, and that the show regularly included Spanish lessons as part of its
curriculum. It was a big deal that the show recruited real, non-actor kids
from the inner city as its child cast-taking a page from Cooney's earlier
"Poverty, Anti-Poverty and the World," which forced government officials to
confront real poor people affected by their policies. (The first child actor
wouldn't be hired until they cast Desiree Casado [14] as Gabi in 1993.) It
was a big deal that they did a segment about a white kid visiting his black
friend's home in an "ethnic" neighborhood that frankly addressed feeling
culturally out-of-place but overcoming difference-something I didn't
appreciate the significance of at that age.
At its best, "Sesame Street" was a show defiantly for and about the urban
poor, demanding that the rapidly growing demographic of middle-class
suburban kids who watched it-kids like me-adapt to that culture, rather than
adapting itself to us. This message was most explicit in "Sesame Street"'s
first feature film, "Follow That Bird [15]," which is-seriously-about Big
Bird being taken off the mean streets by a meddling social worker determined
to place him with a nice family in the suburbs.
It was a great vision. I would argue, despite my lack of familiarity with
2000s-era "Sesame Street," that it's persisted, even if it's been diluted by
the merchandising and consumerism that have kept "Sesame Street" going all
this time. I'm okay with spoiled suburban kids' parents shelling out
ridiculous sums for Tickle Me Elmo dolls if it kept "Sesame Street" free for
the rest of the world.
"Sesame Street" held out a long time. It survived the ill-conceived attempt
to gentrify the street with the 1993-1999 "Around the Corner [16]" set,
adding upscale locations to the street like the Furry Arms luxury hotel and
a big new park and playground. It survived the slimy businessman "Ronald
Grump [17]" attempting to buy out the property to build a luxury hotel in
the 1994 25th anniversary special [18]-a joke that, given this year's
events, seems less funny today.
But now "Sesame Street," facing a revenue crunch, has given in and welcomed
the hipsters in [19].
Yes, I know, HBO isn't the bad guy here [20]. The episodes will still be
available to poor kids for free, just on a nine-month (!) delay. It was this
or watch "Sesame Street" go off the air completely.
But it still stinks, especially because it reflects the degree to which
times have changed. "Sesame Street" was able to raise $8 million in funding
from donors-in 1969 dollars-back when it first started, fully half of which
came from the federal government and its newly created Corporation for
Public Broadcasting. A while ago Twitter was passing around a video of Fred
Rogers testifying to the Senate Subcommittee on Communications in 1969-his
recitation of the lyrics to his "What Do You Do With the Mad That You Feel"
so moved the committee that they immediately approved a grant to PBS for $20
million.
For a while, out of the 1960s came a burning belief that the media and its
effect on our children mattered, and that giving children alternatives to
exploitative commercial schlock was a worthy use of the public purse.
But by 1999 that money had dried up. "Sesame Street" broke one of its
original cardinal rules, to never accept direct corporate funding-the joke
behind its "Brought to you by the letter Z" tagline-and started airing
commercial messages from Discovery Zone [21], which Ralph Nader called out
as the beginning of the end for the show's integrity.
"Sesame Street" is still around for now. But the HBO deal means it now
exists at the sufferance of affluent families, families nothing like the
ones "Sesame Street" portrays-people who are, even if they don't acknowledge
it, slumming it. A good percentage of HBO's predicted viewership might even
be young childless millennial assholes like me who will be watching the show
ironically.
And that's the way all children's TV seems to be going. Ganz Cooney created
"Sesame Street" to end inequality; Jim Henson frankly stated his goal in
putting "Fraggle Rock [22]" on HBO way back in 1983 was to "save the world."
When Fred Rogers testified in defense of "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" he
testified to starting out with a budget of $6,000 per episode to make his
show-a paltry sum even in 1969, as he says, enough to pay for less than two
minutes of a typical cartoon-but he felt it was worth it to provide children
with an "expression of care."
Where's that utopian idealism today? That iron-willed determination to find
the money in order to make good TV for kids, rather than to make good TV for
kids in order to make money?
I'm not saying today's shows for kids are bad. A lot of them are excellent.
But they're also generally very clearly entertainment products, made with
turning a profit in mind, and aimed at affluent kids who make good
consumers. I'm as happy as anyone that LeVar Burton revived "Reading
Rainbow," but it says something that the only way he could make it
sustainable was a subscription-based freemium app [23] for iPad and Kindle
Fire. (Thankfully, there was a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign [24]
to bring it to other platforms and waive the subscription fee for
underprivileged classrooms.)
Despite what marketers would have you think, not everyone has an iPad or a
Kindle [25]. Not everyone has cable TV or HBO. Hell, not even everyone has
Internet access [26].
The vision behind "Sesame Street" was once specifically to reach the kids
that couldn't be reached any other way, kids who had over-the-air TV and not
much else-households that still make up about 15 percent of America [27].
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m()
http://www.usatoday.com/story/popcandy/2013/09/12/bronies-movie/2805503/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_and_the_Public_Interest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgF8r8dq-RA
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mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Even 'Sesame Street' Is
Gentrified Now: TV Show Drops Its Radical Notion That the Urban Working
Class Are People Too
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http://www.alternet.org/culture/even-sesame-street-gentrified-now-tv-show-dr
ops-its-radical-notion-urban-working-class-are
