Sesame Street premiered and rewrote children's television
On this day · 10 November 1969
A show built like a research experiment used Muppets and ad-style repetition to teach letters and numbers to kids who needed it most.
On November 10, 1969, Sesame Street debuted on National Educational Television, the public network that would become PBS. It was conceived less as entertainment than as an experiment: could television give underserved preschoolers, especially children in poverty, a head start before kindergarten?
The creators, producer Joan Ganz Cooney and psychologist Lloyd Morrisett, working through the Children’s Television Workshop, hired puppeteer Jim Henson to populate the street with Big Bird, Bert and Ernie, and Cookie Monster. They borrowed advertising’s tricks, short repeated segments, catchy songs, to make the alphabet stick.
No children’s program had ever been built so deliberately around what research showed kids actually learned.
The gamble worked. Sesame Street became the most widely viewed children’s show on Earth, broadcast in dozens of countries, and the template by which educational television has been measured ever since.
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