Sesame Street Makes Its Television Debut

The Idea

In the mid-1960s Joan Ganz Cooney, a producer at the New York public television station WNDT, and Lloyd Morrisett, a vice president of the Carnegie Corporation, discussed whether television could be used to teach young children. With support from the Carnegie Corporation, Cooney carried out a study in 1966, and her report proposed a new children's program. The Children's Television Workshop was established in 1968, with funding from the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, the U.S. Office of Education and other sources. It is now known as Sesame Workshop.

Research and Design

The Workshop's planners brought together television producers, educators, child psychologists and researchers. They set goals for the program, including teaching letters, numbers, counting, reasoning and social skills, and they tested draft episodes with children to see which segments held their attention. The show was set on an urban street, with adult actors and puppets created by Jim Henson and his company, the Muppets. The name Sesame Street was chosen after an earlier working title, 123 Avenue B, was dropped.

The First Season

The first episode was broadcast on November 10, 1969, on National Educational Television stations. The first season included 130 episodes. Human cast members included Bob McGrath, Loretta Long and Will Lee, who played the shop owner Mr. Hooper. The puppet characters included Big Bird, Bert and Ernie, Oscar the Grouch, Kermit the Frog and Cookie Monster. In 1970 the Public Broadcasting Service took over distribution from National Educational Television.

Research on the Program

The Educational Testing Service studied the first two seasons of the program and reported that children who watched it more often learned more of the material taught than those who watched less. Later research, by different authors, studied effects on school readiness. The program has won many Emmy Awards. Sesame Workshop also produces local versions in other countries, beginning with the Spanish-language Plaza Sésamo in Mexico in 1972.

Later Years

Sesame Street has continued to be broadcast for more than fifty years. The format of short segments has been revised several times, and a segment called Elmo's World was added in 1998. In 2015 the program began a deal under which new episodes first aired on HBO, and they were made available on PBS stations months later. In 2019 the Library of Congress and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting announced that they would preserve nearly 4,500 episodes from the program's first 49 seasons.

The First Episode

The Workshop gives the title of the first episode as Gordon Introduces Sally to Sesame Street. The first season was broadcast five days a week. Jon Stone, who had written and produced children's television, was one of the program's first producers and writers, and he helped develop its short-segment format. Henson's Muppets had appeared on television for years before that, including in commercials, and the program brought them to a wider audience.