We always want to give the audience some reasons to watch the new, while they can still watch the library.”Īnd with more than 50 seasons of episodes, there is a very large library. “We always want to be relevant to the audience. “The fact that it aligns with where we go after the current Warner deal is over, it just happens to be where the timing is,” Youngwood says. New episodes will debut on whatever channel or platform picks up the show, be it with WBD and Max, or somewhere else if they decide not to renew. Discovery, which debuts new episodes on its Max streaming service (the episodes also air on PBS after a nine-month delay).Īs it happens, Sesame Workshop’s current deal with WBD ends after season 55 (which will begin about a year from now), meaning that the new-look Sesame Street will coincide with the beginning of its next rights deal. Sesame Street is nearing the end of a five-year deal with Warner Bros. “And she said that regularly we need to look at the creative, look at who kids are, look at what they are interested in, look at what we’re trying to instill in terms of an educational curriculum, pull all that together and on a regular basis assess Sesame Street and see where we need to make tweaks and where we need to make some enhancements to further evolve it.” “She always talked about Sesame Street as being like an experiment,” Wilson Stallings explains. The changes are the most significant for Sesame Street since 2016, when the show went from one hour to 30 minutes, though it kept the magazine-style format even as it made the program shorter, with a “street scene” leading into a letter or number of the day segment, followed by an Elmo’s World animated segment, etc. And so, by opening up these segments and making them longer, it’s going to give us an opportunity to really serve up what we know from research, what we know from across the industry, what we know from our curriculum and education experts, what we know kids are looking for.”

“Kids love a little bit of peril, they love having emotional stakes, and in nine minutes, it’s kind of hard to really dive into those areas really effectively. “Both the A story and the B story will come together in some way to really help us with whatever curricular focus that we’re trying to have, what lesson we’re trying to make,” she adds. It could, for example, allow for both an “A” story and a “B” story, with the A story focusing on a core character and what they are going through, and the B story adding in “a little bit more levity and a lot more character moments,” Wilson Stallings says. “It’s going to give us an opportunity to dive further into the narrative,” says Kay Wilson Stallings, the executive vp and chief creative development and production officer for Sesame Workshop, calling the changes a “reimagining” of the show, and adding that the longer segments will allow for more “dynamic” and “sophisticated” stories.

Old sesame street episodes