Recent Sesame Workshop and HBO Deal Benefits Everyone
On August 13, Sesame Workshop announced a five-year partnership with HBO. Under this deal, new episodes of Sesame Street will first air on HBO’s family of channels and online services. The shows will then be provided to PBS nine months later. Following a format that Sesame began experimenting with in 2014, the new episodes will be 30 minutes in length rather than one hour. The shorter version shows drew more viewers and held them longer than the hour-long episodes.
There has been a fair amount of negative reaction to the joint venture with HBO. Some see it as counter to Sesame Street’s goal of providing educational content to all children. Critics say this plan teaches low-income children they are inferior to those whose families can afford premium services like HBO. Some believe this is akin to providing low-income children secondhand goods.
Sesame Street does not produce content that is going to be less effective or expire after nine months. It is also not like a serial drama where viewers are anxiously awaiting the next program to see how a storyline develops. Toddlers do not generally gather around the water cooler at preschool and discuss the latest happenings of Big Bird and Elmo. The only way a child is prone to know he or she is watching an episode that aired on HBO nine months ago is if someone tells him or her…and even then the child is not likely to care.
The ideal scenario would be for PBS and Sesame Workshop to continue without a public-private venture with HBO. However, this partnership appears to be a win-win situation. With the popularity of streaming video services, there has been a sharp decline in DVD sales. This was a revenue source Sesame Workshop heavily depended on in the past.
Around 10% of Sesame Street’s production costs were covered by PBS. Product licensing and merchandising fees were covering most of the remainder of production costs, but Sesame Workshop still operated at a loss of $11 million in 2014. Without an arrangement of this nature, it is doubtful the show could continue very much longer. The deal means funding is no longer a problem, and PBS now gets the programs at no charge. Additionally, there will be twice as many episodes produced per season.
Based on HBO’s history with original programming, it is unlikely they will make any attempt to interfere with the content of the show. Furthermore, because HBO is a premium channel there will be no influence from advertisers or encouragement for product placement. Many find Sesame Street an odd fit for HBO, but don’t forget Jim Henson was a trailblazer: Fraggle Rock was the very first original series to air on HBO in 1983.
One aspect of this deal that has largely gone unnoticed is that there will be a new Sesame Street Muppets spinoff series as well as another new original educational series for children. These new series will also be made available to PBS. While details of these programs are not yet available, it seems safe to say there will be lots of new entertaining and educational programming to look forward to from Sesame Workshop for many years to come.
Leave a Reply