Now Streaming: Street Gang - How We Got to Sesame Street

Street Gang, streaming now on HBOMax, is a love letter to Sesame Street and the core group of visionary producers, creatives and academics who conceived and launched the show in 1969, including producer Joan Clooney, writer/director John Stone and Lloyd Morrisett, an experimental psychologist at the Carnegie Foundation. Morrisett, who Clooney credits as “the father of Sesame Street,” was “heavily influenced by the national dialogue on the gap that was being created in schools,” and “wondered whether there was a possibility that television could be used to help children with school.” Morrisett reached out to his friend Joan Clooney, a documentary producer at WNET, about whether television could be used to educate children. “I knew the answer right away,” Clooney recalls. “Every kid in America was singing beer commercials. Now where had the learned beer commercials?”

As a starting point, Morrisett hired Clooney to do a feasibility study on whether television could be an effective medium for educating children. Her conclusion was that it absolutely could.

“Joan had a brilliantly simple notion,” says John Stone, who directed the show throughout much of its formative years. “Children were watching a tremendous amount of television. If they’re gonna watch that much television, why not, one, find out what it is they like to watch, and two, find out what would be good for them to watch, and then you put the two together, and that’s the show.”

Street Gang takes us the show’s development from this brilliantly simple notion into the multidimensional, multimedia program it is today. Along the way we meet other key members of the Sesame Street family, including Jim Henson, who brought the Muppets to Sesame Street, arguably its signature element.

Aside from some initial pushback in some southern states, based on the show’s vision of racial integration, Sesame Street appears to have lived a charmed existence since its earliest days, with little to no internecine squabbling or bad blood. The founding production team and cast had a deep sense of mission, and all the surviving members of the original team look back on their days at Sesame Street with great love and respect for each other and what they accomplished together. Maybe that’s what it takes to create something as magical as Sesame Street, a show that has been as integral part of American childhood for over half a century.