What's next for 'Sesame Street?'

"Sesame Street" has loomed large in the imaginations of America's children for a half-century. Big Bird? Bert and Ernie? Elmo? What would childhood look like without them? Everyone might find out.

The show is "facing significant business and creative hurdles as it enters its 55th season," said The Washington Post. New episodes have premiered on HBO and its streaming service, Max, since 2016, but the company is not renewing the show's contract, and "Sesame Street" has yet to find a replacement network or streaming service. Most alarmingly, the show's audience has "shrunk as competition has grown," said the Post: The Nielsen ratings put "Sesame Street" in 14th place for streaming kids' shows in 2023.

The decision to end the run of "Sesame Street" is "part of a broader corporate shift away from children's programming" at Max, said The New York Times. A company spokesman said the streaming service has decided to "prioritize our focus on stories for adults and families." That might ultimately work to the series' benefit as it looks to find a new home. Other streaming services like Disney Plus, Netflix and YouTube Kids "have more content for parents to play for kids," said The Verge.

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What did the commentators say?

The show's young target audience "might not care" about its future, Candice Frederick said at Huffington Post. The conversation about what happens next for "Sesame Street" might be "15 or 20 years too late." The show still aims to help children with "social, emotional and literacy skills" but some observers say the show "lost a lot of appeal to its core audience years ago." Marilisa Jiménez García, associate professor of childhood studies at Rutgers University-Camden, said the show backed away from its core educational mission to emphasize "puppets, puppets, puppets, cartoons, cartoons, cartoons."

The series is "more essential than ever," Alan Sepinwall said at Rolling Stone. At a historical moment when "we have grown increasingly tribal and isolated from one another," the ethos of "Sesame Street" is that people different of backgrounds "can be best pals despite disagreeing on almost everything." It is "awfully troubling" that the show's future is now in doubt, but it is still such a big brand that it is easy to "imagine Apple or another streamer stepping in to rescue Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch and friends," Sepinwall said. A television landscape without "Sesame Street" would be "much emptier and sadder."

What next?

The show is being "reimagined" for the future, said The Hollywood Reporter. A 56th season, if it happens, will feature a shift away from the show's current "magazine" format of multiple short segments in favor of "two longer, more narrative-driven segments." Children have changed, say the show's producers, which means "Sesame Street" must also change. Kay Wilson Stallings, the executive vice president of Sesame Workshop, said the creators of "Sesame Street" always imagined it "like an experiment."