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Comment by 40four | Hacker News Reader

I grew up watching Big Bird as the lead character, and I think this analysis is spot on.

I don’t have kids of my own yet, so I’m out of touch with how the show is being run these days, but if Elmo is the lead now, this definitely sounds like a step back in quality level.

I guess it makes sense from a business perspective for the creators. I’m sure it helps the bottom line. Kids go nuts for Elmo.

Regardless, it makes me happy to see PBS expand their reach. The quality level across the board is astounding! If it was the only network I had access to I would be happy.

Nova science is unreal! ‘Nature’ episodes are best in the business for nature docs. Many of the Masterpiece series are great... and don’t sleep on all the cooking shows. For a publicly funded organization, it’s absolutely mind blowing the quality of product they put out.

A real treasure.

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> I don’t have kids of my own yet, so I’m out of touch with how the show is being run these days, but if Elmo is the lead now, this definitely sounds like a step back in quality level.

My (at the time 2 year old) referred to Seasame Street as "Elmo."

The shift in content aligns with the shift that has happened in Early Learning Education in the US--mainly less emphasis in academic subjects, and more emphasis on social and emotional skills.

Modern Seasame Street broaches social topics, with a small amount of academics (mainly letter and number of the day).

I happened to watch an episode when visiting some family and even though the characters were slightly different it did feel like it was touching on EQ more than IQ skills.

That being said the count is still the count and Chappelle's skit [1] is still spot on.

[1] https://youtu.be/v595FBEngj8

That's a strange claim since the primary complaint abut Elmo was the elimination of Big Bird's social-emotional learning.

Sesame Street is for pre-schoolers, which was never academic outside of a cadre of upper class dog-eat-dog New Yorkers

I wouldn't immediately dismiss the claim that the Elmo stuff has more explicit social-emotional teaching, as in "here's the thing we're teaching in this skit and exactly what we want you to learn!", while Big Bird's was more implicit and role-model driven (though I don't want to claim it was always subtle and didn't ever just come out and state what it was trying to get across, of course—there was plenty of that). I haven't sampled enough Elmo-street lately to know whether that's true, but it could be.

> , which was never academic outside of a cadre of upper class dog-eat-dog New Yorkers

Can you explain what you mean by this?

> I don’t have kids of my own yet, so I’m out of touch with how the show is being run these days, but if Elmo is the lead now, this definitely sounds like a step back in quality level.

There's a torrent of ancient Sesame Street episodes out there, I used to show them to my kid

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