‘Sesame Street’--The Second Generation

It was a video experiment born of the Great Society idealism of the 1960s--a children’s TV program that meant to make learning the alphabet easy and fun, so that underprivileged kids could get a jump on kindergarten.

Today, “Sesame Street” embarks on its 20th season, a mainstream institution, so much a fixture in popular culture that the Smithsonian plans to enshrine the show’s artifacts next year in an exhibit at the National Museum of American History. Some in the show’s audience today are the children of those first viewers, a generational watershed reached by few TV programs.

Along the way from experiment to institution, “Sesame Street” came to symbolize to parents a rare sort of guilt-free television--programming that managed to combine viewer appeal with educational building blocks. And largely because of that, the show’s producer, Children’s Television Workshop, has been held in high regard and has maintained an image of stability in an often turbulent children’s television industry.

Where the kids’ TV business has been an industry of short-lived trends, CTW has endured, despite having financial problems and occasional uncertainty about its direction. When the kidvid business was nearly swallowed by disputes over commercialization of children’s programming, CTW managed to escape most criticism--despite its own extensive licensing of “Sesame Street’s” Big Bird, Cookie Monster and other characters for use in toys and products as varied as lunch boxes, luggage tags and toothbrushes.

In short, CTW has carved itself a special niche in television.

“We’re considered pretty much a thing apart,” admitted Joan Ganz Cooney, co-founder and chairman of the nonprofit CTW.

The way has not always been easy financially. “Sesame Street,” because of its phenomenal popularity, is self-supporting; its $12-million annual budget is met through the product licensing, sales of the show to more than 80 foreign countries, and fees paid by the 300-or-so PBS stations that carry it.

But piecemeal funding from foundations, federal agencies and CTW itself foots the bill for its “3-2-1 Contact,” the critically acclaimed science show now in its sixth and final season, and “Square One TV,” a math show that nearly didn’t make its third season this fall.

Reconciling what it perceives to be its social mission with the harsh financial realities of TV production has sometimes led CTW far afield of its stated purpose, which is to make good children’s television.

At times, questions about the organization’s purity of mission are met with soul searching, like the decision a few years ago to make the magazine division self-sufficient by allowing advertising in its three publications.

More recently, eyebrows were raised over the decision to allow test-marketing of “Sesame Street” vitamins.

“It’s an area that we have a considerable amount of concern about ourselves,” said David Britt, president of CTW. “We looked at the world the way it is today with all the fast food . . . and we came to the conclusion that the decision was not out of character.”

Despite CTW’s varied business pursuits (its annual operating budget runs between $60 million and $70 million), Britt talks of a renewed commitment to the organization’s most basic purpose in the aftermath of 1985, when CTW lost $7.5 million through investments in computer software and “Sesame Street” amusement parks.

“Still very much at the center of what we do is ‘Sesame Street’ and educational TV,” he said.

Today, “Sesame Street” is hardly remembered as something revolutionary. But Peggy Charren, who founded the consumer group Action for Children’s Television in 1968, within weeks of CTW’s own formation, recalls it as just that--in its look, its feel and its intent.

“The look of kids’ TV and the sound of kids’ TV was beastly. There was no art in kids’ television then,” Charren said. “But ‘Sesame Street’ found the best animators. They got Joe Raposo to write songs about discrimination--you know, Kermit’s ‘It’s Tough to Be Green’--that people all over the country were humming. And ever since then, every puppet created has looked like Jim Henson’s.”

The true educational benefits of “Sesame Street” are still debated.

Dr. Aletha Huston, professor of human development and family life at the University of Kansas, said, “What evidence we have is that children who watch a lot of ‘Sesame Street’ settle into school better.”

Huston, whose Center for Research on the Influence of Television on Children just received a grant from CTW for a long-term study on young children’s use of media, said that “Sesame Street” teaches language, vocabulary, numbers, numerical concepts and social skills to viewers as young as 2 years old.

On the other hand, Dr. Jerome L. Singer, director of the Yale University Family Television Research and Consultation Center, said, “I just don’t think of it as more than an entertaining show. It’s an alternative to these crazy cartoons and violent shows.”

One of Singer’s major concerns is with the format of the show, which is made up primarily of short, fast-paced segments. “There is no evidence that entertainment enhances memory,” he said.

Dulcy Singer, “Sesame Street’s” executive producer (and no relation to Dr. Singer), notes that the show has changed in that respect. More recent research, she said, has confirmed that young children have longer attention spans than “Sesame Street’s” creators had thought, and that they actually like drawn-out stories. As a result, the show now contains many more continuing plot lines.

“We’ve become more ambitious over the years because we are astounded continually by how much young children understand,” Singer said.

One of the more curious aspects of “Sesame Street’s” success, considering that it is the most lauded series in the history of children’s television, is the near-unanimous agreement that “Sesame Street” did little to improve the overall state of children’s television.

“I’m not saying commercial television should have copied ‘Sesame Street,’ ” Charren said, “but it should have realized that TV could be used for something other than pitching products to kids.”