TV Reviews : ‘Sesame Street’ Has 20th Birthday Party

Seldom does a network spend an hour of prime time saluting a television program that isn’t one of its own. But that’s what NBC does tonight on “Sesame Street . . . 20 and Still Counting” (8 p.m. on Channels 4, 36 and 39).

While it’s a nice gesture on NBC’s part, the presence of the program on NBC unwittingly points out how much better “Sesame Street” is than anything that NBC or the other networks offer preschool children. We won’t soon see PBS broadcasting a tribute to any of NBC’s kidvid efforts.

Hosted by Bill Cosby and produced by Jim Henson of Muppets fame, “20 and Still Counting” is a loosely organized grab bag of new material and old, of entertainment and information.

Some now grown-up fans of the program, and three who appeared on it as children, talk about what it meant to them. One of them became a “celebrity in kindergarten” because he could recite the alphabet backward; another says “Sesame Street” taught him English.

We see how “Sesame Street” teaches kids about love and babies and death too. Ray Charles and Placido Domingo sing two of the late Joe Raposo’s songs written for the program. We sample the foreign versions of “Sesame Street.” The Muppets do their shtick.

The material shot for this program and some of the more recent clips aren’t as entertaining as the choice material from the earlier clips. Also, no one mentions any of the objections to “Sesame Street”--the theories that it hooks kids on TV and spoils them for more sedate forms of learning.

But then this is no documentary. It’s a pleasantly puffy birthday party for a remarkably influential American institution.