Brought to you by the number 35

Just as I have never heard an adult say a good word about Barney, I have never heard a bad one spoken of “Sesame Street,” which is made to be interesting to its incidental audience of parents -- much if not most of the current crop, of course, has grown up on it -- but never at the expense of entertaining or enlightening their kids.

To celebrate its 35th birthday -- which is to say, the start of its 36th season -- the series goes prime time Sunday (PBS, 8 p.m.) with “The Street We Live On,” a flashback-filled special episode, scheduled so that working grown-ups may see it. (It will re-air Monday in the series’ usual child-friendly 7 a.m. slot on KCET.)

I was a little too old for “Sesame Street” when it arrived in 1969 -- the year of Woodstock, the moon landing and the Stonewall riots -- but I watched it anyway: Built specifically on the model of “Laugh-In,” including the “ads” -- the show is always “brought to you” by a number and a letter, because research had shown that kids liked and learned from commercials -- it was smart and fast and colorful. It was a showcase for clever animation and, most important, it was the first permanent home of the Muppets, already familiar from “The Ed Sullivan Show” and a quantum leap past the plastic-headed, flop-armed puppets that were the kiddie-show rule.

This was in the days that “educational television” (NET) was morphing into “public television” (PBS), implying a shift from giving people what they needed to giving people what they were willing to pay for. And “Sesame Street” was paved right down that line: It’s both good and good for you. It serves but does not pander to its constituency, and it never forgets to entertain.

There are jokes and puns none but the grown would understand -- the coming season will include a parody of “Far from Heaven” called “Far from Seven” and featuring Julianne Moore, and “Six Feet Under” about six feet under a table -- but it is good to write a little over the head of your audience. It intimates that life is full of new things to know.

The twin themes of the season opener are community and continuity. It begins as Grover, in mailman mode, traverses the neighborhood “through rain and snow and patchy fog” to deliver a package to Oscar, meeting, greeting or bumping into every last one of his famous neighbors along the way. Humans Susan and Gordon and Bob, plus Luis and Maria, are all still here, after decades, and looking not much the worse for wear, though the Muppets strangely seem not to have aged at all.

Presently we join Elmo -- “the little red menace,” as Oscar calls him. (Notwithstanding Elmo’s popularity among his putative peer group -- he has been “3 years old” since he joined the cast in 1984 -- I prefer the cool-color monsters, like Cookie Monster and Grover and Oscar, who are not so doggedly cute and are all slightly mad.) Elmo has Sesame Street on his mind, and Grover -- the nearest thing among the monsters to a capable adult -- arranges a trip back in time “to the Sesame Street you never knew,” via magic taxi. (“I called a cab and it came,” Grover says. “Now that is magic.”)

They witness the marriage of Luis and Maria and the birth of Gabi, now a teenager and still on the show, and get a glimpse of Mr. Hooper (the late Will Lee). Archival clips are scattered throughout the hour, including quickly glimpsed cameos by Harry Belafonte, Robin Williams, Sheryl Crow and the alphabetical R.E.M. and B.B. King.

Besides that there is counting, with and without Count von Count. (He loves to count.) There is a lot of dancing -- with Big Bird and Snuffleupagus; a Chinese peacock imported by Grover (“and let me tell you it is not easy carrying a peacock across the ocean and on the subway”); and Ernie, who dances himself to sleep with assists from Ruben Studdard, Seth Green and the women of “The West Wing.” Bill Irwin as Mr. Noodle demonstrates how Cookie Monster eats a cookie.

If the street seems a little gentrified these days, a little more manicured, a little less funky -- old clips show a bit of graffiti on the brownstones -- it is still credibly urban, essentially working class and proudly multiethnic -- multispecies, in fact. A place where everyone looks out for everyone else’s best interests, and even as helpless a creature as Big Bird or Elmo can survive. It’s the village it takes to raise a child, and if it does not mirror the actual daily life of all its viewers, it at least provides them, for an hour a day, a kind of protected space to learn in.

And you may learn something here yourself, or at least refresh your acquaintance with tonight’s sponsors, the number 10 -- and when did you last really appreciate a number, I mean really appreciate it? -- and the letter C, which stands for “cat” and “casa” but above all for “cookie.” The show climaxes with a song, in which each member of the assembled ensemble (humans, animals, monsters) expresses its special love for “the street I live on.” Upon which Elmo says he loves you -- who doesn’t Elmo love? -- and Oscar says, “Get lost!”

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‘Sesame Street Presents: The Street We Live On’

Where: KCET

When: 8 p.m. Sunday.

Executive producer: Lewis Bernstein.