Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street

Doc­u­men­tary as a form is prone to hyper­fix­a­tion and hyper­bole. But in the case of Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street, where numer­ous talk­ing heads speak to the time­less­ness of the show – that 200 years from now peo­ple will still know who Bert and Ernie are – it feels remark­ably apt. From the first plunk­ing notes of the Sesame Street theme song, you can feel your heart begin to swell. As the film peeks under the hood to see how the icon­ic show came to be, it’s impos­si­ble not to get sucked into the nostalgia.

As much talk as there was among Sesame Street’s cre­ative team about seek­ing out a view­er­ship of inner-city kids, ensur­ing their pro­gramme was edu­cat­ing and enter­tain­ing in equal mea­sure, they showed just as much action in mak­ing that hap­pen. The show’s cre­ators brought in both tele­vi­sion writ­ers and edu­ca­tors; stud­ied what kids need­ed, what they retained, what they for­got, and what they want­ed to see; cre­at­ed a slide pro­jec­tor device to more sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly gauge when the show would lose a child’s attention.

The street set­ting was intro­duced because, for a New York City kid cooped up in the apart­ment, that was where the action was. Lest you think that Sesame Street’s mas­sive suc­cess was a hap­py acci­dent, Street Gang is here to inform you that the show was rig­or­ous in its attempts to appeal to its tar­get audience.

Street Gang flits between dif­fer­ent facets of its sub­ject, sur­vey­ing every­thing from music direc­tion to con­sid­er­a­tions of Big Bird’s design. The tran­si­tions often feel too smooth, whisk­ing you away from top­ics that could use more insight, such as rep­re­sen­ta­tion or pup­pet con­struc­tion. When it can’t ful­ly duck deep­er sub­jects, it shies away from plumb­ing too deeply. The film is at its most absorb­ing when look­ing at how com­pet­ing impuls­es could gel into weird, ground­break­ing TV mag­ic, although even that feels under-explored. Its inter­est is the whole rather than the indi­vid­ual parts.

Giv­en that Street Gang was pro­duced by HBO, the same com­pa­ny that snapped up Sesame Street and made it tem­porar­i­ly exclu­sive to their ser­vice, it might be futile to wish for a doc­u­men­tary that delved deep­er, cov­er­ing how the show’s mis­sion has changed through the years. Instead, after chron­i­cling Jim Henson’s run, the film sput­ters with­out much to say about the inter­ven­ing decades. Still, it’s hard not to be sucked in by the sheer effect of Sesame Street’s radius: on Sesame Street, with its sun­ny days and clear air, even shal­low breaths feel more full.