Format of Sesame Street

Sesame Street is an American children’s television program that is known for its use of format and structure to convey educational concepts to its preschool audience. The show, which premiered in 1969, was the first to base its contents, format, and production values on laboratory and formative research. The format of Sesame Street consisted of a combination of commercial television production elements and educational techniques.

About Format of Sesame Street in brief

Sesame Street is an American children’s television program that is known for its use of format and structure to convey educational concepts to its preschool audience. The show, which premiered in 1969, was the first to base its contents, format, and production values on laboratory and formative research. The format of Sesame Street consisted of a combination of commercial television production elements and educational techniques. At first, each episode was structured like a magazine, but in 1998, as a result of changes in their audience and its viewing habits, the producers changed the show’s structure to a more narrative format. The popular, fifteen-minute long segment, “Elmo’s World”, hosted by the Muppet Elmo, was added in 1998 to make the show more accessible to a younger audience. By 2002 its main viewers were around two years old, while back in the 1960s the intended audiences were aged three through five. The producers attempted to present an idealized world of learning and play, and from a child’s perspective. They also used animation and live-action short films to create a mixture of styles, paces, and characters. The structure allowed them to have flexibility, meaning that segments were dropped, modified, or added without affecting the rest of the show. By 1990, research had shown that children were able to follow a story, so the street scenes were changed to depict storylines. Although the stories were usually about 10–12 minutes in length, it would take 45 minutes to tell them.

The writers presented stories separated by several inserts, dispersed by several stories, throughout the hour-long show. The program’s magazine format accommodated both the curriculum and its demanding production schedule, which referred to the action scenes taking place on the brownstone set, not story-based puppet skits. Instead, they consisted of individual segments connected by inserts, or short films, or animations, and interrupted by stories. By the end of the 1980s, the show had changed the nature of the storylines to tell a story to follow the stories of the Muppets, so they were separated by stories, not skits, or animation, to tell the stories to follow them. It was also the first show to include a curriculum detailed or stated in terms of measurable outcomes, such as how a child should learn to read and write. Despite its urban setting, theProducers depicted the world in a positive way, both realistically and as it could be. Director Jim Martin called the show “an urban show kids could relate to” and “a reality show with a sprinkling of fantasy”. The show’s staff produced segments filmed in-studio with their human and Muppet cast and they contracted out the animations andShort films to independent producers. The studio segments were written to concentrate on the African-American child, a key component of the Show’s audience.

Related posts:

History of Sesame Street Sesame Street international co-productions Sesame Street research Sesame Workshop