Friday, Feb 8:
Waving, not drowning
Friday, Feb 8:So, if you’ll recall, my first My Week column back in August was My Week with Sesame Street. And by Friday of that week, I was drained. A whole week of watching last season’s Sesame just took it out of me. I snapped at Baby Natasha, I snarled at Baby Bear. I don’t know what to say about it. It was a tough week is all.
And this week with the new season just couldn’t be more different. Case in point: There was a “Hero Guy” segment in yesterday’s episode that I didn’t even bother commenting on. I could snipe at Hero Guy right now. I could go on and on about it. But I won’t. See? See how good a mood I’m in?
The difference between last season and this season isn’t even a huge jump in the quality of any particular segment. Yes, the Letter of the Days and Spanish Word of the Days are consistently excellent, but Journey to Ernie isn’t so hot, and Monster Clubhouse doesn’t really get me going. It’s still a mixed bag in that way.
The difference is that the new format gives the show a sense of direction, of forward movement. Old School Sesame never seemed to go anywhere — there’d be a Street scene, and then a cartoon about 12, and then a film of clouds, and then a song about Z, and then another Street scene… The end of a Sesame Street episode felt pretty much just like the beginning, only an hour later. I think that’s what made me so cranky watching it last season. After a while, I just felt battered by clip after clip; it started to feel like it would never end.
This season, it’s much more structured, so you get more of a sense of accomplishment as you watch the show. Watching today’s episode, I kept catching myself thinking things like, “Oh, it’s time for the Number of the Day already?” It moves along from segment to segment, and I never felt like I was just getting bogged down in something that I couldn’t escape. Even the segments that I wasn’t crazy about would end, and then move on to the next thing.
So this, I think, is where I end up parting company with the Trad Fans. There aren’t a lot of vintage 70’s clips in the new season, which is a shame… but clips can really only take you so far anyway. An endless Sesame clip reel — even if it only has the greatest, funniest, most beautiful clips — would just get wearing after a while. It would be Sesame’s Greatest Home Movies, a dead show still walking around the land of the living. To make a show really come to life, you need more than just sketches. You need a sense that things are going somewhere.
To paraphrase Annie Hall, a TV show is like a shark — it has to keep swimming forward or die. What I watched in August was a dead shark. This season, Sesame 2.0… It’s alive, it’s going places.
I don’t like every single place it stops off. But it’s just so great to be swimming again.
by Danny Horn
