Netflix Just Saved Sesame Street. The GOP Might Kill It Anyway.
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Sunny days may be back for Sesame Street . On Monday, production house Sesame Workshop announced that it had signed a new deal with Netflix , which will begin streaming new episodes of Sesame Street worldwide as Season 56 debuts later this year—and do so simultaneously with PBS and the PBS Kids app, instead of claiming first-run rights like HBO had.
This lifesaving announcement for the beloved, world-changing kids' program also comes just a few days after a hard-earned victory for the people behind the scenes. On Friday, a special unit of Sesame Workshop staffers (consisting of those, like visual artists and in-house childhood experts, who weren't represented by other entertainment unions) voted overwhelmingly to organize under the Office and Professional Employees International Union—a win all the most remarkable for having gained federal approval from a sabotaged National Labor Relations Board .
More details on both fronts are yet to be announced. Still, this serves as great relief for Sesame Street and its generations of fans, who've been worried for Big Bird, Elmo, and all their friends ever since HBO decided in December that it would keep streaming past episodes but no longer carry future broadcasts, tanking an annual multimillion-dollar funding source—and a profitable arrangement—for Sesame Workshop. (In case you're wondering, the geniuses at HBO are now hard at work justifying the re-rebranding of their streaming service as … HBO Max, again.) That cutoff, added to broader nerves around the future of government-supported public media under this hostile Republican government , pushed Sesame Workshop to cut 20 percent of its workforce back in March and book emergency meetings with myriad streaming services. The group recently won a $250,000 grant from the Elevate Prize Foundation, but it was hardly enough to cover the shortfalls.
It was all enough to make one wonder whether Sesame Street , whose cultural and political legacy are unmatched within the annals of educational TV, could even survive 2025 . It was also enough for fans of all stripes to step up dedicated social media campaigns to save both Sesame Street and PBS. Popular digital names like Funny or Die and Jazz Is Dead began resharing old clips on their accounts, and one online vigilante even crafted a viral LinkedIn post from “Elmo,” written in a manner reminiscent of the sad announcements from the many federal workers who've lost their jobs this year. ( Sesame Workshop told Variety it had nothing to do with this gag, and LinkedIn soon took it down.)
Now, if you asked the Count, he'd probably remind you that we were just here 10 years ago. In the summer of 2015, the Sesame Workshop shocked American parents by establishing a lucrative five-year partnership with HBO, where the private broadcaster earned the right to first broadcast new Sesame Street episodes months before they reached PBS. In 2019, the parties reupped the deal but transferred the first-run rights over to HBO Max, which also streamed the Emmy-winning 2021 documentary Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street . It was an arrangement that, on the surface, appeared to negate everything that made Sesame Street what it was: a fun yet legitimately educational show available to all young viewers via public broadcasting. The rise of streaming made this move necessary for Sesame Street ’s survival, as falling DVD sales hurt its revenue and kids’ shows quickly went digital . Still, it was a sign of trouble when HBO Max focused on 200 Sesame Street episodes from its library in 2022 and quietly removed Street Gang , as part of the many back-catalog cuts the struggling service has made in recent years. ( Street Gang is still listed as an HBO Original , but links to stream it on Max no longer work.)
Warner Bros. Discovery justified dropping Sesame Street as a reconsideration of its #branding, telling the Hollywood Reporter in December that it would now “ prioritize our focus on stories for adults and families .” In light of last week's HBO Max re-rebranding—supposedly aimed at uplifting “ quality and distinct stories ”—it's clear that this is little more than further expense-trimming from WBD's flailing CEO, David Zaslav. Because the idea that Sesame Street isn't among the most quality and distinct of family shows is laughable.
It's also possible, however, that this was another form of capitulating and face-saving from the studio set. Zaslav has been sucking up to Donald Trump ever since his November reelection, and Trump spent his campaign waging rhetorical war on America's TV studios at large—especially PBS. Trump drove this home in his joint address to Congress in March, when he praised Elon Musk and the DOGE team for identifying “appalling waste” within the country's expenditures, including “ $20 million for the Arab Sesame Street in the Middle East .” That was a made-up number, but more importantly, it believed the many good reasons that USAID worked with nonprofit funders to produce an Arabic-language, internationally broadcast Sesame Street : It's a highly recognizable symbol of American soft power that assisted with peace efforts abroad, not least by providing steady comfort and education to millions of Arab children, including refugees . (George W. Bush's first USAID head even referred to it as “ the biggest weapon against Al Qaeda and Islamic extremism ,” in an interview with the New York Times.)
But Republicans have been braying against Sesame Street for a long time now. Newt Gingrich tried and failed to zero out congressional funding for public media when he was House speaker in the 1990s. During the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney repeatedly called for slashing the government's teeny-tiny financial support for public broadcasting, earning him widespread mockery . In more recent years, anti–Big Bird Republicans have roped Sesame Street into the culture wars : Tucker Carlson (whose late father once headed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting ) decried an Elmo-hosted CNN town hall on American racism during the George Floyd protests; Ted Cruz blasted a 2021 Big Bird tweet promoting the COVID-19 vaccine as “ government propaganda ”; Jordan Petersen randomly claimed that “Elmo would definitely vote for the Democrats.” Such hysterics were front and center at a late-March congressional hearing over supposed “Anti-American” programming on America's public airwaves. Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia had great fun mocking his GOP colleagues by rhetorically asking if Elmo was a commie and whether Bert and Ernie were “part of an extreme homosexual agenda.”
Yet these stupid culture-war lines of attack may prove to be the most potent ones in defanging Sesame Street , no matter how the deal with Netflix shakes out. While resisting the grant cuts and employee shakeups that the Trump administration is already implementing, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting also appears to be self-censoring to avoid further government attacks, shuttering its offices for diversity, equity, and inclusion and pulling a documentary about a transgender livestreamer from its planned April broadcast. (Reportedly, PBS may end up relenting and airing it next month.) Earlier this month, the public channel also canceled Molly of Denali , a Peabody-winning kids' show that was the first of its kind to feature an Alaska Native protagonist; the mountain referenced in its title has reverted to its non-Indigenous name thanks to the Trump administration.
With the president pushing for Congress to gut support for public broadcasting entirely , Sesame Workshop likely isn't eager to provoke Republicans anytime soon—especially as it revamps Sesame Street 's format for Season 56. The result may look more like a Netflix-y show than the radical public institution that once tackled issues of mental health, grievance, disability, equality, and community welfare head-on. At a moment when the show has just escaped near-death and obsolescence, that still may be better than nothing.
But Sesame Street was always about showing kids a better world—and daring them to imagine one , as well. It didn't earn the trust of generations by playing it safe. If the show forgets its way to where the air is sweet, it might not even matter if it's still on the air.
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