Production

Production
Research in production

As Cooney has stated, "Without research, there would be no Sesame Street".[38] In 1967, when Cooney and her team began to plan the show's development, combining research with television production was "positively heretical".[38] Sesame Street was the first children's television program that included a curriculum "detailed or stated in terms of measurable outcomes".[39] There was little precedent for incorporating research into television production.[40] There was some concern that this goal would limit creativity, but Stone understood that there were an infinite number of ways to express the curriculum on screen. The Muppet characters were created to fill specific curriculum needs. For example, Oscar the Grouch was designed to teach children about their positive and negative emotions.[41] It was decided from the beginning to have a research presence while the series was being filmed in the studio.[42] As Cooney stated, "From the beginning, we—the planners of the project—designed the show as an experimental research project with educational advisers, researchers, and television producers collaborating as equal partners".[2]

Sesame Street came along and rewrote the book. Never before had anyone assembled an A-list of advisors to develop a series with stated educational norms and objectives. Never before had anyone viewed a children's show as a living laboratory, where results would be vigorously and continually tested. Never before in television had anyone thought to commingle writers and social scientists, a forced marriage that, with surprising ease and good humor, endured and thrived".

—Michael Davis, Street Gang[43]

The producers of Sesame Street used laboratory-oriented research to test if what they were producing held children's attention. The researchers involved with the show found that preschoolers are more sophisticated television viewers than originally thought.[44] Edward Palmer, Sesame Street's original researcher and the man Cooney called "a founder of CTW and founder of its research function",[45] was recruited by the CTW to test if the curriculum developed in the Boston seminars were reaching their audience.[46] Palmer's research was so crucial to Sesame Street that Gladwell asserted, "...Without Ed Palmer, the show would have never lasted through the first season".[46] Palmer was of the few academicians in the late 1960s who was doing research on children's television.[46]

Palmer and his research team utilized the concepts in the field of formative research, or "research conducted to inform the process of production".[31] They were strongly influenced by behaviorism, which was a prominent movement in psychology in the late 1960s, so many of the methods and tools used were primarily behavioral.[47] For example, Palmer developed "the distractor method",[46][48] which he used to test if the material shown on Sesame Street captured young viewers' attention. Two children at a time were brought into the laboratory; they were shown an episode on a television monitor and a slide show next to it. The slides would change every seven seconds, and researchers recorded when the children's attention was diverted away from the episode.[40][49] They were able to record almost every second of Sesame Street this way; if the episode captured the children's interest 80-90% of the time, the producers would air it, but if it only tested 50%, they would "go back to the drawing board".[50] Palmer reported that by the fourth season of the show, the episodes rarely tested below 85%.[50]

In research done in later seasons of Sesame Street, verbal measures began to be introduced, which strengthened their results and would "yield a richer picture of children's knowledge, reactions, and responses" than behavioral measures alone.[47] The distractor method was modified, under CTW researcher Valeria Lovelace, into an "eyes-on-screen" method that collected data from larger groups of children simultaneously. Lovelace's method also tested for more "natural" distractions, or the distractions that other children provide in group viewing situations. More recent measures included a "engagement measure", which recorded children's more active responses to an episode, like laughing and dancing to the music.[51] Throughout the history of Sesame Street, its research staff and producers held regularly scheduled curriculum seminars, as well as "its own robust internal review and critique",[52] to ensure that their curriculum goals are being met and to inform future production. Curriculum seminars prior to Sesame Street's 33rd season in 2002 resulted in changes to the show's structure and format.[37]
Writing

The show's research team developed an annotated document, or "Writer's Notebook", which provided extended and developed definitions of the researchers' curriculum goals. The notebook assisted the writers and producers in translating their educational goals into televised material.[53] Suggestions in the notebook were free of references to specific characters and contexts on the show so that they could be implemented as openly and flexibly as possible.[17] The research team, in a series of meetings with the writers, also developed "a curriculum sheet" that described their goals and priorities for each season, which were divided into four categories: symbolic representation, cognitive processes, the physical environment, and the social environment.[54][note 5] After receiving the curriculum focus and goals for the season, the writers met to discuss ideas and story arcs for the characters, and when a script was completed, the show's research team analyzed it to ensure that the goals were met. Then each production department met to determine what each episode needed in terms of costumes, lights, and sets. The writers were present during the show's taping, which for the first twenty-four years of the show took place in Manhattan, and after 1992, at the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, New York, to make last-minute revisions when necessary.[55][56]
The Kaufman Astoria Studios, where Sesame Street is taped.

Joey Mazzarino, head writer in 2008, has described the writing process as a "collaboration".[55] Cooney has called this collaboration an "arranged marriage".[38] The show's staff work to ensure that the relationship between producers and researchers is not adversarial, but that each side contributes "its own unique perspective and expertise".[57] The production staff recognized early in Sesame Street's history that having access to researchers to gather children's reactions and to inform production was a valuable resource. Researchers and production staff were viewed as a team working together to ensure the best possible product. As CTW researchers Shalom Fisch and Lewis Berstein stated, researchers, as experts, acted as "advocates" for children while the show's writers and producers brought their instincts and past successes with entertaining children through television.[58]

Sesame Street has tended to use many writers in its long history. As Dave Connell, one of Sesame Street's original producers, has stated, it was difficult to find adults who could identify a preschooler's interest level. Fifteen writers a year worked on the show's scripts, but very few lasted longer than one season. Norman Stiles, head writer in 1987, reported that most writers "burn out" after writing about a dozen scripts.[59]
Music

Many of the songs written for Sesame Street have become "timeless classics"[60] In order to attract the best composers and lyricists, CTW allowed songwriters like Joe Raposo, the show's music director, and Jeff Moss, a "gifted poet, composer, and lyricist",[61] to retain the rights to the songs that they wrote. The writers earned lucrative profits,[citation needed] and the show was able to sustain public interest.

According to Michael Davis, Sesame Street's signature sound grew out of sessions with a seven-piece band consisting of a keyboardist, drummer, electric bass player, guitarist, trumpeter, a winds instrumentalist, and a percussionist.[62] Jon Stone reported that a typical recording session with Raposo was "an on-the-fly, off-the-cuff experience".[63] Raposo was especially inspired by the goals of Sesame Street, especially in the early days of the show's production, and responded by composing "a stack" of curriculum-inspired songs.[64]
Joe Raposo, Sesame Street's first musical director.

Raposo wrote Sesame Street's theme song, which Davis has called "jaunty" and "deceptively simple".[65] Stone, although he (along with writer Bruce Hart) is listed as the song's lyricist, considered the song "a musical masterpiece and a lyrical embarrassment".[62] Raposo enlisted jazz harmonica player Jean "Toots" Thielemans, as well as a mixed choir of children, to record the opening and closing themes.[66] "Can You Tell Me How to Get to Sesame Street" has since become a "siren song for preschoolers".[63]

Raposo's "I Love Trash", written for Oscar the Grouch, was included on the first album of Sesame Street songs, recorded in 1974. One of Raposo's best-known compositions for the show was Rubber Duckie, and it was originally performed by Henson for Ernie. The song was recorded for the first Sesame Street album in 1970, performed by the Boston Pops in 1971, and became a hit in Germany in 1996.[67]

Raposo also wrote Bein' Green in 1970, again performed by Henson, but this time for Kermit the Frog. Davis calls this "Raposo's best-regarded song for Sesame Street",[68] and it was later recorded by Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles.[69] Raposo's other notable songs written for the show include "Somebody Come and Play", "C is for Cookie", and "Sing", which became a hit for The Carpenters in 1973.[70]

Entertainment Weekly reported that by 1991, Sesame Street had been honored with eight