Sesame Street reached American television on November 10, 1969, and on its first day it reached just 67.6% of the country’s sets. It still drew a 3.3 Nielsen rating, or 1.9 million households, which is a remarkable number for a program built around teaching preschoolers the alphabet. Tuesday marks 57 years since that broadcast.
The idea came out of a dinner party. In the winter of 1966, public television producer Joan Ganz Cooney invited friends to her apartment near Gramercy Park in New York, and among them was Carnegie Corporation vice president Lloyd Morrisett. Talk turned to whether television could actually teach small children. A week later they met again, at his office, and she was picked to study the question.
Fifty-five pages and an $8 million bet
Cooney took leave from her job in the summer of 1967 and traveled the United States and Canada interviewing experts in child development, education and broadcasting. The result was a 55-page report titled The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education, which became the blueprint for the show and for a new producer, the Children’s Television Workshop.
Morrisett went looking for money and found it. The Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the federal government put up a combined $8 million, which the show’s history puts at about $70 million in 2025 dollars. All three major commercial networks turned the concept down. Author Michael Davis, writing years later with the licensing income in view, called that decision “a billion-dollar blunder.”
The Muppets were almost kept off the street
Child psychologists advised the producers to keep puppets and human actors apart, on the theory that mixing them would confuse young viewers. Testing said otherwise. Children paid close attention during Muppet segments and drifted during scenes on the street, so the team asked Jim Henson to build characters such as Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch who could share the set with the cast, and the street scenes were shot again.
That willingness to change course on the evidence was the actual invention. The Workshop designed the program as a research project, pairing producers with educators and measuring what viewers learned. Cooney described the partnership as an “arranged marriage.” About the people in it, she was less restrained: “Collectively, we were a genius.”
What 57 years adds up to
The program was not welcomed everywhere. In May 1970, the state commission running Mississippi’s public television service voted not to air it, citing its racially integrated cast of children.
The wider reaction went the other way. The show collected 20 awards in 1970 alone, and by 2022 its Emmy total stood at 222. By its 50th anniversary in 2019, roughly 190 million children were watching more than 160 versions in 70 languages.
The official episode count is now 4,744. Spread across 57 years, that averages out to about 83 episodes a year, though the pace has varied widely as the format shrank from an hour to 30 minutes.
Distribution has changed again as well. Season 56 arrived on Netflix and PBS on November 10, 2025, exactly 56 years after the first broadcast, and on January 15, 2026, the first 100 episodes went up on the show’s official YouTube channel.
Further reading
Illustrative image. Image: MrShah2012, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
