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Anonymous Critic

Chasing The Clouds Away: Loving Sesame Street

January 19, 2007

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As I sit, watching this season of “American Idol,” my young daughter stares at me, wondering why I’m cringing.

In fact, now that she’s old enough to turn the television on and off by herself (soon she’ll be setting my Tivo for me), I find myself watching television through her eyes. And as reality television gets crueler and nastier, and as network dramas get bloodier, I wonder if there’s ever going to be any meaningful backlash.

Will the American television audience will get tired of dead bodies and talentless singers, and if that even happens, will there be programming for them?

Of course, should America collectively turn off their televisions, our networks would figure out the cause of the problem and remedy it, but my question is this: is there anything on television that I can watch with my daughter that isn’t too adult, isn’t trying to sell her (and, in effect, me) toys, or isn’t grating to my ears after watching a few minutes?

Comments

katie wrote:

no foolin. My brothers got me the first season on dvd. it makes you remember that you're allowed to be just about anything. even a bus driver. And you can watch Bob and Susan sing "I've Got Two Eyes, and They're Both the Same Size." It's awesome. (Susan is a lot groovier than I remembered her being.) Anyway, the amazing part is that my kids watch the first season just as much as they watch the current one with Elmo (who, God help me, I just don't care for...) Thanks for this post.

posted at January 19, 2007 05:29 PM

Ale wrote:

I kno!!! My friends and I were talking about his just the other day..we were saying how complecated life seemed when you watch all these teen dramas and reality shows and that all the news and primetimes shows were all sad and all stories were basicly the same...and how life seems so simple when you watch shows that you used to watch when you were little, it takes you back to when boys just had cooties and that was the end of it or when your siblings and you got along in complete silence for 30 mins or when you learned new things, so we started listing shows and of course Sesame Street came up as being the most watched one- I even got to watch it twice a day, in two different languages!!! (its been duplecated in many countries- the characters and their names are altered at times to fit the culture...I watched it in english then Spanish)We also stated Arther, Clifford, the Power Rangers along with Pork Chop, Zoom, and this other show that we had forgotten the name of..it took place at like a news studio run by kids 'for kids and by kids' was like the tag line and they showed music videos of nursery rhymes and kids songs. Well, we listed all these shows that were on PBS or on Fox after school and noticed that only few of us had cable and even then, only a couple watched or remembered Things they watched on cable since they showed the best of the Disney Channel shows on sturday mornings on ABC and Sunday mornings on the WB like the Pinky and the Brain and the Animaniacs...both which went on dvd last year and were on my birthday and christmas lists...

So now, I watch shows like Aurther and such a couple times a week and I watch old reruns of Sesame street when I babysit..Even late at night when the kids I babysit for are asleep and I am able to watch anything I like, i watch sesame street...some are new and others are from like the 80's!!!!
I can still name them; oh!! and They are all different races..I saw that on VH1...lol ;)

posted at February 18, 2007 10:15 PM