"Uh Oh, Bert, Big Bird is in Trouble": The Uncertain Future of Sesame Street

Join us for A Little About A Lot on May 15 at 7:00 PM Eastern. The title is Uh Oh, Bert, Big Bird is in Trouble: The Uncertain Future of Sesame Street and Fuzzy Liberalism. The discussion will be facilitated by Dr. Abby Whitaker of Brevard College.

Whether you grew up in a city, a suburb, or in a rural town, chances are you also grew up on Sesame Street. For the past fifty-six years, American children have tuned in to the program to learn everything from the alphabet to the value of diversity. Sesame Street was created in the late 1960s by a group of professionals who saw television as the best tool available to solve several societal problems. Those professionals believed in the power of popular culture to shape both individuals and society. 

While Sesame Street always taught children basic cognitive skills, it also taught them, and their parents, a new way to understand and navigate the world. Premiering at a turbulent moment in political history, Sesame Street created a new civic center, a televised classroom for a reimagined form of liberalism, that Dr. Whitaker calls fuzzy liberalism. The show has shaped who we are, as individuals and as a collective. Today, that televised classroom is in danger of closing as Sesame Street faces cancellation by HBO Max and funding cuts through PBS. In this discussion, we will explore the history of Sesame Street, its model of inclusion, and the uneven success of fuzzy liberalism in bringing about Sesame Street’s utopian vision for a harmonious and loving society.

Dr. Abby Whitaker is an assistant professor of U.S. history at Brevard College. She received her Ph.D. in history from Temple University in Philadelphia last spring. Her dissertation, "Sesame Street and the Making of Fuzzy Liberalism," seeks to understand the history of post-1960s liberalism by analyzing the children's television show Sesame Street as a vital political and cultural text. Her work has been published in the Washington Post and the Journal of Urban History.

A Little About A Lot is an engaging, community-based monthly dialogue focused on spiritual and social topics. A suggested donation of $8 or more helps support this and other CSW programs.