Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

ROBERT W. MORROW. Sesame Street and the Reform of Children's Television. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 226. $50.00

2007; Oxford University Press; Volume: 112; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/ahr.112.2.549-a

1937-5239

Nicholas Sammond,

Children's Rights and Participation

In a time when Tickle-Me Elmo speaks in the imperative voice, American parents listen obediently, fearful of failing their children. It is hard to imagine that there was a time when the products of the Children's Television Workshop (CTW, now Sesame Workshop), like Disney before it, were not synonymous with media that are good for children, and status markers to boot. Robert W. Morrow's engaging and straightforward book takes us back to that moment in the late 1960s when Sesame Street struggled into existence, and when programming was not yet brought to us by the letter “S.” Morrow has laid the book out in an accessible fashion, starting with a basic historical overview of media effects arguments as they have unfolded in the United States. Beginning with discourses about the dangers of popular periodicals and newspapers in the late nineteenth century, it moves through early arguments for the regulation of the exhibition and content of motion pictures at the beginning of the twentieth century, to the Payne Fund Studies, with a brief mention of radio. When he arrives at television, of course, he slows down, balancing the discussion between calls for the regulation of the medium in the 1950s and early examples of children's programming such as Ding Dong School, Captain Kangaroo, and Howdy Doody. Chapter two offers a well-organized look at debates around preschools in the early 1960s. This chapter is particularly compelling where it emphasizes the enormous social and political burden that preschools were expected to carry as primary sites for addressing larger issues of social and economic inequality. Placing preschools (and early education) in the context of the failed promise of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Civil Rights Act, and Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty, Morrow details why the “preschool moment” created significant interest in (and pressure on) programs such as Head Start, and an environment critical of television's impact on the lives of young children. Chapter three offers an institutional prehistory of Sesame Street. This narrative is built around the work of founding architect Joan Ganz Cooney, and adds nicely to the portrait provided in Heather Hendershot's Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation before the V-Chip (1998), dealing with the hard-won institutional, ideological, and intellectual battles that were fought just to get Sesame Street funded, let alone developed and produced. In his fourth and fifth chapters—which are short enough that they easily could have been combined—Morrow lays out, respectively, the CTW “model” and the realization of that model in the show's first season. What links these two chapters is the importance of the model: CTW had to create programming that had quantifiably beneficial effects on children (particularly poor children of color) and that earned competitive ratings. Chapter six details the buzz that accompanied Sesame Street's premiere (for it truly was a unique moment in the history of American public television), and the seventh and final chapter explores the intense public debate around the program, which encompassed a variety of institutional actors, from the National Association of Broadcasters (cautiously seeking to discredit the show in order to avoid creating a benchmark for the regulation of network children's programming), educational theorists both applauding and decrying the program, and television critics doing the same. Given the weight that Sesame Street bore in terms of addressing social inequality, this intense heat and light is understandable, and Morrow does a good job of portraying the nuanced political maneuvering that followed the show's initial successes.