Warner Bros. and HBO Max have had a busy week, with a lot of original programming, including almost 200 episodes of the classic children’s show Sesame Street, being removed from the streaming service. Sesame Workshop has decided to take matters into its own hands by restoring universal access to the show by posting entire episodes on its YouTube site. There are now 22.9 million people who subscribe to the official Sesame Street channel on YouTube, where Sesame Workshop has uploaded entire episodes. Even while this isn’t directly in reaction to HBO Max (because the episodes are already available on YouTube), the timing of their Twitter reminder seems opportune.
A PBS mainstay, the show was created to reach kids from all walks of life and is now available to them again because of a medium that is both free and widely used: YouTube. Since 2015, when HBO signed an exclusive deal with Sesame Workshop, the premium channel has aired new Sesame Street episodes first and had first dibs on the entire Sesame Street back library spanning multiple decades.
Such an agreement may have ensured the future of Sesame Street for yet another generation. Sesame Workshop’s decision to upload Sesame Street episodes to YouTube follows a slew of cancellations at HBO Max over the past several weeks, which have impacted dozens of programmes and other assets, from movies like Batgirl to TV shows including Generation, Infinity Train, and Summer Camp Island. Of the 52 seasons and more than 4,600 episodes of Sesame Street that have aired since 1969, almost 200 were removed from the streaming service.
Originally, all 650 episodes of the show were available on HBO Max, but currently, just 456 remain, with the bulk of those being from the first 38 seasons. All episodes from Season 39 and beyond, as well as those from the numerous spin-offs and one-offs (with the exception of Not So Late Show with Elmo), are still accessible in their entirety via the streaming service. It’s odd that Sesame Street, a show that promotes moral values for children, was among the recent crop of HBO Max cancellations, but it’s great that in the internet era, Sesame Workshop can make the show accessible to everyone as it was always meant to be.