It all started one night at a dinner party in 1966. TV executive Lloyd Morrisett told documentary producer Joan Ganz Cooney that his daughter Sarah was entranced by the jingles she heard on TV while waiting for her favorite cartoons to come on. Cooney suggested they use these jingles to educate underprivileged inner-city children. The result, Sesame Street, premiered on November 10th, 1969, and the rest is history.

Prior to the upcoming 56th season, which is set to premiere in two years from now in 2025, the series was inspired by commercial television, utilizing a variety show format that allowed for music, puppetry, and animation - even parodies of adult movies, shows, and songs and appearances from A-list celebrities. Even if they didn't like one sketch, the rest captured millions of people's hearts. As I said earlier, this format was utilized to teach children topics such as counting or the alphabet, and it worked (especially since the sketches were repeated in the first few years so children could get the hang of what they were teaching)! In later years, segments like Elmo's World were added and the show became half an hour, but the magazine format remained the same.

Today, Sesame Workshop's Kay Wilson Stallings and Steve Youngwood announced that, for season 56, the show is dropping the magazine format in favor of what most quality kids' shows are going for - two longer narrative stories with a short sandwiched in between them - in this case, a new animated series, Tales from 123, in which the residents of the 123 Sesame Street brownstone go about their lives in their homes. The stories will have a different moral, probably with a famous musician to sing it. Stallings says this was all because Cooney wanted the series to be more modernized.

As an avid fan of the series, knowing it for as long as I can remember, I say that they should NOT drop the legendary magazine format - Tales from 123 is fine, but it can be placed in it, as with segments like Bert and Ernie's Great Adventures, and keep the segments about numbers and letters of the alphabet, as well as the celebrity appearances. These are all what made the show work in the first place. Dropping the letter and number of the day will make the series less about academics, as well as less recognizable, as they’ve been there since the very first episode!

Overall, Sesame Workshop, if you are reading this, you should know that we all love the magazine format and you shouldn’t change it one bit as it is beloved by millions and has for years. Thank you for reading.