Watch your back, Santa Claus. Not content with scrubbing childhood memories from the Cartoon Network website and Max or blowing up Wile E. Coyote before he could make his big-screen debut, David Zaslav and his cronies at Warner Bros. Discovery have just kicked the beloved Sesame Street to the curb.
The Hollywood Reporter broke the news today that Zaslav’s HBO is ending its deal with Sesame Street to create original episodes for its HBO and Max platforms. “It has been a wonderful, creative experience working with everyone at Sesame Street on the blah blah blah blah blah,” a Max spokesperson said while preparing piles of coal to stuff in children’s stockings later this month.
One glimmer of good news: Kids will still be able to watch Sesame Street on Max through 2027. They’ll simply have to content themselves with watching old episodes over and over again. There won’t be any new adventures featuring Elmo, Big Bird and Snuffy — Max and HBO have shifted their strategy away from family-oriented content to focus on Muppet-free crowd-pleasers like 90 Day: The Last Resort (Between the Sheets). At least, let’s hope it’s Muppet-free.
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Sesame Street, which was a PBS property for most of its 56-season run, moved to HBO in 2016. (It still runs on public television a few months after it premieres on the pay platform.) Now it’s a free agent, one that’s expected to draw interest from a lot of big content providers. Those networks or streamers or what-have-you will be after new episodes, but the real prize will be the show’s extensive library of content. Exhausted parents have been known to crank up the iPad and let shows like Sesame Street run for hours, creating an attractive subscriber group for whoever wins Grover and pals.
With plenty of competition expected, it begs the question: Just what exactly is Zaslav’s problem? Because parents are one of the most reliable subscriber bases around, popular kid programming is gold for any content provider. The only logical conclusion is Zaslav hates kids. And he hates little kids even more than he hates big kids.
And like all the worst bosses, he kicked his furry employees to the curb right before the holidays. Bah, humbug.