Sesame Workshop is the American non-profit behind Sesame Street, founded in 1968 as the Children’s Television Workshop.
Why it belongs in a puppetry glossary
Sesame Street is the largest and longest-running employer of puppeteers in history, and the single biggest reason puppet building exists as a profession in the United States. Careers described elsewhere in this glossary — Spinney, Clash, Wilcox, Linz — were built there.
The founding idea
was that television could teach, and that it should be tested rather than assumed. The organisation was built around educational research, with curriculum goals set in advance and episodes assessed against them. That is unusual for a puppet show and it is the reason the programme survived.
What puppetry contributed
Henson’s characters were the delivery mechanism, and the reason children watched. The Workshop’s own research repeatedly found that MuppetA Muppet is a puppet built in the soft foam-and-fleece style... segments held attention where live-action or animation did not — an empirical case for the form’s effectiveness that very little other puppetry has.
The build operation
A show producing new episodes annually for over fifty years needs a workshop that repairs, rebuilds and replaces characters continuously while keeping them recognisably identical. That is a maintenance discipline as much as a creative one, and it shaped a generation of American builders.
It owns its characters
— Big Bird, Elmo, Oscar, Bert and Ernie went to Sesame Workshop rather than to Disney in the 2004 sale.
Its international co-productions
adapt the format for dozens of countries with locally built characters and locally set curricula.