Play with Me Sesame

Play with Me Sesame is an American-international children's television series created by Sesame Workshop and Nickelodeon for their former joint venture Noggin. It is a spin-off of the long-running and iconic children's television series Sesame Street. The series' backgrounds and animated elements were made by Nickelodeon in New York City. Nickelodeon and Sesame developed the show to expand on Sesame Street by directly encouraging young viewers to interact with the characters. To do this, they combined classic Sesame Street footage with new segments, where hosts Ernie, Grover, Bert, and Prairie Dawn invite preschoolers to join them in games.

The first two seasons were produced for Noggin. The first season, containing 26 episodes, premiered on April 1, 2002; in the same season, Elmo would occasionally appear outside of classic Sesame Street sketches. The second and final season, which premiered on June 7, 2003, contained 17 episodes; Cookie Monster, Ernestine, Slimey, and Zoe also started making occasional appearances on the show. Chicago the Lion also made at least one appearance. The third and the very final season was produced solely by Sesame Workshop and was made in international countries between August 8 and September 2, 2007.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) It removes most of the charm that made its parent show great and memorable.
 * 2) Much like Elmo's World, Ernie, Bert, Prairie Dawn and Grover have all been flanderized to treat the audience like how Angela from Angela Anaconda, JoJo from JoJo's Circus, the mh:besttvshows:Little Einsteins, the narrators and puppets from Baby Einstein, mh:besttvshows:Special Agent Oso, Diego from mh:besttvshows:Go, Diego, Go!, Dora the Explorer and the Teletubbies would. They're also a lot more loud and obnoxious than they are in Sesame Street.
 * 3) The voice acting is more annoying than it was in Sesame Street, as Grover, Ernie, Bert, and Prairie often yell or scream most of their lines.
 * 4) Unlike in Sesame Street (where the characters only occasionally broke the fourth wall and only lectured the audience on various topics whenever they did), the fourth wall is broken constantly to the point of annoyance.
 * 5) Unlike Sesame Street and most other preschool shows, Play with Me Sesame barely has any educational value. While it does try to teach kids to play and sing along as well as develop their kinesthetic skills, it mostly turns down to the hosts just doing uninteresting, stupid, annoying, and unfunny things.
 * 6) The humor is unfunny, cringeworthy, and tame.
 * 7) The show is way too predictable, as every episode is structured as follows:
 * 8) *Ernie Says
 * 9) *Classic Muppet clip
 * 10) *Prairie Dawn showcases drawings made by kids
 * 11) *Classic Muppet clip
 * 12) *Bert plays on the computer
 * 13) *Classic Muppet clip (a song segment)
 * 14) *Bert shows computer-generated "oatmeal art" submitted by kids
 * 15) *Classic Muppet clip (an Ernie and Bert segment)
 * 16) *Grover invites the viewer to dance with him
 * 17) The music, especially the theme song, is mediocre.
 * 18) The classic Sesame Street sketches, while good, serve much less of a purpose here than they do in the main show.
 * 19) Quantity Over Quality: Neither Sesame Workshop nor Noggin ran the show properly, as all 130 episodes of the show were made in the littlest of time possible, hence making the episodes feel poorly-executed and extremely rushed.

Good Qualities

 * 1) Great voice acting and puppeteering for all of the characters.
 * 2) As mentioned above, the classic Sesame Street sketches are featured in this show and they're great as always.
 * 3) It encourages kids to play along with the Muppets while developing their gross motor skills.

Reception
Play with Me Sesame currently holds a 6.1/10 on IMDb.