Sesame Workshop (1996-present)

Sesame Workshop (SW), originally known as the Children's Television Workshop (CTW), is an American nonprofit organization and an educational children’s television series that has been responsible for the production of several educational children's programs—including its first and best-known, Sesame Street—that have been televised internationally. Television producer Joan Ganz Cooney and foundation executive Lloyd Morrisett developed the idea to form an organization to produce Sesame Street, a television series that would help children, especially those from low-income families, prepare for school. They spent two years, from 1966 to 1968, researching, developing, and raising money for the new series. Cooney was named as the Workshop's first executive director, which was termed "one of the most important television developments of the decade."

Projects:

 * Sesame Street's Muppets (November 10, 1969 - present)
 * Big Bag (June 2, 1996 - May 11, 1998) (Cartoon Network)
 * Panwapa (October 10, 2007 - August 6, 2009) (iTunes / Universal Kids)
 * Spin-Offs:
 * Play with Me (April 1, 2002 - September 2, 2007)
 * Sesame Beginnings (April 23, 2006 - April 3, 2007) (NOT ON TELEVISION)
 * The Furchester Hotel (September 26, 2014 - October 29, 2017) (Universal Kids)
 * The Not-Too-Late Show with Elmo (May 27, 2020 - December 30, 2021) (HBO Max / PBS Kids)
 * Helpsters: The Other Sesame Street Show (November 1, 2019 - present) (Apple TV+)

Animated Series

 * Sesame Street's Muppets
 * Big Bag
 * Ace & Avery (1998)
 * Animated Segments from the show (seasons 39 - present) (August 11, 2008 - present)
 * Spin-Offs:
 * Mecha Builders (May 9, 2022 - present) (Cartoon Network)

1996-1999, 2005-2015: The PBS Era

 * 1) They kept introducing pointless new Muppets (despite their positives on the Muppet Wiki) to Sesame Street doing drastic changes to the show's street set and format during these years, although it is debatable.
 * 2) *Whenever they introduced new characters to Sesame Street, they would often tend to come off as annoying, sentimental, dull, bland, stupid, idiotic, or obnoxious (depending on your view).
 * 3) **For example, Abby Cadabby was made because the crew wanted the show to have more prominent female Muppets. She also solves her friends' problems with magic in some episodes, which is not how things work in real life, even though it's obviously because she's a fairy, and her prominence is due to Sesame Street competing with other preschool shows since the 1990s and 2000s.
 * 4) They have a lack of care for their non-Sesame properties and they like to pretend that some of the shows they made don't exist.
 * 5) *The Sagwa franchise went dormant after the show's cancellation, due to a lack of merchandise as well as PBS not being able to compete with news coverage during the 9/11 attacks.
 * 6) *Barely anything has been done with Dragon Tales since it was cancelled in 2005 and dropped from the air in 2010. With Sony Pictures Television co-owning the rights to the series and music rights issues, it is unlikely to ever see an official re-release.
 * 7) *Though they revived The Electric Company in January 23, 2009 (thus marks the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street), it was cancelled in April 3, 2011 and the franchise has gone dormant since.
 * 8) **The original 1971 series is hard to come across, as only 40 episodes were released on DVD (followed by another 29 on iTunes) and the show was last rerun on Noggin in 2002.
 * 9) *They rarely give the older seasons of Sesame Street any attention apart from releasing edited versions of episodes on HBO Max and uploading sketches from the seasons on YouTube. This has caused the newer seasons to gain more recognition among children.
 * 10) Nothing has been heard about Square One TV since Math Talk was cancelled. It is also unavailable for streaming or on DVD.
 * 11) Starting in November 16, 1998, they began accepting corporate sponsors to raise funds for Sesame Street and other projects on PBS airings. While it was somewhat justified to increase funding for multiple projects alongside Sesame Street as well as their new network, Noggin, it still defeats the purpose of being a non-profit organization by ending on December 31, 2015.
 * 12) In 2012, despite his false sexual allegations later being cleared out, they had Kevin Clash resign from Sesame Street no matter what—even if it was his decision to resign from the show.
 * 13) On September 15, 2014, the forty-fifth season of Sesame Street was aired on PBS and includes a word on the street and of the day segment, a song, a parody, dance breaks about letters who clap their hands, numbers who stomp their feet, Cookie Monster's movie trailer short films and Super Grover segments until January 15, 2016.

1999-2005: The Noggin Era

 * 1) Sesame Street was named in two different show titles in one television series.
 * 2) *First, Sesame Street Unpaved, the classic series from the Jim Henson era is hard to come across, as episode reruns from 1969-1992 were released on DVD (followed by the series Play with Me and networks HBO Family, iTunes and YouTube) and the show was last rerun on Noggin in 2002.
 * 3) *The second one is just for the street address and name with all of the classic episode reruns from seasons 25, 30, and 31 (followed by the series Play with Me and networks HBO Family, iTunes and YouTube) and the show was last rerun on Noggin in 2005.
 * 4) **Elmo's World also aired on Noggin at the end of the show before signing off.

2016-2022: The HBO Kids and HBO Max Era

 * 1) In 2016, they fired the actors who played Bob, Gordon, Luis, Susan, Maria, Gina, etc. from Sesame Street (although only Bob, Gordon and Luis actually got fired, while Susan, Maria, Gina, Leela, Miles, Gabi, etc. mostly chose to retire themselves sometime before 2016) for no apparent reason. Most of them did return in the 50th Anniversary special, The Power of We special, and Sesame Workshop: Welcome Sesame: A Digital Special Event, but it feels like nowadays that they're all completely retconned out the show like they never even existed.
 * 2) They made a special about racial justice called The Power of We. The whole special basically panders to political left-wingers.
 * 3) A third Sesame Street movie has been in development for more than 10 years now (it began development in 2012) and was supposed to be released in 2022, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the movie hauled production in 2020.
 * 4) **In August 2022, HBO Max removed almost all of the pre-2008 Sesame Street episodes.
 * 5) ***In Japan, U-Next says sayonara to classic and some of the new Sesame Street episodes to teach English.

2023-present: The YouTube Kids Era

 * 1) Beginning on May 3, 2023, Elmo's Mindfulness Spectacular was exclusively uploaded to Sesame Street's YouTube channel and Sesame Street's YouTube Kids channel.
 * 2) *According to PBS airings and the upcoming fifty-fourth season, each Thursday episode with Autism-themed will air on PBS and on Max and some of the episodes will upload to YouTube and YouTube Kids with the forty-fifth to the fifty-third season era of the show every Wednesday from fall 2023.

Good Qualities

 * 1) They still make some good shows like Dragon Tales, Sagwa the Chinese Siamese Cat, The Electric Company (both the 1971 and 2009 versions), Square One TV, Tiny Planets (co-produced with Pepper's Ghost Productions Ltd.), and Ghostwriter.
 * 2) They introduce several good new characters to Sesame Street like Julia, Gabrielle, Tamir, Karli, Wes, Tango, Ji-Young, and TJ, along with the newest human character Charlie.