Haven't watched the video, but the positive on this, albeit convoluted if I remember what the bit I read in regards to the HBO tapings being on PBS would be, is that they will not be under draconian BS bigoted crap from the department of education.

It'll be five years until a kid gets to find a hint that it's okay to be gay, but at least they'll have reruns!

Five stars for evil and/or awesome outcome due to internet crimes!

PBS will still be running Sesame Street, just 9 months after HBO. Net effect on 6 year olds: zero.

Unless they're worried about SPOILERS!!! Or confused about those dated 9 month old pop culture references.

Oh dawg, you don't know how a child thinks. Ya'll don't even know the way they talk!

Childin be all Pen Ward and Reggie Watts music mode yo!

If it was 6 year olds, I'd actually have more of a problem with this: I always thought Sesame Street's target audience was 1-3 or maybe 4. By 6 you're probably already in kindergarden and I could see the poor kid getting picked on because he or she hadn't seen the new super-deluxe Star Wars VII parody featuring all the original cast, but 1-3, that's just your basics for the most part with the entertainment and parodies aimed at the adults who would rather shoot themselves in the face than hear Dora ask the TV something one.. more.. time.. like, I had Sesame Street Fever when I was 3 and I've still never seen Saturday Night Fever. I just remember all the songs.

HBO does seem like a weird choice though. I'm just looking at their television lineup today and it's just a True Detective marathon and movies that are PG13 at the lowest. I understand that this is a move to help their streaming service, but whereas EVERYONE I know has Netflix, I don't know a single person with HBO To Go. And everybody I know with HBO just has a premium cable package, HBO sort of being that channel you turn on to catch the second half of some dumb movie you were thinking about seeing in the theatres but didn't.

If this story instead read the same but you replaced "Netflix," or even "Hulu" with "HBO," that would make perfect sense to me, but I don't know about betting the farm on a kids' show. If they were smart they would've gotten the rights to Poldark Season 2. Meow. Middle aged ladies whose panties get all wet tend to give more money than toddlers getting theirs' wet.

HBO is now a suite of channels, rather than a single one. And one of the HBO channels is aimed at kids. (It's called HBO Family.) Presumably, Sesame Street would be shown on that channel, rather than next Game of Thrones (All Breasts! All the time!) or True Blood (now with 75% more full frontal nudity!).

Ah yes.. I figured that there'd be a channel of family-friendly stuff on HBOGo, but I didn't know they had a whole channel devoted to that. Sesame Street would be a good flagship show. BUT, looking at tonight's schedule, among other things X-Men Days of Future Past is on, which has naked butts and at least one use of the word "fuck" and is pretty violent for a PG-13 movie.

But, the same could be said for PBS. As boring as they are, most night time PBS programming has blood, cussing and implied sex, but PBS never marketed itself as a "family" station, just as a "public" one. I dunno. Ironically, the way Sesame Street's going, kids without HBO will probably learn more from watching the older ones than the new ones. I mean, I love John Oliver but teaching a 3 year-old about what a meme, a .gif and "literally" means isn't exactly the pedagogy that child needs vs. their ABCs.. have fun on 4Chan and Reddit, rich kids, and blame your fucking rich parents.

Or five star your own video and feel guilt about it for the rest of the day! :(

zest you are the michael eric dyson of poetv, i've never seen someone so devoted and breathless in their messages, who says as little as you do

maybe homer comes close, but he is your run-of-mill contrarian internet pedant, repeating the wikipedia scholarship he just soaked up two seconds ago -- which is a common and accepted gimmick, at this point

but what is your thing? seriously

goddamnit.. why didn't I think of that?

-Brian Harrod

Good points, but I respectfully disagree that this does not matter. This is in fact intensely symbolic, for all the reasons that Judy mentioned.

Yeah, you're definitely right about B.. and you're right about A too, to an extent. I would donate if they devoted any time to what I (or people in my demographic) might like to see or hear, and there's a lot of cool stuff they could pick up. So at least in Oregon, it's completely bland at this point.

I think it's their logic that somebody like me would give what they could (probably about 5 bucks a month) whereas the people who like Miss Marple would give a thousand a month for a goddamn totebag and shitty show, so the dollar signs have it. And that makes sense, except that's a buzzard mentality and what happens 20 years from now? Same thing happened when I worked with the Opera. There's plenty of good, new Opera out there but since the money wasn't coming from the young folks they'd keep squeezing out the same Puccinis and Bizets that everybody had already seen five years ago. But put a NEW Opera in there, heavens to betsy!

And a lot of this is fueled because they think we're already torrenting all of our shows that we like, or maybe using our ex girlfriend's dad's netflix accounts, things like that. And that's not necessarily a false superstition. But without reaching out to a broader audience they're just digging their own grave, and that money from people about to die who like Prairie Home Companion won't pay the bills someday.

That being said, I'd like if PBS countered and just started at the very beginning of Sesame Street and moved forward, sort of like that Simpsons FX Marathon last summer. I would gladly donate to see that.

Are you trying to convince us or yourself?

They're going to be on HBO? Well, maybe the kids will finally get to see Katy Perry's tits!

And was the best, or at least the most uncompromising, thing Henson ever did for TV.