Is Sesame Street the best TV show ever made? If we're measuring by the sheer good it's done for the world, the number of children it has entertained and educated, there's a serious argument that nothing beats it. Marilyn Agrelo's documentary Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street, based on the book Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street, by Michael Davis, is a celebration of the show's success and the geniuses who brought the experimental preschool program to life in the late 1960s.
Comparisons will inevitably be made with the hit 2018 documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor? The Street Gang film isn't as definitive a chronicle of Sesame Street as Morgan Neville's film was for Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, mainly because Sesame Street is a much more expansive subject than Mr. Rogers both in terms of the number of people to talk about and the scope of the show itself. Even so, any excuse to spend almost two hours watching hilarious and heartwarming interviews and behind-the-scenes clips with the classic Sesame Street team is worth your time.
If Street Gang has a main character, it's writer/director Jon Stone. Of the three individuals most widely credited with making Sesame Street what it was, puppeteer Jim Henson remains the household name while Children's Television Workshop founder Joan Ganz Cooney (the only one of the trio still alive) gets the credit for setting the production in motion. Stone is a lesser-known figure in comparison, so Agrelo gives him a somewhat heightened focus in an attempt to correct the record.
Even so, there's a reason the film is called Street Gang, because Sesame Street was (and still is) a truly collaborative endeavor. Educators, psychologists, puppeteers, musicians, comedy writers and activists all took part in the effort to improve the television landscape for children. In the early years especially, the show was primarily focused on helping improve education for inner-city kids of color. A good deal of time is spent discussing the show's progressive approach to racial issues, from its integrated cast which got the show temporarily pulled from the airwaves in Mississippi to the true meaning of "It's Not Easy Being Green," with acknowledgment of missteps (Roosevelt Franklin was designed by original Gordon actor Matt Robinson to give the show a Black muppet but was retired due to complaints about stereotyping).
The movie mostly cuts off its history of Sesame Street with two deaths that are absolute tearjerkers to revisit: of Mr. Hooper actor Will Lee (memorably acknowledged on the show itself) in 1982 and of Jim Henson in 1990. Going into the present day would have made a more complicated film -- for one thing, it seems doubtful HBO Documentary Films would be up for a candid discussion of the controversies surrounding the series' move to HBO. Street Gang never gets too complicated or too heavy; it's a celebration first and foremost, but it's a subject that deserves celebrating.
And you get to see Oscar the Grouch curse and joke about sex! What more could you want?
Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 30, and will have an encore screening on Feb. 1. Screen Media will release it in theaters and on-demand in Spring and it will stream on HBO Max later this year.