The beloved children’s show Sesame Street is getting a structural renovation and will finally take viewers into the iconic 123 apartment. This switch-up will entail longer storylines that run throughout the episodes, switching from its regular “magazine” style snippets. The change won’t happen until the 2025-2026 television season.
Kay Wilson Stallings, a chief creative development and production officer for Sesame Workshop, explained to The Hollywood Reporter why the series is making the switch. It seems that the stories and messages they want to portray in the episodes are not able to build out the titular point in the short 9-minute structure they have now. So in order to create higher stakes and enhance the young audiences’ ability to understand and process stories, Sesame Street is going to swap over to longer storylines and ditch the familiar sketch style.
“Both the A story and the B story will come together in some way to really help us with whatever curricular focus that we’re trying to have,” Wilson Stallings tells The Hollywood Reporter “kids love a little bit of peril, they love having emotional stakes, and in nine minutes it’s kind of hard to really dive into those areas really effectively” — ergo the longer blocks of stories that can be more dynamic and sophisticated.”
But fear not. Sesame Street is not switching things up entirely. In the middle of the episodes, the iconic “signature song” sung by a muppet and a famous singer, paired with perhaps a lesson in counting or the alphabet, is here to stay.
Along with the signature song, there is a new segment added in between the longer narratives. A new animated segment titled Tales From 123 will bring viewers into the apartment that viewers have been eager to take a peek into since Sesame Street’s debut in 1969.
Wilson Stallings explains, “For the very first time will give viewers an opportunity to go inside 123 Sesame Street, which is probably the most famous apartment building in the world, and there, beyond the stoop, is where monsters and humans and fairies and dinosaurs and talking numbers and letters and even food will call home.”
Sesame Street season 54 premieres on Thursday, November 9 on Max. The series’ structure change will come with season 56 in the 2025-2026 television season.