Sesame Street to Be Reimagined in 2025

Word on the street is that 123 Sesame Street is getting an overhaul. Sesame Street will undergo a "reimagining" for its upcoming 56th season in 2025, with the beloved PBS and Max educational children's series moving away from the classic "magazine format" for more story and narrative-driven segments. According to The Hollywood Reporter, which first reported the format changes, the format for Sesame Street season 56 will see episodes consist of two 11-minute story segments separated by installments of the new five-minute animated series Tales From 123.

This isn't the first format change to the long-running Sesame Street, which airs its 54th season in November: in 2002, producers revamped the show to add a more set structure, and in 2016, PBS shortened episodes from 60 minutes to 30 minutes to adapt to the streaming era.

"With any change you have evolutions, and then you have things that are slightly bigger steps, while still staying core to who we are," Sesame Workshop CEO Steve Youngwood told The Hollywood Reporter. "We felt like this was a moment to step back and think bigger about how we evolve it."

Packing more story into Sesame Street's half-hour episodes will "give us an opportunity to dive further into the narrative," added Kay Wilson Stallings, Executive Vice President, Chief Creative Development and Production Officer for Sesame Workshop. The format change is a "reimagining" of the show, Wilson Stallings said, with its longer segments meaning more "dynamic" and "sophisticated" stories in addition to the educational curriculum.

Kids' and parents' favorite puppets — classic characters Big Bird, Elmo, Cookie Monster, Bert and Ernie, Grover, Oscar, and the Count, and more recent additions like Abby Cadabby, Rudy, Rosita, Tamir, Gabrielle, Julia, Gonger, and Elmo's dog Tango — will continue to appear in the live-action and animated segments. 

Tales From 123 will "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," said Wilson Stallings of the new animated Sesame Street show that could potentially be spun out of the Sesame Street mothership into its own series. "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. So this will be a great opportunity for our audience to explore a whole new part and a whole new world of Sesame Street."

These new Tales will include the core characters but won't "necessarily link into the 'A' story or the 'B' story," Wilson Stallings explained of the 11-minute story segments. Instead, these are five-minute installments that will be "very characterful, that has a lot of humor, that really kind of highlights the best components of who our characters are."

Sesame Street co-creator and Sesame Workshop founder Joan Ganz Cooney "always talked about Sesame Street as being like an experiment," Wilson Stallings said. "And she said that regularly we need to look at the creative, look at who kids are, look at what they are interested in, look at what we're trying to instill in terms of an educational curriculum, pull all that together and on a regular basis assess Sesame Street and see where we need to make tweaks and where we need to make some enhancements to further evolve it."

Sesame Street season 54 premieres November 9th on Max (formerly HBO Max). The curriculum focuses on helping children develop a healthy sense of self and belonging, with celebrity guests Ariana DeBose (Disney's Wish), Quinta Brunson (Abbott Elementary), singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile, Eugene Cordero (Marvel's Loki), Dan Levy (Schitt's Creek), and Kal Penn (The Santa Clauses).