Why I'm Watching Sesame Street for the First Time Tonight

I have a confession to make: I never watched Sesame Street.

When people talk about the green curmudgeonly guy who lives in a trash can, I politely nod to pretend I know who they mean. When adults my own age spend large sums to buy the new animatronic red stuffed animal, I roll my eyes with my head turned so they can't see it. When people do impressions of a large goofy bird, I have literally no idea what is going on. Oscar the Grouch, Elmo, Big Bird—these are characters I know nothing about.

Don’t yell at me! I'm sorry! I know!

In fact, I have felt for years like not being a Sesame Street kid made me some kind of weird snob. When it comes up in conversation that I never watched the show people give me this raised-eyebrow look that seems to say, "Oh, so you think you’re better than me?" Either that or they ask, "What the hell kind of childhood did you have?" Tonight the show debuts on HBO and I’ll be watching for the first time. I just had a child and I promised myself that I would not let him wind up in the same awkward situation at cocktail parties in 25 years. But the irony that I want my son to avoid feeling like an elitist outsider by watching a show that will now air on what is arguably the most elite cable channel on TV is not lost on me. Is it possible for him to have the experience I missed? I don't know.

This glaring hole in my cultural education is not something I’m proud of. It wasn’t a choice. I simply grew up in a household where Sesame Street was never put on the TV. I watched Roseanne. And Magnum P.I. I watched Melrose Place and the occasional New Kids on the Block TV special. I watched MacGyver with my mom, who liked to mention during every episode that she had once gone on a date with Ricky Dean Anderson. "He broke my heart in one date," she recalled again recently. (My mom has led an amazing life! But that’s not the point I'm trying to make.)

The point is, it's not like TV wasn't my babysitter—like most American kids, it was—it was just that my human babysitters didn’t bother to put on shows for kids. This sometimes led to me being out of sync or inappropriate with my peers on the kindergarten playground ("Hey guys, did you see the Roseanne where Darlene gets pregnant?!"), but I had no idea how that omission would continue to plague me.

Adults, it turns out, talk about Sesame Street a lot. And more than that, they truly love it. It meant a great deal to most of my friends. My husband vividly remembers watching it. We once walked past the show being filmed in Central Park and he stopped, delighted like a little kid seeing a puppy. I did not get it. I feigned interest, but really, in my heart of hearts, I felt nothing. It was a hot day in Manhattan and I did not want to linger.

When my brothers and I have mentioned this in the past, we get accused of elitism, and I think the charge is sort of accurate. Not that we chose to be elitists! But Sesame Street was by its very nature a uniter, the show all children from every background watched. By not watching it, me and my siblings were set apart. And though the outsider feeling wasn’t something I relished, mostly I have felt like, Hey, we probably really missed out on some important life lessons! How did I even manage to learn to count without Sesame Street? I have no idea! What were our parents thinking! Every time I see a Big Bird meme I think of two words: benign neglect. (Kidding, Mom and Dad, I love you!)

But I was not going to make the same mistake. I gave birth to my son three months ago. When I was still pregnant, my husband I discussed what kind of media we were going to let him see, and we decided Sesame Street was absolutely on the accepted list from the beginning. Not on an iPad or computer, but on the actual TV. We figure we can't keep him from all screens, and rather than try and lose, we will attempt to give him about the same screen exposure we had as kids—nothing handheld. And since research suggests that live-action media is better for developing brains than cartoons, we'll stick to that. Sesame Street and The Wiggles it is!

If Sesame Street is an essential unifying part of childhood, as people who watched it strongly believe, then I want my son to know it. I don't want him to miss out on a fundamental part of our society because his parents didn't pick up on the fact that it was important. But there's the rub. This was a decision we made before Sesame Street announced its move to HBO. The New York Times notes that in the new Sesame Street "Elmo has moved from an apartment into a brownstone." Will Sesame Street be to my son's generation what it was for mine, even if it's on a paid cable channel? Even if it's "fancy"? Even if it's elite?

What made me feel so left out of the zeitgeist was the omnipresence of Sesame Street. It was easy to access. It was for everyone. Now, the new shows are only for people who can pay for an HBO subscription (or mooch off their parents, like I do ... as a 32-year-old supposedly grown adult—again, thanks Mom!).

So that's why I'll be watching tonight, even though my son is still so young his age is being counted in weeks and he's not remotely ready to watch TV. I want to see if the new Sesame Street will be the thing people tell me the old one was. (I'll have my husband with me watching to compare with the original.) And Maybe, just maybe, it won't matter that the new episodes won't hit PBS for nine months. Maybe, just maybe, it took becoming a mother to complete a small part of my own childhood.