Street Gang (62 page)

Cooney and Chloe share an incredible bond. They took up piano together three years ago and now play duets, and have regular pizza-and-a-movie dates. “We see each other a lot,” says Chloe Kimball, who credits
Sesame Street
for igniting a passion for reading. Big Bird was her favorite character.

In the early 2000s Chloe’s grandmother began work on
The Roads to Sesame Street: A Memoir,
an autobiography that has been set aside for now. But as one pertinent passage recalls:

 

It was from watching
Sesame Street
with the grandchildren that Cooney concluded the series might benefit from having a new female character that could connect with an emerging generation of preschool girls who couldn’t seem to get enough of princesses and fairies in pink. Cooney recognized that the cycles of pop culture had once again swung, and she wanted
Sesame Street
to tap into the zeitgeist. Doing so might keep things current on the
Street
and, who knows, might create another rush to Toys R Us, as happened in the 1980s, after CTW dumped unproductive millions from the nonprofit’s endowment into a television project entitled
The Best of Families.

“Not many people knew it, but CTW was very shaky in the mid-eighties,” Cooney said. “Our boat was really rocking. David Britt and I decided we couldn’t go beneath ten million dollars in the endowment and we were maybe at fourteen million dollars and falling. Things got so bad, I had David write up a plan that I hid in my desk for safekeeping. We called that plan The Little Workshop. It was a downsizing plan that would have shed everything except enough to keep
Sesame Street
going and make a modest income. But we’d have to cut costs to even do that.

“Just when things seemed so dire, along came a toy called Talking Big Bird, which used new interactive technologies. Money started rolling in, and it was the beginning of a real turnaround financially. Other things happened, but Talking Big Bird was like hitting a jackpot in Las Vegas on a slot machine. We just couldn’t believe that the quarters kept coming out. Talking Big Bird was a miracle.

“My husband uses an expression: dumb luck beats careful planning every time. And I always said when things got bad, ‘Oh, something will come in over the transom.’ And it always has. The Workshop has really been stalked by good luck from the very beginning. Terrible luck in terms of the health of the principal people, terrible, tragic luck. But otherwise it has always been stalked by a certain amount of just dumb luck.”

Cooney’s pretty-in-pink brainstorm ignited the charge to create Abby Cadabby, another attempt to launch a funny, feisty female lead character. This time, though, Tony Geiss, a
Sesame Street
staff writer since the early 1970s, provided the essential constructs that led to development of a blond sprite with tiny wings and a magic wand that allowed her to call home to her fairy godmother.

Abby, performed by ingenious puppeteer-comedian Leslie Carrera-Rudolph, is thus television’s first fairy godchild. She was announced with great fanfare and public relations puffery in the summer of 2006. Liz Nealon, who was for a brief term executive vice president and creative director for the Workshop, explained to the
New York Times
what niche Abby Cadabby was intended to fill. “We have our wacky and our gentle. But we wanted a female lead character. If you think about the
Mary Tyler Moore Show,
some girls relate to Rhoda, who’s our Zoe, and some girls relate to Mary, who’s a girly girl. And we didn’t have that girl.”
¹

Feminists fumed at this news, proving the more things change, the more they stay the same.

 

When Sarah Otley arrives home from her library job at the University of Maine, Farmington, she reaches for her knitting and settles in for some quality television viewing.

The former Sarah Morrisett is in her mid-forties now, married for eighteen years to a groundwater expert. She chases two cats, a dog, and that husband around a home they share ninety miles north of Portland. Sarah hasn’t worn a tutu for some time now, but in 1985 she did earn a combined undergraduate degree in dance and computer science at Goucher College in Baltimore. Later she picked up a master’s degree in health and fitness at Springfield College in Massachusetts. Suffice it to say that Sarah has found a felicitous balance between left-brain intellectual pursuits and right-brain creative endeavors.

What remains consistent all these years is her love of television. She and husband, Mike, enjoy the forensic sleuthing series that have defined prime-time network schedules in recent years. Sarah continues to marvel at her father, who in his late seventies remains Sesame Workshop’s board chairman. After his retirement in 1998 from the presidency of the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation, Lloyd Morrisett became chairman of Infonautics, a public Internet company. Morrisett serves on the board of the Rand Corporation and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He took up piano late in life and has the fitness profile of a man who could fly to Hawaii and compete in the Iron Man triathlon.

Regal twin portraits of Morrisett and Joan Cooney adorn the entranceway to the Workshop’s corporate offices at One Lincoln Plaza, just five hundred steps away from the Marc Chagall mural at the Metropolitan Opera House. Together Morrisett and Cooney founded a mom-and-pop nonprofit that has set a global standard for educational media for children, and today adaptations of
Sesame Street
air in 140 countries. Productions thrive in such disparate locales as Egypt, South Africa, India, and Northern Ireland.

Cooney said, “Once, for a special on
Sesame Street
’s twentieth anniversary, Jim Henson asked me on camera, ‘What’s the biggest surprise you’ve had with the show?’ and I said, ‘Being in Israel.’ The foreign productions have been thrilling, but being in Israel and the Arab world have been extraordinary.

“I said to Jim, ‘My dream is one day they’ll be at the negotiating table and someone will say something and it will start a Bert and Ernie routine and then peace will break out in the Middle East.’ ”

Children’s television has come a long way since
Sesame Street
debuted on stations with snowy reception that required tinfoil balls affixed to the rabbit-ears antenna. Domestically,
Sesame Street
is a mainstay on PBS as it steams toward its fortieth anniversary in November 2009. On-demand episodes of the show are available for anytime viewing on PBS Kids Sprout, a digital channel offering round-the-clock preschool programming.

Gary E. Knell helped put the Sprout deal together with Comcast and HIT Entertainment in 2005. Knell succeeded David Britt as Sesame Workshop’s president and CEO in 2000 and has presided over an especially fertile period in the nonprofit’s history. Knell, a whip-smart lawyer with a Seinfeldian gift for observational asides, is one of three founders of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, a media lab launched in 2007 whose mission is to “catalyze and support research, innovation, and investment in digital media technologies to advance children’s learning.” Cooney and Morrisett are once again founders of an enterprise that links the theoretical with the practical. They intend to keep going until someone says stop.

In a sense, Bert and Ernie have an office these days at Sesame Workshop. After a series of developments that were as unlikely as they were fortuitous, the trademarks for the Muppets of
Sesame Street
now reside at One Lincoln Plaza, after a strange spell when the Muppets were the property of EM.TV, an ill-fated German media company that nearly collapsed just as the Internet bubble burst.

“The Hensons made a strategic decision to sell their company in 2000,” Knell said. “People were cashing out of all kinds of properties, especially brand names that had some relevance in the world. Anything that had a classic nature with a positive cachet was open game at the time. People were pushing me and the Workshop to take
SesameStreet.com
public, trying to figure out if we could collect hundreds of millions of dollars by creating a public stock offering of some kind or a private equity offering. There was a lot of money floating around and tons of ideas, good and bad. Can someone say ‘
Pets.com
’?”

Charles Rivkin, president of the Jim Henson Company, flew to Munich in the summer of 1999 to meet with Thomas Haffa, CEO of EM.TV, then Europe’s largest distributor of children’s television programming. Unbeknownst to Rivkin, billionaire Haffa was almost groupielike in his adoration for the Muppets. Along hallways of the company were posters and photographs of Miss Piggy and Kermit. Haffa indicated his desire to own a piece of the Muppet franchise, but Rivkin said, “We’re not for sale.”
²

Upon returning to the States, Rivkin discovered that the Henson heirs were open to investigating a sale of the company, after all, following ten difficult years of adjusting to life without their father, onerous estate-tax problems, and a changing landscape in family entertainment. Knell recalled, “The Henson kids basically said, ‘Wow. Here’s an opportunity.’ In some ways it mirrored the outlook that their dad had years earlier. They asked themselves, ‘Do we want to be running this business or would selling it allow us to do what we want to do best, creative work?’ They decided to see what was out there and found there was a lot of interest.

“We had just started Noggin, a joint digital cable channel with Nickelodeon, and thought,
Gee, maybe we should buy the Muppets together,
thinking there was a way that we at the Workshop might centralize control over the characters. Nickelodeon could take over the licensing. Nick was already an aligned partner with the Workshop, so they would have a vested interest in allowing us to do our thing with the
Sesame Street
characters and could have aligned a strategy around the classic Muppets that didn’t interfere or compete with
Sesame.
We fashioned a bid and things moved up to a fairly substantial level. But the amount that we established as the value for the Muppet franchise—$300 million—was less than half the amount it sold for. Our offer made everyone guffaw.”

Thomas Haffa threw a mind-boggling $680 million in cash and stock at the feet of the five Henson children. Only eleven years earlier Disney had put up $150 million. The deal with EM.TV was consummated in February 2000. In Germany, as in the United States, properties were selling at prices that seemed unrealistically high.

Just about everyone at Sesame Workshop, Gary Knell included, read the news in the
Wall Street Journal
and swallowed hard. Had the Workshop not already had good business relations with EM.TV, there would have been even more stress. “They were our licensing agent in Germany,” Knell said, “and we always got along fine.”

But then, another development occurred in Germany, followed by more stories in the
Journal.
“Thomas Haffa and his brother Florian really drank the Internet bubble Kool-Aid,” Knell said. “They began to view themselves as a mini-Disney, buying companies left and right. They were really on the march, and they saw the purchase of the Muppets as a way to put them on the map in the United States. But about a week after they did that deal, they put a billion dollars on the table to buy half of Formula One, the auto-racing circuit in Europe, from Bernie Ecclestone, who is one tough character. It was at that point—when they put down a billion—that I said to myself,
Uh-oh.
It was one thing overpaying for the Muppets, another thing striking a deal a week later for an enormous amount of additional money. All you would be seeing is enormous debt load. Everyone was asking ‘How are they possibly going to absorb all of these management issues and make the economics work?’ The dream lasted about two and a half days before they started running into problems. The financial community caught on pretty fast and the whole thing collapsed within six months.

“Here in America things weren’t going so swell, either. EM.TV put a gal in place to run licensing at Henson, and the first thing she did was move into Jim Henson’s old office in New York. You can imagine how
that
went over. It was a statement intended to mean, ‘It’s a new day,’ but it was interpreted as a foreign power marching in to destroy a legacy. It was pretty ugly.

“Things began to spiral down fast, and we got caught in the middle of it. Here is the company that owns Big Bird and Elmo in freefall. Their stock goes from $110 to $2 in a matter of two months. Thomas Haffa called me while I was on the beach in Hawaii, during one of the few family vacations I had in that era. Haffa said, ‘I’m going to sell the Muppets. You’d better come to Munich.’ The next thing I knew we were discussing a purchase price. We knew we had to put something together pretty fast. We were afraid—especially in a fire sale—that they were going to sell the Muppets to God knows who. It could have been anybody who would not necessarily have the interests of
Sesame
on its priority list.”