“After the third or fourth season, I’d say it was rare that we ever had a segment below eighty five percent. We would almost never see something in the fifty to sixty percent range, and if we did, we’d fix it. You know Darwin’s terms about the survival of the fittest? We had a mechanism to identify the fittest and decide what should survive.”
The most important thing that Palmer ever found out with the Distracter, though, came at the very beginning, before Sesame Street was even on the air. “It was the summer of 1969 and we were a month and a half from air date,” Lesser remembers. “We decided, let’s go for broke. Let’s produce five full shows—one hour each—before we go to air and we’ll see what we’ve got.” To test the shows, Palmer took them to Philadelphia and over the third week of July showed them to groups of preschoolers in sixty different homes throughout the city. It was a difficult period. Philadelphia was in the midst of a heat wave, which made the children who were supposed to watch the show restless and inattentive. In the same week, as well, Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and some children—understandably—seemed to prefer that historic moment to Sesame Street. Worst of all were the conclusions from Palmer’s Distracter. “What we found,” Lesser says, “almost destroyed us.”
The problem was that when the show was originally conceived, the decision was made that all fantasy elements of the show be separated from the real elements. This was done at the insistence of many child psychologists, who felt that to mix fantasy and reality would be misleading to children. The Muppets, then, were only seen with other Muppets, and the scenes filmed on Sesame Street itself involved only real adults and children. What Palmer found out in Philadelphia, though, was that as soon as they switched to the street scenes, the kids lost all interest. “The street was supposed to be the glue,” Lesser said. “We would always come back to the street. It pulled the show together. But it was just adults doing things and talking about stuff and the kids weren’t interested. We were getting incredibly low attention levels. The kids were leaving the show. Levels would pop back up if the Muppets came back, but we couldn’t afford to keep losing them like that.” Lesser calls Palmer’s results a “turning point in the history of Sesame Street. We knew that if we kept the street that way, the show was going to die. Everything was happening so fast. We had the testing in the summer, and we were going on the air in the fall. We had to figure out what to do.”
Lesser decided to defy the opinion of his scientific advisers. “We decided to write a letter to all the other developmental psychologists and say, we know how you guys think about mixing fantasy and reality. But we’re going to do it anyway. If we don’t, we’ll be dead in the water.” So the producers went back and reshot all of the street scenes. Henson and his coworkers created puppets who could walk and talk with the adults of the show and could live alongside them on the street. “That’s when Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch and Snuffleupagus were born,” said Palmer. What we now think of as the essence of Sesame Street—the artful blend of fluffy monsters and earnest adults—grew out of a desperate desire to be sticky.
The Distracter, however, for all its strengths, is a fairly crude instrument. It tells you that a child understands what is happening on the screen and as a result is paying attention. But it doesn’t tell you what the child understands or, more precisely, it doesn’t tell you whether the child is paying attention to what he or she ought to be paying attention to.
Consider the following two Sesame Street segments, both of which are called visual blending exercises—segments that teach children that reading consists of blending together distinct sounds. In one, “Hug,” a female Muppet, approaches the word HUG in the center of the screen. She stands behind the H, sounding it out carefully, then moves to the U, and then the G. She does it again, moving from left to right, pronouncing each letter separately, before putting the sounds together to say “hug.” As she does, the Muppet Herry Monster enters and repeats the word as well. The segment ends with the Herry Monster hugging the delighted little girl Muppet.
In another segment, called “Oscar’s Blending,” Oscar the Grouch and the Muppet Crummy play a game called “Breakable Words,” in which words are assembled and then taken apart. Oscar starts by calling for C, which pops up on the lower left corner of the screen. The letter C, Oscar tells Crummy, is pronounced “cuh.” Then the letters at pop up in the lower right hand corner and Crummy sounds the letters out—“at.” The two go back and forth—Oscar saying “cuh” and Crummy “at”—each time faster and faster, until the sounds blend together to make cat. As this happens, the letters at the bottom of the screen move together as well to make “cat.” The two Muppets repeat “cat” a few times and then the word drops from sight, accompanied by a crashing sound. Then the process begins again with the word bat.
Both of these segments are entertaining. They hold children’s attention. On the Distracter, they score brilliantly. But do they actually teach the fundamentals of reading? That’s a much harder question. To answer it, the producers of Sesame Street in the mid 1970s called in a group of researchers at Harvard University led by a psychologist named Barbara Flagg who were expert in something called eye movement photography. Eye movement research is based on the idea that the human eye is capable of focusing on only a very small area at one time—what is called a perceptual span. When we read, we are capable of taking in only about one key word and then four characters to the left and fifteen characters to the right at any one time. We jump from one of these chunks to another, pausing—or fixating—on them long enough to make sense of each letter. The reason we can focus clearly on only that much text is that most of the sensors in our eyes—the receptors that process what we see—are clustered in a small region in the very middle of the retina called the fovea. That’s why we move our eyes when we read: we can’t pick up much information about the shape, or the color, or the structure of words unless we focus our fovea directly on them. Just try, for example, to reread this paragraph by staring straight ahead at the center of the page. It’s impossible.
If you can track where someone’s fovea is moving and what they are fixating on, in other words, you can tell with extraordinary precision what they are actually looking at and what kind of information they are actually receiving. The people who make television commercials, not surprisingly, are obsessed with eye tracking. If you make a beer commercial with a beautiful model, it would be really important to know whether the average twenty two year old male in your target audience fixates only on the model or eventually moves to your can of beer. Sesame Street went to Harvard in 1975 for the same reason. When kids watched “Oscar’s Blending” or “Hug,” were they watching and learning about the words, or were they simply watching the Muppets?
The experiment was conducted with twenty one four and five year olds, who were brought to the Harvard School of Education over the course of a week by their parents. One by one they were seated in an antique barber’s chair with a padded headrest about three feet away from a 17 inch color television monitor. A Gulf & Western infrared Eye View Monitor was set up just off to the left, carefully calibrated to track the fovea movements of each subject. What they found was that “Hug” was a resounding success. Seventy six percent of all fixations were on the letters. Better still, 83 percent of all preschoolers fixated on the letters in a left to right sequence—mimicking, in other words, the actual reading process. “Oscar’s Blending,” on the other hand, was a disaster. Only 35 percent of total fixations fell on the letters. And exactly zero percent of the preschoolers read the letters from left to right. What was the problem? First, the letter shouldn’t have been on the bottom of the screen because, as almost all eye movement research demonstrates, when it comes to television people tend to fixate on the center of the screen. That issue, though, is really secondary to the simple fact that the kids weren’t watching the letters because they were watching Oscar. They were watching the model and not the beer can. “I remember ‘Oscar’s Blending,’” Flagg says. “Oscar was very act
ive. He was really making a fuss in the background, and the word is not close to him at all. He’s moving his mouth a lot, moving his hands. He has things in his hands. There is a great deal of distraction. The kids don’t focus on the letters at all because Oscar is so interesting.” Oscar was sticky. The lesson wasn’t.
3.
This was the legacy of Sesame Street: If you paid careful attention to the structure and format of your material, you could dramatically enhance stickiness. But is it possible to make a show even stickier than Sesame Street? This was what three young television producers at the Nickelodeon Network in Manhattan asked themselves in the mid 1990s. It was a reasonable question. Sesame Street, after all, was a product of the 1960s, and in the intervening three decades major strides had been made in understanding how children’s minds work. One of the Nickelodeon producers, Todd Kessler, had actually worked on Sesame Street and left the show dissatisfied. He didn’t like the fast paced “magazine” format of the show. “I love Sesame Street,” he says. “But I always believed that kids didn’t have short attention spans, that they could easily sit still for a half an hour.” He found traditional children’s television too static. “Because the audience is not all that verbal or even preverbal, it is important to tell the story visually,” he went on. “It’s a visual medium, and to make it sink in, to make it powerful, you’ve got to make use of that. There is so much children’s television that is all talk. The audience has a hard time keeping up with that.” Kessler’s colleague, Angela Santomero, grew up on Sesame Street and had similar misgivings. “We wanted to learn from Sesame Street and take it one step further,” Santomero said. “TV is a great medium for education. But people up until now haven’t explored the potential of it. They’ve been using it in a rote way. I believed we could turn that around.”
What they came up with is a show called Blue’s Clues. It is half an hour, not an hour. It doesn’t have an ensemble cast. It has just one live actor, Steve, a fresh faced man in his early twenties in khakis and a rugby shirt who acts as the show’s host. Instead of a varied, magazine format, each episode follows a single story line—the exploits of an animated dog by the name of Blue. It has a flat, two dimensional feel, more like a video version of a picture book than a television show. The pace is deliberate. The script is punctuated with excruciatingly long pauses. There is none of the humor or wordplay or cleverness that characterizes Sesame Street. One of the animated characters on the show, a mailbox, is called Mailbox. Two other regular characters, a shovel and a pail, are called Shovel and Pail. And Blue, of course, the show’s star, is Blue because she’s the color blue. It is difficult, as an adult, to watch Blue’s Clues and not wonder how this show could ever represent an improvement over Sesame Street. And yet it does. Within months of its debut in 1996, Blue’s Clues was trouncing Sesame Street in the ratings. On the Distracter test, it scores higher than its rival in capturing children’s attention. Jennings Bryant, an educational researcher at the University of Alabama, conducted a study of 120 children, comparing the performance of regular Blue’s Clues watchers to watchers of other educational shows on a series of cognitive tests.
“After six months we began to get very big differences,” Bryant said. “By almost all of our measures of flexible thinking and problem solving, we had statistically significant differences. If there were sixty items on the test, you might find that the Blue’s Clues watchers were correctly identifying fifty of them, and the control group was identifying thirty five.” Blue’s Clues may be one of the stickiest television shows ever made.
How is it that such an unprepossessing show is even stickier than Sesame Street? The answer is that Sesame Street, as good as it is, has a number of subtle but not insignificant limitations. Consider, for example, the problem created by the show’s insistence on being clever. From the beginning Sesame Street was intended to appeal to both children and adults. The idea was that one of the big obstacles facing children—particularly children from lower income families—was that their parents didn’t encourage or participate in their education. Sesame Street’s creators wanted a show that mothers would watch along with their children. That’s why the show is loaded with so many “adult” elements, the constant punning and pop culture references like Monsterpiece Theater or the Samuel Beckett parody “Waiting for Elmo.” (The show’s head writer, Lou Berger, says that the reason he applied for a job at Sesame Street was because of a Kermit sketch he saw while watching the show with his son in 1979. “It was one of those crazy fairy tales. They were looking for a princess in distress. Kermit ran out to this female Muppet princess and said”—and here Berger did a pitch perfect Kermit—“‘Excuse me, are you a female princess in distress?’ And she said, ‘What does this look like? A pant suit?’ I remember thinking, ‘That’s so great. I have to work there.’”)
The problem is, preschoolers don’t get these kinds of jokes, and the presence of the humor—like the elaborate pun on “distress”—can serve as a distraction. There is a good example of this in an episode of Sesame Street called “Roy” that ran on Christmas Eve in 1997. The episode opens with Big Bird running into a mail carrier, who has never been on Sesame Street before. The mail carrier hands Big Bird a package, and Big Bird is immediately puzzled: “If this is the first time you have ever been here,” he asks, “how did you know I was Big Bird?”
MAIL CARRIER: Well, you have to admit, it’s easy to figure out! [Gestures broadly at Big Bird]
BB: It is? [Looks at himself]. Oh, I see. The package is for Big Bird, and I’m a big bird. I forget sometimes. I’m just what my name says. Big Bird is a big bird.
Big Bird becomes sad. He realizes that everyone else has a name—like Oscar, or Snuffy—but he has only a description. He asks the mail carrier what her name is. She says Imogene.
BB: Gee, that’s a nice name. [Looking to the camera, wistfully] I wish I had a real name like that, instead of one that just says what I am, as if I were an apple or a chair or something.”
Thereupon begins a search by Big Bird for a new name. With the help of Snuffy, he canvases Sesame Street for suggestions—Zackledackle, Butch, Bill, Omar, Larry, Sammy, Ebenezer, Jim, Napoleon, Lancelot, Rocky—before settling on Roy. But then, once everyone starts calling him by his new name, Big Bird realizes that he doesn’t like it after all. “Somehow it doesn’t seem right,” he says. “I think I made a big mistake.” He switches back. “Even if Big Bird isn’t a regular name,” he concludes, “it’s my name, and I like the way all my friends say it.”
This was, at least on the surface, an excellent episode. The premise is challenging and conceptual, but fascinating. It deals candidly with emotion, and, unlike other children’s shows, tells children that it’s okay not to be happy all of the time. Most of all, it’s funny.
It sounds like it should be a winner, right?
Wrong. The Roy show was tested by the Sesame Street research staff and the numbers were very disappointing. The first segment involving Snuffy and Big Bird did well. As you would expect, the viewers were curious. Then things began to fall apart. By the second of the street scenes, attention dropped to 80 percent. By the third, 78 percent. By the fourth 40 percent, then 50, then 20. After viewing the show, the kids were quizzed on what they had seen. “We asked very specific questions and were looking for clear answers,” Rosemary Truglio, Sesame Street’s research head said. “What was the show about? Sixty percent knew. What did Big Bird want to do? Fifty three percent knew. What was Big Bird’s new name? Twenty percent knew. How did Big Bird feel at the end? Fifty percent knew.” By comparison, another of the shows tested by Sesame Street at the very same time recorded 90 percent plus correct answers on the postshow quiz. The show simply wasn’t making any impression. It wasn’t sticking.
Why did the show fail? The problem, at root, is with the premise of the show—the essential joke that Big Bird doesn’t want to be known as a big bird. That’s the kind of wordplay that a preschooler simply doesn’t understand. Preschoolers make a number of
assumptions about words and their meaning as they acquire language, one of the most important of which is what the psychologist Ellen Markman calls the principle of mutual exclusivity. Simply put, this means that small children have difficulty believing that any one object can have two different names. The natural assumption of children, Markman argues, is that if an object or person is given a second label, then that label must refer to some secondary property or attribute of that object. You can see how useful this assumption is to a child faced with the extraordinary task of assigning a word to everything in the world. A child who learns the word elephant knows, with absolute certainty, that it is something different from a dog. Each new word makes the child’s knowledge of the world more precise. Without mutual exclusivity, by contrast, if a child thought that elephant could simply be another label for dog, then each new word would make the world seem more complicated. Mutual exclusivity also helps the child think clearly. “Suppose,” Markman writes, “a child who already knows ‘apple’ and ‘red’ hears someone refer to an apple as ‘round.’ By mutual exclusivity, the child can eliminate the object (apple) and its color (red) as the meaning of ‘round’ and can try to analyze the object for some other property to label.”