Reviewed by Matthew Buchholz

For anyone under the age of forty (myself included), Sesame Street isn’t just a TV show, it’s a way of life. It’s a part of our shared heritage, for no matter how different we are or what paths we took in life, nearly everyone spent time in front of the TV with Big Bird, Bert & Ernie, and Oscar the Grouch. That’s why it’s so hard to imagine that Sesame Street is written and produced by mere mortals and that’s exactly what makes Michael Davis’ book Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street so invaluable.

Davis charts in exhaustive yet fascinating detail the genesis of the program; how a group of New York intellectuals at a dinner party in the 1960s wondered if TV could be used to educate children. A few years later, with millions of dollars from the Ford and Carnegie foundations and the US Government, Sesame Street was born. Yet by all rights it should never have worked; the creative personnel worried about working closely with professors and childhood learning specialists and there were serious questions raised about integrating puppets with live action characters.

Sesame Street was designed from its inception to appeal specifically to inner-city children without access to preschools. Hence its urban milieu and emphasis on a multi-racial cast of role models. Davis does a brilliant job of breaking down these political considerations and showing how miraculous it is that the show never crumbled under the weight of its own pretensions.

A large part of that burden was shouldered by the late great Jim Henson, a man considered no less than a god by many people in their twenties and thirties. Street Gang is very objective about Henson, showing him to be both a brilliant innovator and a ruthless businessman. Yet his heart was in the right place; Davis shows how Henson protected the Sesame characters from ever falling into the hands of another corporation and how this decision virtually ensured the success of Sesame Street and the Children’s Television Workshop.

Yet the book isn’t all business either; the chapters discussing the creative genesis of the show are wonderful as Henson and puppeteer Frank Oz first created Bert & Ernie, a gangly youth named Carroll Spinney stepped inside the Big Bird costume and composer Joe Raposo created brilliant song after song. The book’s secret hero is the head of the CTW and the show’s longtime producer and advocate, Joan Ganz Cooney, without whom the show might never have existed.

Yet all this attention to detail is sometimes exhausting. After the tenth trip through the childhood of yet another tangential character, Davis is just showing off his prodigious research abilities at the expense of the reader’s attention span. And while he tirelessly traces the gritty beginnings of the show (check out this clip of Stevie Wonder performing a scorching version of Superstition, something that would never happen today), the book runs out of steam in the 1980s and 90s, as the show struggled with competition, corporate takeovers and political correctness.

Street Gang is at its most valuable when it salutes the unflinching brilliance of the show, such as its decision to include marriage, birth, love and death in all its forms on the show. Perhaps the book’s greatest contribution is that it lets us see the contributions of the people behind the magic, without entirely demystifying the process. It’s still hard to imagine that prolific composer Joe Raposo sat down at a piano and knocked off C is for Cookie, but that is just what happened. While it may be a little unbalanced and over-researched, Street Gang is an essential celebration of one of the greatest TV shows ever created, and a glimpse of how a small group of dedicated people really can change the world.