Sunny days might be back for Sesame Street thanks to a Netflix deal announced Monday. The beloved children's series will debut on the streaming service later this year, and new episodes will appear the same day on PBS stations, keeping access free, Deadline reports. Under an HBO Max streaming deal that Warner Bros. Discovery decided not to renew, new episodes didn't appear on PBS until months later. This will be the first time in more than a decade that PBS has been able to air brand-new Sesame Street content, reports the New York Times.
Sherri Westin, CEO of Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind the show, calls the new arrangement a "unique public-private partnership, the AP reports. Netflix says the episodes in the upcoming season 56 will revolve around a single 11-minute story instead of the magazine format of past episodes. Producers say there will be updates to the show's look and feel and more exploration of the Sesame Street neighborhood.
The deal will provide some financial stability for Sesame Workshop, which announced mass layoffs in March. Westin told staff that the deal is "certainly worth celebrating," but warned that "we will also have to find additional new ways to sustain our work, as the economics of these agreements are vastly different than those of the past, given the drastic market and media landscape shifts in recent years," the Times reports. A big plus, she said, is that the deal will make Sesame Street available in many more households. The Hollywood Reporter calls the expanded free access via PBS an "extremely unusual arrangement for Netflix." (This content was created with the help of AI. Read our AI policy.)
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