Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street (2021) on Netflix

Plot summary

In the late 1960s, Joan Ganz Cooney was working in the young world of public television when her friend Lloyd Morrisett Jr., who studied how preschoolers learn at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, asked her to try an experiment: could a children's show turn television's grip on young viewers to good use? Cooney and Morrisett, inspired by the civil rights movement, wanted the medium to educate all children and especially those in America's inner cities, where poverty and systemic racism had widened the educational gap. Cooney recruited puppeteer Jim Henson and the children's writer and director Jon Stone. The first two decades of the show they built, from its development through its 1969 debut, are told through interviews with the creators, artists and educators involved, behind-the-scenes footage, and the program's characters and songs.