HBO Max wiped another 200 classic Sesame Street episodes from its servers

HBO Max continues to work this week to ensure that it’s leading the pack ahead of its various rival services in the big-money field of “Making people go ‘Oh god, why are you doing that?’” Variety reporting today that the Warner Bros. Discovery-owned service has apparently axed 200 classic episodes of Sesame Street from its servers.

Although the service’s lineup of episodes from the show’s 39th season onward (i.e., from 2008 or so) remain intact, as many as 200 classic episodes from the show’s history before that time are now gone, leaving only a small collection from the first 40 or so years of the show’s history. All told, 456 episodes of Sesame Street remain on HBO Max at this time.

And, look: We know parents probably weren’t queuing up Sesame Streets from the 1980s quite as much as they were the most recent episodes—although it’s worth noting that we’re talking about a show that remains pretty timeless in terms of its teaching style and entertainment value. But this decision to cut these episodes (informed, as with many of the company’s cuts, by the upcoming merger with Discovery+) feels like a waste of the potential of having a streaming library in the first place. Why not include the older episodes, as both entertainment in their own right, and a living archive of TV and educational history? Why does anything need to “make room” in a scenario like this?

News of the cuts comes as HBO Max continues to chop apart its children’s programming offerings; earlier this week, the service removed a number of its own animated shows from its roster, provoking an outcry from the creators of said series. Those cuts included some Sesame Street side projects, including late-night TV parody The Not-Too-Late Show With Elmo. Neither HBO Max, nor Sesame Workshop, which HBO acquired in 2015, have issued a statement about the cuts.