HBO has been the first-run home of Sesame Street for years now, with HBO Max also having first dibs on streaming new episodes before they move to the free PBS Kids app, but if you’re a grown-up who has spent the last 40 or 50 years wondering what the deal is with all those Ernies and Big Birds and Snuffleupaguses, HBO has just the thing for you—or it will in 2021. As announced earlier today in a press release, HBO Documentary Films has picked up a new doc called Street Gang: How We Got To Sesame Street that will cover the first two “experimental and groundbreaking” decades of the show, with a particular emphasis on how it was all influenced by the civil rights movement. The aforementioned press release goes on to say that it will follow creators Joan Ganz Cooney, Lloyd Morrisett, Jim Henson, and Jon Stone as they create a show that “audaciously interpreted radical changes in society and engaged children in ways that entertained and educated them like never before.”
Street Gang: How We Got To Sesame Street is coming from director Marilyn Agrelo and will be available on HBO and HBO Max at some point next year. There’s also a regular Sesame Street movie with Anne Hathaway and Chance The Rapper that is still in the works (as far as we know), so HBO could be loaded with hot new Street content come next year.