Recognizing the needs of today’s multitasking preschoolers, PBS has announced that it will add a shorter, half-hour version of Sesame Street to its lineup beginning Sept. 1—just as the carefree idleness of summer fades, and our children’s thoughts return once more to the looming end of the fiscal year. As PBS’s Lesli Rotenberg explains to The New York Times, the traditional hour-long Sesame Street will continue to run in the mornings, when most kids still make time for learning how to count before the markets open. But now it will also be accompanied by the new, 30-minute version that airs in the afternoons, which will excise the more frivolous, serialized segments, such as “Abby’s Flying Fairy School,” and get down to the brass tacks of telling busy modern youngsters the day’s letters of the alphabet. This shorter Sesame Street is also specifically being designed for users of the PBS mobile app, so that they can learn social skills the way adults do: by staring at their phones and tablets.
This shorter Sesame Street is also expected to limit the average number of things the Count sees to no more than three.