Exclusive Interview: Gary Knell

September 28, 2010 World Screen
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The fun-loving Muppets from Sesame Street have taught several generations of children around the world their ABCs, 123s and valuable preschool life lessons. Gary Knell, Sesame Workshop’s president and CEO, is adapting Sesame Street’s 40-year legacy to the needs of children in today’s media landscape. 

WS: What new Sesame Street international productions are in the works?
KNELL: We’ll be announcing a big new Chinese co-production, whose name translates as Big Bird Looks at the World, with the Shanghai Media Group that’ll certainly be our biggest entry into China in 15 years. This builds off a major set of activities we’ve done at the Shanghai Expo, including a live show called the Magic Map Show, which is an environmental theme for kids to get clean water. That was a big project this past summer in Shanghai and the television show will be premiering in October. We’re very excited about that. We have a great partner in Shanghai Media and they’re going to be managing the licensing in China.

 
In Japan we are introducing an English-language training program that we’ll be doing in storefronts throughout the country with a company called Nagase, which runs the Toshin schools, and is the second-largest private education/tutoring company in Japan. Sesame Street English is an original animated version of the Muppets, who have been put into Japanese anime style by our amazing creative group here at the Workshop.
 
In Nigeria, which is the most-populated country in Africa, we’re doing our first big co-production. We’ve been in South Africa for ten years and we’ll have some bigger announcements later in the winter, but in Nigeria we’ll be launching Sesame Square and it will feature Kami, our HIV-positive Muppet, who we’re bringing up from South Africa, as well as a new Muppet, Zobi, who got named as part of a contest that was done through mobile phone voting. We’re excited about Zobi and the show and we’ve got a great set of co-production partners in Nigeria.
 
In Northern Ireland, we’ll be kicking off another season of Sesame Tree, which will be on the CBeebies network. That is really great, because not only will it be seen in Northern Ireland, but [it will] be seen throughout the entire United Kingdom.
 
And finally it’ll be the 35th anniversary of our Dutch program Sesamstraat and we’re having a live touring show this fall.
 
WS: Sesame Street has spun off other programming. Tell us about some of those newer shows.
KNELL: In the U.S. we have been working pretty hard over the last couple of years to think of our show as a block. In other words, it’s a one-hour broadcast every day on PBS, and because kids today are not really accustomed to watching anything for one hour—if you think about it there is really no other children’s show that is one hour long—we decided to think of the show as a block with interstitials and come up with compelling segments within that block that we could promote, such as Word of the Day or Elmo’s World or a Street story about nature. In that context, we introduced Abby’s Flying Fairy School, which is a CGI-animated product that runs about 12 minutes and it’s done really well. Abby is quickly becoming a very popular character, and I actually have to say she’s giving Elmo a run for the money in certain popularity categories, including product sales. She’s really become a star and the CGI version is very popular with kids. We have ratings data that tracks the show minute by minute, and when her segment comes on the ratings go way up. [We’re] marketing Abby’s Flying Fairy School at MIPCOM as a stand-alone segment for broadcasters. That is something that we are really proud [of].
 
Super Grover 2.0 is another show in development that will be introduced at MIPCOM. It features Grover as he questions, observes, investigates and reports, and literally stumbles across the solution to problems all across the planet.
 
We are also really focusing on our website and growing that. I’m pretty clear that television is not going away, [but content is] going everywhere. So we are trying to be on as many platforms as we possibly can, including a big portion of mobile video, the iPod, the iPad as well as content on the web. We’re not stopping at all on broadcast television. Our view is we’ve got to be in as many touch points as we can with kids.
 
WS: Books, DVDs, games and toys are all ways that you reach children and extend the experience that they first see on TV.
KNELL: Yes, and we inked a new ten-year deal with Hasbro earlier this year and that will be kicking off early in January. That’s a big new partnership with Hasbro, who are really innovators in the merger of electronics and traditional toys. And Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment is a partner of ours in home video as well as in interactive games. They have two new interactive games for preschoolers, which were introduced at E3, Sesame Street: Elmo’s A-to-Zoo Adventure and Sesame Street: Cookie’s Counting Carnival, for the Wii, Nintendo DS and PC.      
 
WS: Do children still come to Sesame Street characters through the television show first, or are some children introduced to them through an iPod or a book or a plush doll?
KNELL: It’s a good question. We know that kids are being introduced to media nearly since birth now. And studies show, even though those studies are two or three years old now and the numbers are probably even bigger, that two out of three kids under the age of two are watching television everyday and one out of three has a TV in their own bedrooms. Whether it’s a good thing or not we can debate, but we know that parents are introducing kids to media and that as all of these platforms become faster, cheaper and smaller, the ability to watch a segment of Sesame Street on an iPod exists today and we’re seeing pretty big traffic. The podcasts of Sesame Street are always ranked number one or number two among preschool content on Apple’s iTunes store. It’s a good question to know where kids are getting originally introduced, but I think for some time now Sesame Street has almost been a right of passage for young children in the U.S. and in certain other countries. That has not changed. I think what has changed is that they are probably less [inclined to] sit in front of a daily broadcast at a set hour and much more [interested in] finding Sesame Street content on their time, on their own device. And that is where everybody is moving. That is probably the biggest shift in the last five years.
 
WS: Beyond all the content you create, you have a lot of outreach programs that are very important.
KNELL: We’ve had two major initiatives this year. One is Healthy Habits for Life for young children in this country, which we’ve also introduced in Australia and Mexico and recently in Colombia. This tries to tackle the childhood obesity crisis. We are trying to promote healthy eating and nutrition, lifestyle and exercise to young kids as a prevention strategy as opposed to an intervention strategy, where it’s often too late to turn around a child’s health outcome. We have been very proactive in making sure we have done the right thing, on the one hand licensing our characters only on foods that meet certain nutritional standards, and on the other, taking the lead on using the Muppets to promote healthy habits for life. We opened this season of Sesame Street with the First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, promoting those messages on the show as well as through PSAs [public service announcements] which got a lot of pick up.
 
We’ve also done a major outreach project for military families, here in the U.S., for the 800,000 preschool kids of active duty military personnel, National Guards and reserves, whose parents are being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. These families are going through major tumult and trauma because of deployment, re-deployment, and re-deployment again, with injuries both physical and so-called invisible injuries to the returning service members. How do you talk to a young child about the fact that dad is different? We’ve completed the third piece of this triumvirate, [the first two were on deployment and homecoming] which is on grieving. We got Katie Couric to do a one-hour special, which has just been nominated for a prime-time Emmy, called When Families Grieve. It highlights the stories of four real families who dealt with the death of a parent while the children were still quite young, two of them are in a military context and two are not. They are really compelling stories, and of course, Katie, I would almost argue is a fifth story, because she went through the same thing—she lost her husband to cancer when her kids were very young. The show did really well. We’ve created an outreach kit that is being distributed to members of the military and it’s also available to the general public on how talk to your kids when you have a death in the family. We are trying to do is use the power of our characters and our trusted brand to give parents coping skills on how to deal with some of these very difficult challenges.
 
WS: In a previous interview you told me that you are trying to make a difference in the world using the Muppets as your ambassadors. Is that still a goal?
KNELL: Oh, absolutely, we believe in Muppet diplomacy! We’re very active in the Middle East. From working in Israeli-Arab communities to putting on a road safety show at a mall in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia—we’re all over the region. We believe generally that kids are kids all over world. They really relate to our Muppet characters who are trying to promote basic education, positive health outcomes, and respect and understanding for others, which is a fairly simple set of life lessons, but still important, more important today than ever. We really view our work here as a very important mission to making the world a little better.