Sesame Street and Netflix have announced that Season 56 of the popular children’s show will premiere on both Netflix and PBS Kids on November 10. There’s only one twist to the double premiere: each episode will now run for 11 minutes instead of the usual half hour.
The streaming company made the announcement Tuesday by sharing a video of Cookie Monster eating the calendar. He ate the months of September, October and, once he got to November, circled the 10th and finished it off.
According to Deadline, the new episodes of Sesame Street will be 11 minutes long, as they will only focus on a single story. They’ll be available on local PBS stations and the PBS Kids app on the same day they drop on Netflix so kids can access them without any financial barriers a Netflix subscription imposes.
The reduction in episode runtime from 30 minutes — or 26 minutes, if you look at the last several seasons of Sesame Street on HBO Max — to 11 minutes may be tied to PBS slashing its budget as a way to keep itself afloat amid President Trump’s campaign to defund public media, which subsequently led to Netflix saving Sesame Street. Unfortunately, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) will be shutting down due to the loss of federal funding.
Of course, another reason for to Sesame Street episode lengths could just be due to cultural changes. The consumption of short-form content on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram have certainly shortened attention spans, after all.
