Raymond Williams on "Sesame Street"

Certain forms have evolved within the conventions of current television programming. In American television, with its extraordinarily short units and as it were involuntary sequences, mainly determined by commercials, there have been such interesting innovations as Laugh In, Sesame Street and The Electric Company. The comic effects of fast-moving disconnection, using many of the local techniques of commercials and trailers, made Laugh In in its early years a fascinating example of an effective form created out of a deformation. In Britain, in a different way, Monty Python's Flying Circus developed new kinds of visual joke out of standard television conventions, by simply altering the tone and perspective. Sesame Street is perhaps a different case. It has been said that it uses the techniques of commercials for education. Yet this is a doubtful description. Many of the technical possibilities for mobility of every kind were were first exploited, at a popular level, for commercials, and have no necessary connection with that kind of simplified selling. Some of the best mobility of Sesame Street and The Electric Company is a way not only of responding to a highly mobile society but of responding in some depth, since the central continuities, within the fast-moving sequences, relate not only to planned teaching but to a kind of eager openness, a sympathetic curiosity, which is perhaps a truer social use of some of the intrinsic properties of television than any of the more fixed and confirming social forms.
-Television, 74-5.

All I can say is that this is the most proper viewpoint from which to analyze this show. Despite its age (1974) the analysis still seems more relevant now than the recent discussions we have seen in the news of the show (since its first couple of years recently got released on DVD)... and I am generally one to think that more familiarity with a medium or emerging form produces better consciousness of it...