Notice: All forms on this website are temporarily down for maintenance. You will not be able to complete a form to request information or a resource. We apologize for any inconvenience and will reactivate the forms as soon as possible.

Fifty Shades Goes to Sesame Street

 My wife and I regularly have conversations about whether something on TV is appropriate for our children (ages 4, 5 and 7). I’m not going to suggest that we always get it right. But we’re trying, in terms of both what our kiddos watch and how much. Lately, for instance, we’ve been working through the issues related to Pokemon the Series: XY, which my oldest has developed a sudden interest in.

Ideally, my wife and I can watch a show, talk about it together and develop a sense of what we’re dealing with, both in terms of a program’s worldview and content. We do a kind of hypothetical extrapolation that says, Well, this episode had these problems, here’s what we’ll likely have to work through if we say yes to the series.

The unspoken assumption is that what we see in this sample episode is what we’re going to get in the future. And often, maybe even most of the time, that extrapolation is pretty accurate.

But sometimes it’s not.

Sometimes, something really egregious zooms in out of left field. Sometimes in breathtakingly surprising ways. Ways you never would have dreamed of in a million, bazillion years.

We heard about one of those stories last week when a constituent emailed us a link to a Sesame Street segment online featuring Bert (of Bert and Ernie Fame) reading from a book called Fifty Shades of Oatmeal.

Wait … what?

Seriously, I’m not making this up. I wish I was.

The skit begins with Bert sitting on a park bench telling viewers, “Oh, hi there. Welcome to Sesame Street. I’m Burt. I’m just reading this book: Fifty Shades of Oatmeal. Yeah. One: beige. Two: tan. Wow, this is steamy stuff. Three: ecru.” You can watch it here.

It was enough to make me dig through my hypothetical “Never Gonna Happen” file in search of a mashup between the long-running public TV series for children and the more recent fiction phenomenon Fifty Shades of Grey (in which a young woman is lured into a seedy world of bondage and sadomasochistic sex).

The incident begs the obvious question: What do bondage and S&M have to do with presumably asexual Muppets on a children’s program? As you wrestle with that rhetorical question, let me offer a few more thoughts on this Shades-y surprise.

Obviously, unless children are reading things they absolutely shouldn’t be, this reference to E.L. James’ pornographic novel will likely (and mercifully) sail right over their innocent heads. Still, it’s enough to make you wonder who approved this dirty joke at PBS. What were they thinking? (And, for the record, this isn’t the first time Sesame Street has pushed the envelope with adult-oriented, pop culture elements. Back in 2010, for instance, Katy Perry’s cleavage raised eyebrows and prompted similar cultural conversations.)

Frankly, I don’t know what they were thinking. Maybe someone thought it would be a clever LOL moment for Fifty Shades-reading moms out there. Who knows.

What I do know is that engaged and intentional vigilance doesn’t always catch everything, because inappropriate content can still turn up in the most unlikely places. (Thanks, Sesame Street.) As parents, we have a responsibility to do our due diligence ahead of time. But sometimes, despite our best efforts, there’s damage control to do after the fact as well when creators of entertainment for kids go way out of their way to slip in a “steamy” joke like the one Bert told.

After we get done exhaling exasperated sighs, it’s time to assess what our kids understand about what they just saw or heard, and what we might need to do to help them further process it. Unwanted though those moments may be, they can be teachable ones nonetheless if we’re willing to talk, ask questions and discern how that inappropriate content might have influenced our kids … despite our best attempts to be discerning ahead of time.