The long-running children’s TV show is now on the market after Warner Bros. Discovery decided not to renew its Sesame Street deal with HBO and Max. Original episodes of the program will now need a new home.
Max will be working with the show’s producer, Sesame Workshop, to license episodes from its library through 2027. It is not yet clear if the library deal would prohibit potential new partners from also acquiring the old episodes of the program.
The streamer’s decision to not continue the deal comes from a strategy change to focus on more adult and family programming, with less of an emphasis on children’s programming.
“It has been a wonderful, creative experience working with everyone at Sesame Street on the iconic children’s series and we are thrilled to be able to keep some of the library series on Max in the U.S.,” a Max spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter, which broke the story. “We will continue to invest in our best-in-class programming and look forward to announcing our new distribution plans in the coming months, ensuring that Sesame Street reaches as many children as possible for generations to come.”
Sesame Street first aired in 1969, with episodes running on PBS since 1970. The show moved to HBO in 2016, with episodes airing on PBS months after they drop on HBO to ensure maximum reach and accessibility. A deal was struck in 2019 that moved Sesame Street to HBO Max, which was then renamed to Max.
“‘It is cancer…’ Each year, approximately 2 billion people around the world receive this diagnosis,” he wrote. “And I’m one of them.”
“There’s no playbook for how announce these things, but I’d planned on talking about it at length with People magazine at some point soon … to raise awareness and tell my story on my own terms,” he continued. “But that plan had to be altered early this morning when I was informed that a tabloid was going to run with the news.”
Van Der Beek wrote he has “been dealing with this privately until now, getting treatment and dialing in my overall health with greater focus than ever before.”
Despite the health update, he shared that he feels hopeful about the future and apologized to those in his life who learned the news from the press.
“I’m in a good place and feeling strong,” he wrote. “It’s been quite the initiation, and I’ll tell you more when I’m ready. Apologies to all the people in my life who I’d planned on telling myself. Nothing about this process has occurred on my preferred timeline. … But we roll with it, taking each surprise as a signpost, pointing us toward a greater destiny than we would have discovered without divine intervention.”
“Please know that my family and I deeply appreciate all the love and support,” he concluded. “More to come.”
Van Der Beek and his wife Kimberly have six children.
He’s one of the most recognizable faces in Hollywood, but two-time Oscar winner Denzel Washington is thinking about retirement — and reveals he’ll be in one of Marvel’s biggest franchises before he calls it a career.
To Australia’s Today program, the star of the upcoming Gladiator II revealed Ryan Coogler is writing a role for him in the third Black Panther film — and that project will be one of his final acting jobs.
“For me it’s about the filmmakers,” Denzel says. “Especially at this point in my career, I am only interested in working with the best. I don’t know how many more films I’m going to make.” He adds, “It’s probably not that many. I want to do things I haven’t done.”
Washington mentioned how he got his start — performing Shakespeare — and how he’ll be revisiting The Bard on Broadway opposite Jake Gyllenhaal in 2025.
“I played Othello at 22. I am about to play Othello at 70. After that, I am playing Hannibal [for Netflix]. After that, I’ve been talking to Steve McQueen about a film. After that, Ryan Coogler is writing a part for me in the next Black Panther. After that, I’m going to do the film Othello. After that, I’m going to do King Lear. After that, I’m going to retire.”
Incidentally, it was the original Black Panther‘s star, the late Chadwick Boseman, who once praised his British Academy of Acting program patron Washington by saying, “There is no Black Panther without Denzel Washington.”
“Imagine receiving a letter that your tuition … was paid for by the dopest actor on the planet,” Boseman said at an AFI Tribute to Washington that took place a little more than a year before Boseman’s untimely death from cancer in 2020.
