Netflix 'Saving' Sesame Street Isn’t the Win You Think It Is

What the Sean Combs trial and Sesame Street’s Netflix deal reveal about power, control, and the erosion of the public good

Photo by TopSphere Media on Unsplash

I love to people-watch. It’s probably one of my favorite things to do. I do it in all sorts of contexts, from watching people interact with one another at the airport, to noticing what people have in their shopping carts. People watching on the internet is a sport of its own.

Tonight, as I scrolled through my Threads feed, I was watching reactions. Leftover reactions to the weekend’s news of that plantation going to dust. Reactions to Joe Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis. Reactions to the Sean Combs trial. Reactions to the reactions to the Sean Combs trial. And then…reactions to the news that Netflix “saved” Sesame Street. And the reactions to those of us who didn’t read the full press release before reacting.

I include myself in the latter group because I’ll be honest, I saw a few posts (with no links, just headlines) and before seeking out a full article, my first reaction was to look up which page of Project 2025 referenced defunding PBS (pages 246-248).

And then I posted,

“While this is great news for the programming, it undercuts the fact that defunding public services so that private business can scoop them up and sell them to us for profit is the *entire* point of Project 2025!

Also, all the PBS kids like me whose parents couldn’t afford cable are WHY WE TURNED TO PBS IN THE FIRST PLACE. It’s those kids who benefit most from having access to publicly-funded programming.

This is not a celebratory news piece. I’m sorry. It’s not.”

Then I read the full press release from Sesame Workshop. The TL;DR is that Netflix is going to air new episodes on their streaming service while also making them available on PBS. All of this is in an effort for PBS to offset the funding cuts from the federal government. Even with the full context, I still feel that the news isn’t celebratory. Something doesn’t sit right with me.

As an abuse survivor, one of my default responses when something feels off is to ask, “Is it just me?” and then overanalyze ad nauseum. But one of my survivor superpowers is that I have become extremely good at recognizing patterns.

Everything about this feels familiar in my body, so I got curious.

As I sat with the news for a bit, my mind bridged into the running commentary about what people have been learning about coercive control as details of Cassie Ventura’s experience with Combs came out in her testimony last week. As I followed the deeper conversation about coercive control emerging from the Combs trial, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The language, the logic, the tactics….

And then it hit me—the same dynamics that keep survivors trapped in abusive relationships, specifically financial control and coercion, play out on the macro scale when we look at what happens when essential public services are controlled by private interests.

When public services are quietly defunded, then we’re told a private company stepping in is somehow a win, we’re being duped. It’s the same playbook: take away your choices, offer help (with strings attached), and call it rescue so everyone thinks it’s a win-win.

As people celebrate the rescue of our beloved Sesame Street, they are are distracted from the harm. Defunding public programs so that private corporations can scoop them up and profit is the central goal of Project 2025. We all know that when profit-first logic is applied to public services, it doesn’t lead to better outcomes. It leads to gatekeeping, inequality, and harm. See also: healthcare, housing.

On a personal level, financial abuse traps people in cycles of control, limiting their options for freedom and safety. Similarly, the privatization of services traps the public—especially marginalized communities—by placing access under the control of for-profit entities.

The radical experiment born from the Civil Rights Movement

Sesame Street premiered in 1969, in response to the still-burning fires of the Civil Rights Movement. It was a radical experiment about equity—provide free, high-quality educational programming to inner-city kids who were being systemically underserved by the public school system. The intention was to teach on TV what the white suburban kids were learning in school.

From its earliest days, Sesame Street was designed to close opportunity gaps. It featured a diverse cast, modeled positive conflict resolution, introduced kids to letters and numbers—and did it all for free, on public television. Not cable. Not subscription. No paywalls. Just turn on the TV and learn.

Its success was proof of what public media could do: reach millions of children, especially Black and brown children, with affirming, educational content. That’s what made it powerful. And that’s what made it a target for those who use “DEI” as a racial slur.

But here’s the thing: Sesame Street was never meant to be a marketable asset. As beloved as it is, it is first and foremost a public good. It’s powerful because it’s accessible, not because it can be spun into video games and merchandise.

When public resources become private leverage

Defunding PBS (and the broader Corporation for Public Broadcasting) didn’t just hurt public television—it created the conditions for control to shift hands. When you take away public funding, you force institutions to rely on private dollars. And when the money comes from private corporations, so does the influence.

That’s how you end up with PBS licensing Sesame Street (first to HBO and now to Netflix) to bridge the shortfall. It’s not a bold strategic move; it’s a survival tactic. And survival often comes at the cost of autonomy.

Defunding is not a budgetary oversight. It’s a deliberate strategy to weaken public institutions until they have no choice but to lean on private systems for survival. Just like an abuser might cut off a partner’s access to money, employment, or housing to manufacture dependency, policy architects cut funding from public goods in order to force privatization. Once that dependency is in place, the power dynamic shifts—and it’s extremely difficult to shift it back.

This is the playbook laid out in Project 2025. It’s not just about deregulation or budget cuts. It’s about transferring control from public, community-based infrastructure into the hands of private, for-profit actors and consolidating power. It’s a hostile takeover of our public services.

Survivors of coercive control (like Cassie) get pulled in because they are offered something that means something. She was offered a career. Then they get stuck in a web of abuse because they can’t afford to leave. That’s how financial abuse works: it limits your choices until dependence starts to seem like a logical option. When public institutions can’t afford to opt out of private partnerships, the same trap is set.

This is the part that worries me. The longer we rely on private streams of revenue to fund our public media, the boundaries will continue to erode until the public option disappears completely.

That’s the nature of coercion—whether in a relationship or a system. It doesn’t always arrive as a threat. Sometimes it shows up as help. A lifeline. A rescue.

I learned to spot coercion by surviving it. So when I see it in the dismantling of public media, I’m cautious about celebrating Sesame Street’s new partnership.