The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,44

Carl’s going to come over, and then we’re going to play a little while. And then Carl and Emily are both going down the car with somebody, and we’re going to ride to nursery school [whispered], and then when we get there, we’re all going to get out of the car, go into nursery school, and Daddy’s going to give us kisses, then go, and then say, and then we will say goodbye, then he’s going to work and we’re going to play at nursery school. Won’t that be funny? Because sometimes I go to nursery school cause it’s a nursery school day. Sometimes I stay with Tanta all week. And sometimes we play mom and dad. But usually, sometimes, I, um, oh go to nursery school. But today I’m going to nursery school in the morning. In the morning, Daddy in the, when and usual, we’re going to eat breakfast like we usually do, and then we’re going to...and then we’re going to...play. And then we’re, then the doorbell’s going to ring, and here comes Carl in here, and then Carl, and then we are all going to play, and then...

Emily is describing her Friday routine. But it’s not a particular Friday. It’s what she considers an ideal Friday, a hypothetical Friday in which everything she wants to happen happens. It is, as Bruner and Joan Lucariello write in their commentary on the segment,

a remarkable act of world making...she uses tonal emphasis, prolongation of key words, and a kind of “re enactment” reminiscent of the we are there cinema verité (with her friend Carl practically narrated through the door as he enters). As if to emphasize that she has everything “down pat” she delivers the monologue in a rhythmic, almost singsong way. And in the course of the soliloquy, she even feels free to comment on the drollness of the course that events are taking (“Won’t that be funny”).

It is hard to look at this evidence of the importance of narrative and not marvel at the success of Sesame Street. Here was a show that eschewed what turns out to be the most important of all ways of reaching young children. It also diluted its appeal to preschoolers with jokes aimed only at adults. Yet it succeeded anyway. That was the genius of Sesame Street, that through the brilliance of its writing and the warmth and charisma of the Muppets it managed to overcome what might otherwise have been overwhelming obstacles. But it becomes easy to understand how you would make a children’s show even stickier than Sesame Street. You’d make it perfectly literal, without any wordplay or comedy that would confuse preschoolers. And you’d teach kids how to think in the same way that kids teach themselves how to think—in the form of the story. You would make, in other words, Blue’s Clues.

4.

Every episode of Blue’s Clues is constructed the same way. Steve, the host, presents the audience with a puzzle involving Blue, the animated dog. In one show the challenge is to figure out Blue’s favorite story. In another, it is to figure out Blue’s favorite food. To help the audience unlock the puzzle, Blue leaves behind a series of clues, which are objects tattooed with one of her paw prints. In between the discovery of the clues, Steve plays a series of games—mini puzzles—with the audience that are thematically related to the overall puzzle. In the show about Blue’s favorite story, for example, one of the mini puzzles involves Steve and Blue sitting down with the Three Bears, whose bowls of porridge have been mixed up, and enlisting the audience’s help in matching the small, middle, and large bowls with Mama, Papa, and Baby Bear. As the show unfolds, Steve and Blue move from one animated set to another, from a living room to a garden to fantastical places, jumping through magical doorways, leading viewers on a journey of discovery, until, at the end of the story, Steve returns to the living room. There, at the climax of every show, he sits down in a comfortable chair to think—a chair known, of course, in the literal world of Blue’s Clues, as the Thinking Chair. He puzzles over Blue’s three clues and attempts to come up with the answer.

This much is, obviously, a radical departure from Sesame Street. But having turned their back on that part of the Sesame Street legacy, the creators of Blue’s Clues then went back and borrowed those parts of Sesame Street that