Conceptual Inception
The decision to tackle the issue of divorce was a weighty one for the Children's Television Workshop, and the idea had a long gestation period. As early as 1989, writer/director Jon Stone announced that he was attempting to examine the issue: "We make a conscious decision on what to look at. My two projects for this year are drugs and divorce. Divorce is a difficult one. Perhaps we could do it with puppets. I am also writing a script on drugs and peer pressure."
Not everyone in the production shared Stone's interest. Executive producer Dulcy Singer vetoed the idea in 1990, before it reached development. While she felt complex social matters should be discussed on the series, she felt the issue was irrelevant to lower socio-economic groups; the initial target audience of Sesame Street was inner city and financially disadvantaged families. Feeling that "divorce is a middle-class thing," she suggested instead that an episode focus on a single-parent family, with the child born out of wedlock with an absent father.
The topic of divorce was discussed again the following year, after the US Census Bureau released statistics suggesting 40 percent of all children in the United States, not just the middle classes, would soon live in divorced households.
Read more about this topic: Snuffy's Parents Get A Divorce
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