Episode 2895, unofficially titled "Snuffy's Parents Get a Divorce", is a filmed yet un-aired episode of the popular U.S children's show Sesame Street. The episode was created for broadcast in 1992, but shelved by most broadcasters and producers once test audiences to the program were not able to understand the concept of divorce.
Launched in 1969, the PBS children's series Sesame Street was created with modern, lower-class, urban audiences in mind. While the audience quickly expanded beyond the initial demographic, the program stayed committed to occasionally tackling serious issues such as death, adoption, marriage, and pregnancy. These episodes are often inspired by national statistics or events within the circle of the show's own cast and crew.
In Season 23 (1991–1992), the subject of divorce was the big project of the season. As a result, producers filmed an episode "Snuffy's Parents Get a Divorce", in which Aloysius Snuffleupagus (also known as Snuffy) and little sister Alice must deal with the separation of their parents. The plot seemed to trouble children who watched it in test screenings, essentially afflicting the comfortable, rather than comforting the afflicted.
Sesame Workshop released a video called Little Children, Big Challenges: Divorce, on the topic.
Read more about Snuffy's Parents Get A Divorce: Conceptual Inception, Choosing An Approach, Test Results, References
Famous quotes containing the words parents and/or divorce:
“Perhaps one reason that many working parents do not agitate for collective reform, such as more governmental or corporate child care, is that the parents fear, deep down, that to share responsibility for child rearing is to abdicate it.”
—Faye J. Crosby (20th century)
“Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived.”
—Jane Austen (1775–1817)