I really think both Elmo and Abby need to be toned down, they are nearly running SS on the muppet level IMHO :\. I would love to see (I know, I know, 'SS isn't for you' but a girl can dream can't she?) a whole street story that focused on Big Bird or Snuffy for once..or maybe even Grover..after all, he's not that much older than them..and..and..he's fuzzy :3
I think they're still trying to work out Abby's role in the series. She's positively plastered on merchandising, and SW really wants to get their money's worth for all the buzz planting and hype they had to give the character. I think they've just about toned her down to a main character level (the level of Telly, Baby Bear, Rosita, Zoe... etc) and she isn't quite as over done as Elmo is. I think that first season with her is the worst of the character because they didn't get all the bugs out. The first episode she was in, they didn't explore her as a character, they explored her as a marketing item... every other thing that came out of her mouth was a ready for t-shirt catchphrase. I'm glad to see they
re trying harder to make her something more than a pasted in concept, and it's almost there...
I, for one, liked Leela's intro episode best: it had plenty of Muppet supporting cast in the main story, but the real focus was on a human character (pretty rare today) and on the Street as a whole (even rarer). The references appealed to both preschool children (Prairie trying to stop Cookie Monster) and nostalgic adults (Leela's remark that "[n]othing says 'Sesame Street' like an eight-foot bird singing the alphabet"). If the Workshop could keep writing plots that balanced most of Sesame Street's highlights that way--I'd bet that it would last another ten seasons at least!
I really enjoyed that too, and more on a different level. When characters are usually introduced to Sesame Street, they always have to meet every single character and then keep turning to the camera and saying something to the extent of "this place is so extraordinary" every time they meet a character. And then they have to meet Oscar, which always ammounts to what we all know, Oscar is a Grouch. I'm so glad they already settled Leela in. The fact that she's not being introduced to Sesame Street so much as introducing it herself was a brilliant twist.
I also must note... they FINALLY learned the art of subtlety when it comes to stressed segments of the curriculum.... Wasn't there a math focus this year? You almost couldn't tell. They didn't shove Math into each and every available crevice and say, "we're teaching math!" every five minutes, the way they've been doing with the health initiative and Word of the Day bits. We had them blended into some of the street segments... Number 6 day, The Hat Counting competition, Max the Magician. Now if they only did that with fruits and vegetables, we wouldn't have so many useless segments like "the Veggie Dance" and that stupid skit about the girl who ate a banana and the girl that ate cake (both unfortunately seen this season).