When The Electric Company debuted in October 1971, television hadn't seen anything quite like it. Psychedelic graphics, wildly creative animation, mod outfits, over-the-top characters and sketch comedy all functioned to serve the same goal: teaching kids to read.
Brought to you by the Children's Television Workshop (CTW) — the same producers behind Sesame Street, which debuted in 1969 — The Electric Company won two Emmys, aired on more than 250 public TV stations and became a teaching tool in thousands of classrooms nationwide.
The show's cast included Academy Award winner Rita Moreno, Bill Cosby and a then-unknown Morgan Freeman. Guest stars included Mel Brooks, Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder and Joan Rivers. The teen pop band Short Circus (get it?) included future star Irene Cara. The comedy writers were among the best in the business and later went on to work on hit TV shows, including MASH and Everybody Loves Raymond.
So with all that going for it, why did The Electric Company run out of juice? The answer shines a light on the fate of many a public media endeavor where making money is as important as the mission statement.
The Electric Company's target audience was elementary school students who were too old for Sesame Street but still needed help learning to read. According to a report by CTW, "Government estimates showed that illiteracy was a problem for as many as one out of ten Americans" and that "Millions more" were "described as 'functional illiterates.' " Joan Ganz Cooney, CTW's president, explained that a project to help older children with reading was "requested by the U.S. Office of Education, whose 'Right to Read' campaign sought to achieve universal literacy in the 1970's."
"What we needed to worry about were the people falling behind," remembers TV writer and producer Samuel Gibbon, who was pulled off his job on Sesame Street to oversee The Electric Company. "If you're falling behind in the second and third grade, your prognosis is not wonderful, so we tried to correct that problem at its origins."
Research and academic advisers powered The Electric Company
Gibbon and a team of TV writers and producers, reading experts and other academic advisers spent 18 months doing research and developing the show before it went on the air. These days, that's business as usual for educational TV shows, but back in 1971, this was new. Despite the success of Sesame Street, "most people thought it was anathema to try to use television to teach kids to read," remembers Barbara Fowles, who was part of The Electric Company's research team. "Teachers thought television was really horrible."
Plus, as Cooney wrote in 1976, "few of the experts agree on how to teach reading in the classroom, even under ideal circumstances."