When “Sesame Street” debuts Saturday morning on HBO, the iconic puppets who spent the last 45 years on PBS will reveal a few modern touches: Elmo will move into a brownstone, the Cookie Monster will team up with some tablet-wielding crimefighters, and Oscar the Grouch will pop out of not just trash cans, but recycling and compost bins, too.  Yet the biggest changes for America’s best-known children’s series are much subtler — and riskier — than can be seen on set at 123 Sesame Street: Shorter episodes, fewer core characters and a sharper focus on winning the millions of preschoolers who don’t get the show turned on for them, but choose it themselves, via a phone or tablet app.  A lot has changed since the psychedelic “Sesame Street” first hit family living rooms in 1969, becoming a mainstay of public television and ushering in an age of “nutritious entertainment.”  So as the battle for kids’ attention heats up, the American classic is having to become a different beast: Redesigned, relentlessly field-tested and repositioned to win that increasingly lucrative market, the media-drenched toddler of 2016.  “It’s a very competitive marketplace . . . and it really is the kids now who are making the decisions,” said Carol-Lynn Parente, the show’s executive producer. “Sesame is the most-tested show in the history of television. We’re trying to diagnose what makes these kids tick.”  “Sesame Street’s” 46th season will be its first to premiere behind HBO’s premium-cable paywall, where episodes will run exclusively for nine months before they’re made available on PBS.  It will also be the first to fully break with its long-standing hour-long format and shrink to 30 minutes, to keep kids with other media vying for their attention focused and engaged. That half-hour will also be newly focused on a single backbone topic — a departure from the hour-long “Sesame,” which could flit between Elmo’s songs, the central “Street story” and “Abby’s Flying Fairy School” in a squeaking blur.  Where recent series focused on STEM skills and childhood obesity — most notably, with Michelle Obama joining Big Bird in the White House kitchen in 2013 — new shows will focus on lofty goals such as teaching kids “self-regulation” and “executive function”; in other words, handling challenges without having a meltdown.  The focus comes on the back of behavioral research that has found emotional control can be an important intangible in deciding how kids learn, adapt and grow. Leading the curriculum will be in the insatiable Cookie Monster: As “Sesame” spokeswoman Alicia Durand said, “He’s the poster child for self-regulation skills, because he has none.”  “Sesame” will still teach the basics: The vampiric Count von Count will still count, and kids will still be taught a “Letter of the Day”: In the first new episode, “Black-ish” actor Tracee Ellis Ross will teach the letter “B” while in bed with Boodles, her stuffed beagle.  But more and more, the episodes will focus on scenarios that children born in the Internet age will no doubt confront. One recent episode involves Elmo and Abby scheming to get a character to stop staring at her phone.  “Sesame’s” five-year contract with HBO, announced in August, was a lifeboat for Sesame Workshop, the show’s nonprofit, which lost $11 million in 2014 largely due to plunging sales of DVDs, its biggest moneymaker. But the deal, whose financial terms weren’t disclosed, was also a crucial win for HBO, the not-so-family-friendly cable empire looking to boost its appeal in kids’ entertainment.  With HBO’s backing, “Sesame” has almost doubled its new season’s length, from 18 episodes to 35, and will launch other new kids’ educational series, including a “Muppets” spinoff. The HBO deal will also allow PBS, which previously had to pay to license the episodes, to play “Sesame” for free.  But the unexpected marriage also fueled a major backlash. For critics, the premium-cable giant’s swallowing of a children’s show designed to deliver free education to underprivileged kids was a dark irony: The comedian Brian Gaar tweeted that HBO was “privatizing a national treasure.”  Others bemoaned that Elmo would soon share the same airwaves as grittier shows like “Game of Thrones.” Parents Television Council president Tim Winter said that “Sesame”-charmed parents would be forced to “subscribe to the most sexually explicit, most graphically violent television network in America.”  The producers feel the pressure with every change to the American classic, and they’re expecting this season, with its new HBO roots, to face more inspection than ever. Johnson, the creative director, called it exciting but “kind of terrifying.”  “There’s always a danger that one of the changes will alienate people,” said Parente, the executive producer. “It’s something other properties don’t have to deal with: the deep emotions of this brand . . . the challenge to stay relevant, and to stay important to preschoolers, too.”  The street itself will play a much bigger part in the show, after producers found that kids were increasingly interested in knowing where their favorite characters lived. Designers created a vibrant new set, crafting homes for almost everyone: a new nest for Big Bird, a crayon-caked bedroom for Elmo, and an apartment for the Cookie Monster above Hooper’s Store, where something is always baking.  Street producers had over the years tried to match their cartoon competition by upping the set’s eye-catching vibrancy. But there began to be so many colors that the kids were distracted from the story, especially when viewing on a smaller screen. The new set is a more realistic cityscape of “Sesame’s” quasi-New York neighborhood.  Modern touches abound, though the creators sought to keep some connection to their roots. Hooper’s Store was designed to look like it was pulled from the ’70s, with dirtied vintage awnings and pressed-tin walls. (One of the few non-retro changes: The “public telephone” sticker there is now joined by one offering “free wi-fi.”)  The show’s opening theme song will still wonder how to get to Sesame Street, but with a song that is faster and more upbeat, and with slickly cinematic, slow-motion shots that seem pulled straight from TV. Like the introduction, the show will also focus on fewer main-story characters than previous puppet-filled episodes, a “commitment to the top characters” designed to keep kids coming back.  “If you’re 4 years old and you love ‘Sesame Street’ because you love Cookie Monster — but you also love one of our competitors’ shows, and mom gives you half an hour of content to watch before dinner,” Parente said. “Well, if you watch the competitors’ shows, there’s a 100 percent chance you’ll see that character, and if you choose ‘Sesame Street,’ maybe you’ll see Cookie Monster and maybe you won’t.”  Where parents were once “the first door-openers for ‘Sesame Street,’ producers said, two-thirds of children now first see the show via an online streaming service or on demand. Because so many kids watch on tablets or cellphones, producers last season placed a heavier emphasis on crafting shots so they’re best viewed on smaller screens.  And because children are making the choice to watch, producers have inched away from the types of cheeky pop-culture references once included as winks for their parents. They’re less likely to watch anyway, producers said — where half of all American kids had a stay-at-home mom in 1960, only 14 percent of kids had one in 2014, Pew Research data show .  To keep up with its toddling audience, “Sesame’s” creators have worked with developmental psychologists and early-education specialists, and invested heavily in research on how kids learn and what they like. For upcoming episodes on kindness, producers recently hosted a group of Chicago teachers at their office to learn how best to teach the concepts of understanding and mutual respect.  They also continue to invest in “distractor testing,” watching where kids gravitate when “Sesame” is turned on in a room full of toys, or across from a TV playing the competition. One researcher per child will record where the kids are looking at the screen, or gauge how distracted they are.  “My first rule is know your audience . . . and we have very tough critics,” said Sesame Workshop creative director Brown Johnson, a long-time Nickelodeon veteran who guided that network’s “Blues Clues” and “Dora the Explorer.” “If they don’t understand what’s going on or what’s happening in the story, they’ll basically walk away.”  Subtle clues have given the producers reassurance that their changes will be well received. While testing an episode on “booboos” — the curriculum of which covers health, kindness and emotional control, as well how many bandages it takes to wrap Big Bird’s beak — one little boy in a test room pulled up his pant leg to show the TV his own booboo.  Pressure to update “Sesame” has grown, as more alternatives have hit the market. Producers no longer just have to contend with TV franchises like Mickey Mouse and “Paw Patrol,” they must now face down streaming giants who see kids’ shows as a way to get cord-cutting families on board.  Hulu recently inked a mega-deal with Nickelodeon. Amazon’s video unit has invested in original kids’ shows like “Tumble Leaf” and “Annedroids,” and plans to reboot “Sigmund and the Sea Monsters,” a ’70s children’s show from the creators of “H.R. Pufnstuf.”  Netflix, which last week expanded worldwide, owns franchises such as “Reading Rainbow,” is rebooting “Inspector Gadget,” and plans to debut 30 original kids’ programs as part of a $5 billion content spending spree this year.  “Sesame” must also do battle with free services such as YouTube’s Kids app, which serves up parental controls and easy access to segments from “Thomas the Tank Engine” to “Minecraft.”  But “Sesame’s” segment-heavy magazine format was always well attuned to shorter, more “snackable” entertainment, a saving grace in a time where shorter online videos are all the rage. That could help explain why “Sesame” has been such a hit on YouTube, attracting 2.4 billion views since 2006, including a billion just last year.  A “Sesame” spoof of “House of Cards” in February, featuring three little pigs and “Frank Underwolf” (who declares, “There’s too much pork in this town”) got more than 2 million views on YouTube. That’s not the only parody of a Netflix original: A segment this season on healthy eating is dubbed “Orange Is the New Snack.”  “We live in a media competitive world, and that’s why we have to spend time listening to children, observing children and constantly evolving,” said Rosemarie Truglio, Sesame Workshop’s vice president of education and research. “The child has not changed, but their environment has changed, and they can get ‘Sesame’ whenever they want.
Elmo moves into a brownstone, and Oscar into a recycling bin, as the classic upgrades for the Internet age.