The Electric Company: Inside the Best 1971 PBS Show
“Hey, you guys!” Rita Moreno shouted that line at the top of every Electric Company episode between 1971 and 1977, and for 780 half-hours she meant it. PBS built the show for seven-to-ten-year-olds who had aged out of Sesame Street but still couldn’t reliably read a cereal box. The Children’s Television Workshop put a Grammy winner, a future Oscar winner, and a sitcom king on the same set, then handed them sketch comedy that hid phonics drills inside disco numbers and a sweet 1969 leather jacket. The result was the most underrated education show ever broadcast in North America.
Why PBS Built a Show for Kids Who Could Already Watch Cartoons
The premise sounds dull on paper. A federally funded broadcaster decided that Sesame Street, which had launched two years earlier, was leaving older grade-schoolers behind. Joan Ganz Cooney, Lloyd Morrisett, and Paul Dooley pitched a follow-up aimed squarely at the second-grade reading slump — the moment when a kid who learned letters from Big Bird is supposed to start decoding actual sentences but stalls. About a third of American second-graders were reading below grade level when the show debuted, and PBS thought variety sketches might do what flashcards couldn’t.
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The bet paid off. Within two years The Electric Company was being shown inside US classrooms during school hours, the first PBS program ever folded into formal curriculum that way. Teachers got companion magazines. Sponsors got a giant Grammy nomination. The cast got a guarantee that they’d be on TV every weekday for half a decade.
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The Retro Almanac
A monthly roundup of "on this day" highlights from that month, decades back — plus first dibs on new retro merch drops. No spam, just the good stuff.
