hth | has it really been the same since snuffleupagus became visible?

Ah, Sesame Street, the television programming that taught us all at a young age that they could hear you when you answered back at the tv screen. In retrospect, that was a little bit cruel; the entire rest of my life, I've been waiting for the magic people on the Other Side of the Box to listen to anything I had to say.

I kid, I kid. I love Sesame Street! All bookish, diversity-loving liberal nerds under the age of forty are required by law to love Sesame Street. I have to specify this, because some people think that my snideness and simmering anger is a sign that I, uh, dislike something, and that's not true as often as you might think; mostly if I dislike something, my strategy is NA NA NA NA NA CAN'T HEAR YOU, which is why you've never seen a screed against The Apprentice or state-sponsored lotteries in this space.

All this to say: there's a new girl Muppet on Sesame Street! That's right, in the THIRTY-SEVENTH SEASON of the nigh-legendary Diversity-Loving Liberal Nerd flagship show, we're up to two (TWO! *crash, boom* AH HA HA HA HA!) female regulars; the Muppets have just now caught up with Stargate: Atlantis, which, if you think about it, should make you cry just a little tiny bit.

Also, the really really funny part? Is that some Muppet wonk named Liz Nealon told the New York Times that, "We have our wacky, and we have our gentle. But we wanted a lead female character. If you think about The Mary Tyler Moore Show, some girls relate to Rhoda, who's our Zoe, and some girls really relate to Mary, who’s a girly girl. And we didn’t have that girl. We made a definite decision to sit down with the writers to figure out what this character might be." So...Sesame Street debuted in the year of our lord Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-Nine, and when four decades later a bunch of producers get together and say "Hey! Do we want a lead female character or what? Yes?" naturally the first role models that come to mind are female characters that debuted on network television in *checks watch* 1970?

It's fucking 20andfucking06, for the love of holy, jumping FUCK! We need a focus group to decide that little girls who are being raised with Muppets by their conscientious nerd-liberal parents deserve an ENTIRE TWO DIFFERENT KINDS OF GIRL CHARACTERS to choose from? And why in the fucking FUCK should we still be looking at a television show that was trying to safely and quietly appease those women's lib girls in 19fucking70 as our grand archetype for how to have two chicks on the same show without the whole thing going straight to hell? Mary and Rhoda haven't been au courant since before I was fucking born, and they want me to be raising my own fucking daughter on a show that's using this as its template?

Girl Muppets should be a non-issue. Girl Muppets should not even be a thing. You should not have to take a meeting to discuss whether or not we can handle having a female lead on fucking Sesame Street's thirty-seventh season. If you are having this discussion at all, you are part of the fucking problem, Jim Henson Studios, and I cry quietly when I say this, because when I was a little girl all I wanted to be in life was Princess Leia or Kira from The Dark Crystal, and now I'm thirty years old and cynical and bitter and I know that George Lucas is a raging megalomaniac who knows jack shit about women and Jim Henson Studios is putting out press releases to let us know that girls are cool, look, we made one! Two! (Although I gather from the research I've done that Zoe doesn't get that much screen time; maybe she should petition for a spin-off, like Rhoda did. The year before I was born.)

If we explained it to them using The Mary Tyler Moore Show, d'you think we could get the Stargate producers to give Teyla some damn lines? "If you think about it, some girls relate to Mary, and Teyla is real pretty and speaks politely and never gets laid and you can barely even tell she thinks the men she works for are sort of jackasses a lot of the time! C'mon, do it for the girly-girls!"

(Will spare you the Nerd Digression about how Sam Carter is Phyllis and Vala is Sue Ann Nivens. Also, further Random Nerd Weirdness about how all four Stargate women should fuck off together and remake The Golden Girls.)