Stream It Or Skip It?

Elmo & Mark Rober’s Merry Giftmas is the first Sesame Street holiday special since the classic children’s series’ move to Netflix, and the classic Sesame Muppets have teamed with popular YouTube engineer Mark Rober and his Crunch Labs team to build each other some really cool holiday gifts. But will the show inform of just be too sweet for its own good, like much of the show’s current run can be?

The Gist:  It’s the holiday season on Sesame Street, and Elmo (Ryan Dillon) and Abby (Leslie Carrara-Rudolph) sing about the idea of “Giftmas,” where you give friends and family gifts to show them how much you love them. The other thing Abby talks about is how great the first snow always is, but Elmo doesn’t think it’s cold enough to snow.

Abby and Elmo are going to exchange gifts with each other, as will Cooke Monster (David Rudman), who wants his gingerbread cookies to go to space, and Grover (Eric Jacobson), who is desperate to get a snapshot of Santa.

Elmo has brought in a friend to help: Mark Rober, former NASA engineer who is an immensely popular YouTuber and the founder of CrunchLabs.

The red monster is really struggling to figure out how to make a really killer gift for Abby, so Mark takes him down an elevator, past chickens and confetti and Christmas trees, to the secret Crunch Labs HQ. There, they brainstorm a killer gift, but Mark keeps getting interrupted as Cookie, Abby and Grover all sneak into the labs. Soon, even Big Bird (Matt Vogel) and Oscar (Eric Jacobsen) find their way in. He gets CrunchLabs designer Bam Singhasaneh to help Abby with a snowball catapult, and he gets “Science Bob” Pflugfelder to help Cookie make a night vision camera and Grover make a gingerbread rocket that can actually go into space.

But when Elmo starts to give up, thinking that any gift he makes is going to fail, Rober tells him that “failure is awesome”, and the two of them sing about it. Why is failure awesome? Because engineers fail all the time; each failure gives them information that gets them closer to a solution.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Of course, Elmo & Mark Rober’s Merry Giftmas is a Sesame Street special, and quite a clever one at that.

Performance Worth Watching: Even though Rober has been on camera for years now, it’s fun to watch him be a little bit awkward, but have fun, around the Sesame Street Muppets. It just shows that he’s still an engineer at heart.

What Age Group Is This For?: Like most things Sesame Street these days, the show is aimed at the preschool set, though the brief explanations of the science behind each of the gifts he’s helping the gang create might be more suitable for slightly older kids.

Our Take: Our issues with the current iteration of Sesame Street are well-documented, but we also know that the folks at Sesame Workshop can still put together funny and informative programming that adults will feel good about watching with their little ones. Elmo & Mark Rober’s Merry Giftmas is one of those shows.

Yes, most of the action centers around Sesame‘s “core four” of Elmo, Abby, Cookie and Grover, which can sometimes lead to an imbalance of happy, singsongy scenes over the smart, non-pandering material that the show used to be known for. But seeing Big Bird and (our current favorite) Oscar get more than just brief camera time was good to see. We hope that in the next special, Ernie (Peter Linz) and Bert (Jacobson) get some speaking parts. Heck, even the Count (Vogel) got a line and E&B didn’t!

But it was fun to see Rober explain the various scientific principles behind the designs he was helping the gang with, said in terms that all except the show’s very youngest viewers would understand. And, given our past in computer engineering, we really appreciated his message about failure helping you get closer to a solution. In fact, that’s applicable to many things in life that require problem solving, whether it’s scientific, artistic, or mechanical, and it’s a great message to impart to young kids.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Elmo & Mark Rober’s Merry Giftmas combines Rober’s informative Crunch Labs lessons with the usual fun of bein around the Sesame Street gang. We just want to see more of the gang than just the “core four.”

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.