Elmo and Jon Hamm make art. (PBS)

Though when you think about it, the implications of Mr. Hamm's famous genitalia being so close to Elmo--who until recently, was voiced by Kevin Clash--are somewhat disturbing. Best not to think about it too hard.

...That's what she said. (Dammit!)

Watch out for Cookie Monster... (Getty Images)

When meeting the costumed characters at Disney World, tourists often get hugged. When meeting the costumed characters in Times Square, tourists often get harassed.

If you’ve traipsed the flashy, crowded sidewalks of Times Square in the past year, you’ve seen them: Cookie Monsters; Elmos; SpongeBobs; Dora the Explorers—(kind of creepy looking) costumed characters who pose for photos with tourists in exchange for tips.

But lately, these characters have been anything but cuddly. Take last Sunday, for example, when Osvaldo Quiroz-Lopez—dressed up as Cookie Monster—reportedly shoved a two-year-old boy and shouted at his mother when the latter didn’t tip fast enough. Other reports from the past year tell stories of characters punching, cursing, and inappropriately groping customers.

NYPD Sgt. Ed Mullins, President of the Sergeant Benevolent Association (S.B.A.), wants to do something about it. His solution? Requiring the costumed characters to get licensed. “Let them get licenses and let the city council pass a law that allows us to enforce the law and summons people," Mr. Mullins told Gothamist. "Let them submit their fingerprints. They're dealing with kids, they're taking pictures with tourists. It's a reflection on New York."

Under Mr. Mullins’s vision, the characters would be treated like food vendors, and would be taxed on their profits. “If you license them, we have accountability for their tax revenue,” he said to Gothamist. “You know, let them pay with their tax stamp.”

But despite Mr. Mullins’s ideas, controlling these Cookie Monsters won’t be as easy as ABC. Members of city government have stressed the difficulty of classifying the costumed creatures—Are they street performers? Are they vendors, of a sort?—and henceforth, the difficulty of finding a law to regulate their behavior.

"There are anti-mask laws, but you need at least two people working together,” City Councilmember Peter Vallone told Gothamist. “There are 'blocking the sidewalk' laws but they're difficult to enforce in this situation. They claim they're street performers and don't need licensing."

The complicated issue reached the ears of Mayor Bloomberg, who seems to see no clear solution.

“We have tried at various times to regulate people who dress up and then get you to take a picture with your kid and then demand money or harass you in other ways,” said Mayor Bloomberg, according to The New York Post. In regards to the characters earning money, the mayor said, “It’s not against the law. So I’m sorry. Maybe it should be.”

Until regulations are passed, we suggest you steer clear of the Times Square characters. Trust us—you don’t want to be around when SpongeBob drops his squarepants.

Kevin Clash and Elmo (Bill Thompson, Wikipedia)

Update: 12/11/12 4:47 p.m. So Kevin Clash has not only lost his job at Sesame Street, facing four underage sexual molestation charges, but now on top of that is being accused of having a limp dick by the latest alleged victim.

The accuser, now a 33-year-old man, ran away from his family in Miami when he was 16 to live with Clash. He revealed in his lawsuit (obtained in part by The New York Post), that "Kevin Clash told [his accuser] he had difficulty...due to a medical condition." It's like this Clash's life cannot get any worse at this point. Except:

"Herman said that because Clash is alleged to have transported his accuser across state lines for the purpose of engaging in sexual activity, he could face criminal charges."

Okay, now it can't get any worse. Right??

Update 11/20/12 4 p.m. Kevin Clash, the voice of Elmo, has resigned from his role on Sesame Street after a second young man stepped forward to accuse the Academy Award-nominated documentary subject of being a sexual predator. 24-year-old Cecil Singleton is asking for $5 million from Mr. Clash, after claiming he met the voice actor on a phone sex line when he was 15. Then he made a pretty large leap in logic, claiming that Clash spent his days at Sesame “preying on teenage boys to satisfy his depraved sexual interests.”

Update 11/13/12 6:20 p.m.: The 23-year-old accuser just recanted his statement. Read below for more details.

Yeah, this is just pretty awful, especially because of all the absolutely terrible, not appropriate jokes and off-color puns that immediately pop into one's head when reading a headline about how the man who played the voice of Elmo for 28 years on Sesame Street left the show over allegations that he molested a little teenage boy. Try not to think about them, okay? It will just make you feel worse.

From TMZ.com:

Kevin Clash -- the man known as the voice of Elmo -- has taken a leave of absence from Sesame Street in the wake of allegations he had a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old boy, TMZ has learned ... allegations Clash adamantly denies.

We've learned ... Sesame Workshop lawyers recently met with a 23-year-old man who claims he and Clash began a sexual relationship 7 years ago ... when he was 16 and Clash was 45.

Clash has acknowledged to TMZ he had a relationship with the young man -- but insists it only took place AFTER the accuser was an adult...

Sources with direct knowledge of the situation tell TMZ ... after the accuser's initial meeting with Sesame Street, the accuser felt Sesame Workshop's lawyers were trying to muzzle him ... so he lawyered up with Andreozzi and Associates -- the firm that represented one of the victims in the Jerry Sandusky child rape case.

So, you know, that's a shitty thing to start your Monday news with. Sorry, folks.

Update: The New York Times learned an hour ago that the young man who accused Mr. Clash of having a sexual relationship with him while he was underage has recanted his previous statement:

Andreozzi & Associates, a law firm that said it represented the accuser said in a statement that “he wants it to be known that his sexual relationship with Mr. Clash was an adult consensual relationship.” The statement added, “He will have no further comment on the matter.”

So maybe the voice of Elmo is just homosexual, and not a child molester. Still, we feel we all lost a lot of innocence in the past two days, and it's yet to be seen whether Mr. Clash will be allowed back on Sesame Street after this scandal.

Kevin Clash resigns. (PBS)

– Kevin Clash, the voice of Elmo, has resigned from his role on Sesame Street after a second young man stepped forward to accuse the Academy Award-nominated documentary subject of being a sexual predator. 24-year-old Cecil Singleton is asking for $5 million from Mr. Clash, after claiming he met the voice actor on a phone sex line when he was 15. Then he made a pretty large leap in logic, claiming that Clash spent his days at Sesame "preying on teenage boys to satisfy his depraved sexual interests."

– So in addition to bringing new chapters of Trapped in the Closet to IFC, R. Kelly is now bringing his hip-hopera to the Great White Way. Hey, it can't be any worse than Ghost: The Musical.

– Finally, Anne Hathaway (sort of) fesses up that her co-hosting of 2011s Academy Awards was a shitshow. "I came off as slightly manic," she admits.

Now we can forgive her and move on to buying our advance tickets to Les Mis.

– Wayne Brady went all nutty on Reddit's AMA today. But at this point, second-rate celebrities going on Reddit is akin to them guest-starring on Parks and Recreation. Sorry, the heads of our country have already gone there, Wayne Brady! What will you contribute?

The New York Times quotes a statement from the Sesame Workshop, which produces the PBS series:

"...none of us, especially Kevin, want anything to divert our attention from our focus on serving as a leading educational organization. Unfortunately, the controversy surrounding Kevin’s personal life has become a distraction that none of us want, and he has concluded that he can no longer be effective in his job and has resigned from Sesame Street."

Mr. Clash was accused of a past relationship with a minor last week by a now 24-year-old man, who later recanted; TMZ reported that the accuser later attempted to go back on his recantation, offering to pay back his cash settlement in order to allege an inappropriate relationship with Mr. Clash once more.

"This is a sad day for Sesame Street," wrote the Sesame Workshop in its statement.

Sheldon Stephens (The Smoking Gun)

"Stephens agrees that immediately upon execution of this Agreement, his counsel, Andreozzi & Associates, P.C., shall release the [following] statement ... 'He [Stephens] wants it to be known that his sexual relationship with Mr. Clash was an adult consensual relationship.'"

We've learned Stephens has met with lawyers in Los Angeles and told them he was pressured into recanting his allegation and insists he's telling the truth when he says he had sex with Clash when he was 16.

Stephens -- who is now 23 -- is telling lawyers he will gladly forfeit the $125,000 to restore his name. Stephens is saying he was literally crying during the final negotiations and repeatedly said he didn't want to sign.

This probably has nothing to do with the fact that as soon as he backtracked on his original story and his name was leaked to the press, The Smoking Gun discovered that the "aspiring model" had some dirty secrets all his own, including robbing his former employer at knifepoint for $250,000 in jewelry.

We still don't know just how deep inside the fuzzy red muppet this story goes. We do know that this is certainly not the first whiff of scandal in children's entertainment.

Here's a handful of other scandals that range from darkly funny to frankly terrifying.

The last cast member to be added was “Leela” in the 2008 season. Leela, a laundromat owner on the titular Street, is played by Nitya Vidyasagar, an Indian-American. “Sesame Street has always reflected the diverse population within the community,” said Ms. Parente

It’s vanishingly rare for a cast member to be added to Sesame Street, as witnessed by Sonia Manzano, who has played Maria since 1971, walking the line of potential auditioners to say hello. Once on the show, cast members tend to stay, though that didn’t necessarily seem to be the endgame of auditioner Rebecca Diaz, who said, “It’d be a dream come true! I’d be set! You work with the monsters, the kids, and you get that exposure!”

Auditioners had found out about the call from sources including Univision, the Spanish-language network, and Playbill. Mauricio Marces, a young man with bleached tips and a big smile who’d come in the day before on a bus from Richmond, Va., planned to sing “La Bamba” and “Uptown Girl” to indicate his Spanish and English capabilities. That was if he got to the final round of auditions--the songs happened upstairs at Roseland, after an initial personality interview and the reading of provided sides. Had Mr. Marces watched Sesame Street as a child?

“I was a Barney kid.”

Inside Roseland, a woman close to the front of the line looked wide-eyed, terrified. “¿Nervioso?,” an event staffer asked.

“Un poquito, pero también feliz,” she replied.

One of the first people to audition was a young woman in cowboy boots, toting a rolling suitcase, Longchamp purse, pillow, and sleeping bag. “Yo vivo en Philadelphia--pero soy de México,” she told the casting agent. Then, in English: “I came here last night--but I got my sleeping bag right here!” She’d slept on the street to ensure she was one of the first let in at 10 a.m. As the preliminary interview came to an end, a photographer came to her and snapped her picture. She turned towards it like a sunflower, smiled broadly, and put her arms, bent at the elbows, over her head--a classic pin-up pose. She was invited on to the next round.

“It’s funny,” said Ms. Parente, when asked whether Sesame Street was based on the Midtown stretch near Roseland, or on Harlem, or something else. “Everyone I meet thinks it’s based on their community.”

Against God's will: Bird refuses to age (Getty Images)

Happy Birthday to Big Bird, who is 43-years-old today. No wait, actually, he's six, and he'll always be six. (Except for the time he was 4, and when he was originally very old.)

Come on Sesame Street: how much are you going to make us suspend our disbelief here?? A big yellow talking bird...fine. A big yellow talking bird that doesn't age? That's just nutty!

To celebrate the special occasion, the  Sesame Street Workshop interviewed Carroll Spinney, who has played Big Bird (and Oscar the Grouch) since the show's conception in 1969. Unlike Mr. Bird, Mr. Spinney has definitely aged. The puppeteer explains the reasoning behind his character's inability to age...sort of.

On the very first show the writers gave a two minute period to say hello to Big Bird. I said, “What’s Big Bird like?” And Jim said, “I don’t know, what do you want him to be like?” I said I wanted him to be pretty human. As the show progressed, the writers didn’t know what he was, they hadn’t seen it. He looked like quite a different character. At first I played him like Charlie McCarthy, Edgar Bergen’s ventriloquist dummy.  It wasn’t long before I decided that it should be a childlike character, not a goofy old guy. Since he couldn’t read or write, he was 4-years-old. By the end, he was writing little poems and stuff, so then he had to be six so he could read. He’s turning six and he always turns six. His birthday came about on a calendar on the early days of the show. Someone decided he should have a birthday and I decided it should be the first day of spring.

Big Bird was originally an old crotchety dummy who transformed into a child that doesn't age? That's some Benjamin Button-level craziness over at Mr. Hooper's Store.

Can they save PBS?

Downton Abbey, the Masterpiece franchise about life at a stately British manor, began with the sinking of the Titanic; its recently-concluded second season took on the Great War and the influenza outbreak. It’s a series about people unaccustomed to change suddenly dealing with staggering new technological and sociological realities, those who have long enjoyed a privileged position scrambling to preserve their birthright.

Little wonder it’s on PBS.

The network, too, has been under assault, its powerful patrons once again debating whether to disinherit it altogether. In 2009, PBS President Paula Kerger claimed that the changing media landscape had led to “clearly the most challenging times that this industry has ever faced.” She hadn’t seen anything yet. Last February, the House voted to defund public radio and television. (The measure died in the Democratic-controlled Senate.) Then came the March 2011 “sting” undertaken by James O’Keefe against NPR, which resulted in the departure of NPR President Vivian Schiller and increased scrutiny of public broadcasting overall. In December 2011, GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney vowed that in his administration, “Big Bird is going to have advertisements.”

Thank goodness for Downton, the February season finale of which drew an average audience of 5.4 million, nearly a million more than the better-rated night of Kim Kardashian’s wedding and double the Mad Men finale. Meanwhile, the series has inspired a slew of fan Tumblrs and viewing parties and even a Saturday Night Live parody.

“We’ve had programs out of Masterpiece that have really captured the public’s eye going back through our history,” Ms. Kerger told The Observer. “Programs like The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Brideshead Revisited. This is very much like a Brideshead—a program that fits a lot of what we do on a regular basis but for a lot of the right reasons, just resonates.”

The Six Wives of Henry VIII ran on what was then called Masterpiece Theatre in 1972, and Brideshead Revisited in 1982. Back then, of course, most TV dials went up to 13 (if you don’t count UHF), and more than half the channels were snow. It was easier to break through. The network best known for Sesame Street, Antiques Roadshow, and respected-if-not-loved shows like Frontline and NewsHour hasn’t had this kind of cultural currency in 30 years. Can Downton rebuild the fractured PBS audience—or is it just postponing the inevitable?

“We have to try to keep Julian Fellowes alive—we can’t just work him into the ground,” exclaimed Rebecca Eaton, executive producer of Masterpiece. She was referring to the Oscar-winning screenwriter whose plan for the project got PBS to jump in as coproducer. (Downton Abbey airs in the U.K. on the commercial network ITV—which explains how your web-savvy neighbors pirated the second season long before you watched it.) While Downton was intended as a miniseries, its success was irresistible; the third season, with Shirley MacLaine, is to air in the U.S. in January 2013, and more may follow.
What made this project work when others (ahem, the new Upstairs, Downstairs) disappeared without a trace?

“If I knew that, I would do it again really fast,” Ms. Eaton said. “It is a little bit of black magic.”

Ms. Eaton said that the success of Downton has influenced what will air on future Masterpiece installments only incidentally: “It’s affected the decision-making process of my colleagues in England, so there are more long-running miniseries being commissioned than before.” (PBS serves as a coproducer, but does not independently produce any Masterpiece programs.) “But it isn’t an either-or for Masterpiece, because our stock-in-trade has always been adaptations of classic books. We will always do those.” Next up is an adaptation of Great Expectations (are we ready for “Team Estella” and “Team Pip”?).

As edifying and high-minded as it may be, Masterpiece is also a money-maker. It originated in 1971 under a sponsorship with Mobil, which continued for 33 years. This year, Viking River Cruises, a travel company, signed on to sponsor Downton Abbey’s second season and the rest of the Masterpiece slate in 2012, though its ads do not interrupt the broadcast and avoid the FCC-prohibited “call-to-action.” They don’t tell you, exactly, to go on a cruise.

“They knew what they were doing,” Ms. Eaton said, noting that it was clear by then that Downton was on fire. “They did the calculus and knew that this was going to be a tremendous opportunity for that company. It was very shrewd.”
Ms. Eaton said  she doubted whether PBS would have sprung for the coproduction had the defunding occurred in early 2011. “At the time we made the deal for Downton one, we had no corporate sponsor. All of our money came from PBS.”

Actually, the defunding would have taken effect before the series’ second season, we reminded her, by which time PBS would have had the infusion of corporate cash to fund the production.

The reply was terse. “Yep.”

PBS’s argument for its continued existence is the fact that it does fundamentally different work than any other television outlet. “British costume drama hasn’t been particularly appealing to network broadcasters in recent memory,” Ms. Eaton said of Downton, citing HBO as the only possible outlet for similar programming and noting that without PBS, “It’s unlikely Downton would have been seen in this country.” Ms. Kerger noted the instructive example of the onetime highbrow channels that now air Ice Road Truckers, Intervention, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and American Chopper: “The latest is History, but if you look at A&E, if you look at Bravo, if you look at some of the work of Discovery, the commercial networks start with higher intentions, but the market is going to take you down a different path.” (She didn’t mention Ovation or Trio; she didn’t have to.)

Interestingly, and perhaps tragically, PBS pioneered many of the most lucrative TV genres. Julia Child’s The French Chef was among the first cooking shows, and now we have two networks devoted to the format. An American Family created the template for reality. Sesame Street laid the groundwork for Nickelodeon. This Old House begat HGTV.

More recently, Downton-adjacent programming like the documentary Secrets of the Manor House indicate PBS may finally be learning to strike while the iron is hot.

Ms. Kerger cited Showtime’s Homeland as the sort of contemporary drama that would do well on PBS, but it would have made for an odd fit. Perhaps the flukiest thing about Downton’s success is how perfectly the show meshes with the PBS brand; by staying in its own lane, PBS got a win that required no pivoting, no rebranding, no stooping.

The great temptation, then—and the risk—is taking Downton’s success as a sign that PBS’s longstanding strategy will continue to work. “This is what we do week in and week out, so we have a built-in audience who was there, cheering that along and watching every minute of it,” Ms. Eaton said of Downton. Nonetheless, many of Downton fans hadn’t been regular PBS viewers since kindergarten. Viewers have tuned in for sex and death and gossip and big hats, and there’s no way of knowing if they’ll hang around. “We have another season of Sherlock that looks really great,” Ms. Kerger said. “That’ll be out later this spring, and I’m hoping some of the Downton audience will stick with that.”

Perhaps the greatest boon to PBS has been on the web side: Dan Greenberg, head of WNET’s Interactive Engagement Group in New York, noted that the show has been “an incredible generator for traffic,” adding, “We’ve seen an increase in donations and membership, and an extreme level of user-generated content.” For all the fustiness of its setting, Downton Abbey’s helped draw attention to the fact that PBS streams all its shows online—where a pledge is just a few clicks away. And PBS isn’t concerned about eating its own Nielsen’s lunch by making material available on the internet. “It used to be that ‘We have to make them watch on air,’ Mr. Greenberg said, “but now we have to supply them with content so they can watch the way they want.”

PBS is actually not a network. Like NPR, it’s a system of local member stations, which receive the majority of the federal government’s investment in the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which stands at $445 million in the most recent budget). All PBS programming is produced or licensed through one of its local affiliates, which get a great deal more leeway than your average NBC or ABC station. Most innovation, then, will happen at the local level. New York’s WNET recently launched “MetroFocus,” an online newsmagazine that will eventually transition to the air—after it becomes a smartphone app that serves up news on-the-fly.

Meanwhile, although AOL might not be most networks’ idea of an perfect business partner, Ms. Kerger has joined forces with Tim Armstrong to jointly promote Makers, an online interview series that will go to air in first-quarter 2013.

As to the danger of defunding, David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, has been arguing for for years that the government should get out of the broadcast business; he declared PBS a “public menace” in a New York Post editorial last June. “I don’t know any reason why PBS couldn’t be a nonprofit network that relied on foundational giving to a slightly greater degree than they do,” he said. Claiming that the federal government provides only 15 percent of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s annual budget, he added, “Do you know how many households have lost 15 percent of their income? And some of them have survived.” (In fiscal year 2009, PBS and its member stations derived 21.9% of their budget from federal funding.)

It’s not hard to imagine a future for PBS as a nonprofit that keeps the brand intact—drawing in donations and corporate partnerships—while innovating on the margins. What WNET President Neal Shapiro, whose career began in commercial television, calls “the work of the angels” could fall slightly to earth without going to hell in a handbasket. Then again, perpetual war has long meant perpetual success for PBS: “Last year, when there was a move to defund PBS, our viewers were mobilized—they sent donations, they called Capitol Hill,” Mr. Shapiro said.

But Mr. Boaz highly doubts that a post-federal-funding future will come to pass, no matter who is elected: “PBS and NPR audiences are the most influential in America,” he admitted. “There may be a lot of waitresses out there who’d rather have Randy Travis subsidized, but they’re not making decisions.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Boaz is thoroughly enjoying Downton Abbey. “I must say Lord Grantham is just as perfect and judicious and generous and metes out justice and equity to every person,” he said. “I can’t help but admire him—I just marvel at how noble he is.”

Ms. Kerger, PBS’s President, prefers the youngest daughter: “I love Lady Sybil. I think she’s amazing. I think that she is a woman that is trying to forge her own way.”

daddario@observer.com