In a new deal between Sesame Workshop International and MultiChoice, several seasons of its educational kids' show Takalani Sesame will be added to the Showmax video streaming service during July and August.
Seasons 12 to 18 of Takalani Sesame will now become available as on-demand content on Showmax, with seasons rolling out over the next two months.
Season 12 of Takalani Sesame was released on Showmax on Wednesday 2 July, with a new season released weekly on Wednesdays. Season 13 will be added on 9 July, season 14 on 16 July and season 15 on 23 July.
Seasons 17 and 18 of Takalani Sesame will be added to Showmax during August. Season 17 has a focus on critical school readiness skills, with 13 five-minute episodes titled "Watch Play Learn Science".
Season 18 will continue the school readiness theme, exploring processing skills including creative thinking, task persistence, and problem-solving.
Both seasons feature social-emotional learning, and include original songs about colours, shapes, affirmations, seasons, and the days of the week. Takalani Sesame will be available on Showmax in Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Sotho, and Zulu.
"We need to adapt to the changing media landscape by expanding access to our educational programming beyond traditional TV," says Dr Onyinye Nwaneri, Sesame Workshop International South Africa managing director.
"Children are consuming content in new and diverse ways, and in order to continue playing a meaningful role in their development, we are evolving to meet them where they are - across platforms and formats."
"This expansion allows us to reach more children, support their early learning journeys, and help close the developmental gaps that affect nearly half of children entering school."
"As an organisation, we want to be a child's trusted friend and a parent's valued partner, and by embracing digital expansion, we can ensure that no child is left behind."
Tracy-Ann van Rooyen, Showmax executive head of content, says "Nine out of 10 of the most streamed titles onShowmaxlast year were local content, but for children, that figure was reversed".
"Partnering with Takalani Sesame is a step towards addressing that imbalance and responding to the need for our children to see and hear themselves on our screens, in Afrikaans, Ndebele, Sotho and Zulu."
The reality show Die Brug on kykNET as well as the educational children's show Takalani Sesame both got 2024 International Emmy nominations.
It means that South Africa got two International Emmy Awards nods this year, compared to three last year and is also kykNET's first International Emmy Awards nomination ever.
The two South African shows are part of 56 International Emmy nominees across 14 categories that are competing in the 2024 International Emmy Awards taking place on 25 November in New York.
South Africa's two nominees are part of this year's nominees coming from Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, Türkiye and the United Kingdom.
"Every year the international television community competes to be recognized on the International Emmys' much-coveted global stage," says Bruce L. Paisner, International Academy president and CEO, in a statement.
"We congratulate the nominees for their outstanding programs and performances, they are once again a testament to the universal appeal of great storytelling across all genres, countries and cultures."
Die Brug, produced by Red Pepper Pictures for M-Net's kykNET (DStv 144) channel on MultiChoice's DStv has been renewed for a second season and is a nominee in the category for Best non-scripted entertainment.
Die Brug, produced by Frederick Louw and Lindi Lucouw, is also a contender in the Best International format category for this year's 18th South African Film and Television Awards (SAFTAs) organised by the National Film and Television Foundation (NFVF) taking place in October in Johannesburg.
In its International Emmy Awards category Die Brug is up against Me Caigo De Risa [Anything Goes] from TelevisaUnivision in Mexico, Restaurant Misverstand [The Restaurant That Makes Mistakes] from Roses Are Blue in Belgium, as well as The Summit from Endemol Shine Australia in Australia.
"Die
Brug is a very
special format and somewhat of an enigma to produce,” says Cecil Barry, CEO of
Red Pepper.
"Working with kykNET on this wonderful format was indeed a great
adventure and privilege. We are proud and excited about this Emmy nomination,
especially because it brings international recognition to kykNET and Red
Pepper."
Waldimar Pelser, M-Net director of premium channels, says "When
Marguerite Albrecht, one of the commissioning producers at kykNET, suggested in
May 2022 that kykNET adapt the international format Die Brug for
our viewers, we knew something exciting was coming".
"The end product, produced by Red Pepper,
provided our viewers with immense enjoyment. To receive international
recognition for an Afrikaans production filmed near the picturesque Swellendam
in the Southern Cape is immensely gratifying. And the second season will be
airing on kykNET next year."
Nomsa Philiso, MultiChoice CEO for general entertainment, says "Die Brugis one of those rare reality shows
that come along from time to time that turn the genre on its head".
"We’re proud
to have been able to adapt a top-notch international format for our local
market – and produce such an amazing local version. Congratulations to our talented
crew on bringing a uniquely South African flavour toDie Brug, which stands
comfortably alongside versions produced anywhere else in the world."
The first season of Die Brug is currently available on MultiChoice's Showmax streamer.
Takalani Sesame which was also a nominee in the 2023 International Emmy Awards is again a nominee in the Kids: factual category.
Takalani Sesame on the South African public broadcaster's SABC2 and produced by the Sesame Workshop and Ochre Moving Pictures, is nominated for its Takalani Sesame Big Feelings special.
In the category, Takalani Sesame competes against De Mensenbieb [Living Library] from Skyhigh TV in the Netherlands, La Vida Secreta de tu Mente [The Secret Life of Your Mind] from Warner Bros. Discovery in Mexico, as well as My Life: Eva's Having a Ball from Fresh Start Media in the United Kingdom.
The new star-studded 13th season of Takalani Sesame which will start on SABC2 on 6 June with new episodes on weekdays at 15:30 will feature guest appearances by Sho Madjozi, Prev Reddy, Holly and Mimi Rey, Farieda Metsileng, David Kau, the Goliath brothers and others, and help parents and kids to understand and talk about different feelings.
The new 13th season of Takalani Sesame will focus on helping people understand "big feelings" ranging from sadness and frustration, to recognising when you're scared and angry and what to do about it.
Takalani Sesame episodes are available in English on Mondays, isiZulu on Tuesdays, Sesotho on Wednesdays, isiNdebele on Thursdays and Afrikaans on Fridays.
Innocent Nkata, managing director of Sesame Workshop South Africa managing director, says the focus of the 13th season of Takalani Sesame is on helping children and parents recognise emotions and how to process them - especially when something feels overwhelming.
"The season's lessons will help children identify and name big feelings and provide strategies to manage these emotions."
"Big feelings can be difficult for young children to handle or overcome and that's why in the brand-new 13th season of Takalani Sesame, our beloved Muppets are focusing on what to do when your emotions feel like they're about to burst out of your body."
"The season's lessons will help children identify and name Big Feelings and provide strategies to manage these emotions, skills that are critical in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic."
"Kids learn best when they're playing and having fun. That's why Elmo, Zuzu, Moshe, Zikwe, Kami and animated friends like Basma, Jad and Grover come up with games and songs that let children explore different emotions and how to deal with them."
"This could be like feeling left out when someone else is chosen to play a game first or feeling frustrated if you don't get something right the first time, and the Takalani Sesame friends learn techniques to help them cope with big feelings, like belly breathing, counting to five or drawing it out."
Mari Payne, Sesame Workshop South Africa director of education and outreach, says "Recent developments have proved to us the importance of building resilience and overcoming trauma by developing critical social-emotional skills".
"By helping children build social-emotional skills, we're giving them the tools they need to thrive both in school and in life."
Danie Swart, SABC head of education, says "SABC2 and SABC Education have been long-standing champions of edutainment as part of our drive to entertain and inform our viewers and we are so happy to see a diverse contingent of South African celebrities joining a well-loved, proudly local show".
With some friendly new faces in the Takalani neighbourhood, the South African spinoff of Sesame Street is marking its milestone 20th anniversary of providing preschool TV content on SABC2 in the time of Covid.
Innocent Nkata, managing director of Sesame Workshop South Africa, spoke to TVwithThinus about 2 decades of the colourful and playful puppets, what the new season and a Covid-19 special is about, why Takalani Sesame is important, the new characters, and the building blocks of diversity, inclusion and ubuntu tying everything together.
What would you say has been the big achievements of Takalani Sesame of the past 2 decades? Innocent Nkata: It's been to make early learning opportunities available to millions of children in South Africa who would otherwise not have any opportunity for any learning at all before they enter school.
Recently Statistics South Africa (SSA) published a report which detailed the number of children who have access to early learning opportunities and those who don't. The finding was that nearly half of children between birth and 6 years old do not have access to early learning opportunities.
They don't attend any learning institution at all before they go to school at 7. And in that age group in South Africa we have just over 7 million children. So more than half means more than 3 million children under 6 years of age who don't have access to those early learning opportunities.
That's what Takalani Sesame has consistently been doing over the past 2 decades because we use the power of mass media to reach children in their homes. We have consistently reached, in any given month, more than 4 million children through television and other digital channels.
Can you tell more about the conceptualisation of the new characters, Basma and Jad? Innocent Nkata: The primary theme in Takalani Sesame that these new characters are carrying is that of "learning-through-play".
We decided to introduce the theme of learning-through-play after the realisation that play is a very powerful vehicle to help children cope with setbacks in life, to help cope with difficult circumstances, but also critical to help them in their normal development to help them develop creativity, cognitive skills, physical skills, and their social and emotional skills.
Play has all those benefits, yet in South Africa and in many other places across the world, many parents and educators are not aware of those benefits. As a result, they don't do much to facilitate and to deliberately use play as a vehicle in that development of children.
That's why we are putting it into Takalani Sesame where we will use our characters to model the benefits, the how, the why, the what of learning-through-play. All of the Takalani Sesame characters will do the same, but the primary characters who are portraying this message are Basma and Jad.
What we did is to introduce a brand-new segment in Takalani Sesame of 5-minutes which is focused on learning through play.
Basma and Jad are two friends who have just arrived in the Takalani neighbourhood. Children will see that they have their workshop where they keep all of their tools and whatever they use.
The key focus in storylines are that we see them playing in the club house or on the playground, they encounter a particular problem, then you hear them shouting "Oh, we have a problem. What shall we do to solve this problem?", and then they set off on the path towards solving the problem.
They need some tools, they go to their workshop, they try different things, they meet some frustrations, but they continue to persist because that's typically the skills that you want to teach in children. It's task persistence, but in the process, they're having fun, they're playing and at the end of the segment when they've solved the problem you hear them shouting "We did it!".
Why Basma and Jad are new characters and why we didn't embed this into the existing Takalani Sesame characters is because it's a theme that we are carrying in different characters across the world.
How has Covid-19 impacted the new season of Takalani Sesame and is it worked into the show to explain it to children? Was it more difficult to produce the season? Innocent Nkata: We did the filming for the season late last year in 2019. We finished filming in December. The current season doesn't have very evident Covid-19 scenes.
We are already preparing to film the next season and in that season Covid-19 related content will be very evident.
However, what we have also since done is that we have been creating additional content that is Covid-19 related that we are placing around the main show. We have public service announcements (PSA's) for instance teaching children how to wash their hands, teaching them other healthy sanitation habits that play immediately after an episode.
In addition to that, we are also in the process of developing other short-form content that we will be distributing through digital platforms and connecting those to the TV programme.
Then we developed a family Takalani Sesame special, a 25-minute programme entitled Elmo's World News Special on SABC2 - the same length as the usual episode - that is very specifically focused on helping children and families to cope with the current challenges of being in lockdown and dealing with Covid-19.
Takalani Sesame has been so successful over many years with addressing difficult adult topics like HIV/Aids. Now an international conversation about racism and #BlackLivesMatter has been pushed to the forefront. What new broader topics or themes will Takalani Sesame tackle and touch on going forward? Innocent Nkata: In terms of how we decided what to put in the programme, our education programming is underpinned by a comprehensive educational framework which is also endorsed by the department of basic education.
It is also aligned to the national curriculum framework for children from birth to 6 years of age. We do workshops with stakeholders and go through a process of reflecting on the main challenges and most pressing challenges that are facing children in South Africa.
Then we prioritise. Obviously, there are so many challenges and we can't address all of them so we go through a prioritisation process in which we decide which are most pressing right now, what are the ones where, as Takalani Sesame, we have a comparative advantage as mass media to make the biggest difference.
We also do extensive research at the beginning of every season to validate those needs that we have identified to get views from parents and from children.
About other themes in the current season, besides learning through play, there are two other themes that we are deliberately addressing are the themes of diversity and inclusion, as well as ubuntu.
With diversity - and as you might be aware in the world of film, it's all about "show, don't tell". We're not shouting about it but we're showing.
We're showing the characters, we're showing the children interacting with people whom they share differences, whether those differences are in terms of outlook, how their skin looks, in terms of language, in terms of ethnicity, nationality and where they come from, in terms of gender. So we are modelling all of those elements of diversity and inclusion very deliberately within Takalani Sesame.
The third theme is ubuntu which is related to that. We are putting ubuntu at the centre of Takalani Sesame. We're using the show to model and teach children about the importance of the values of caring, respect, about sharing, about living and working together whether you are different or whether you are the same.
This is in every episode. At the end of the episode, after the characters do a certain challenge in which they have to make something to deliver to a friend who is different from them, they deliver that gift, then celebrate and then you see them celebrating and dancing to an ubuntu song. We've created a Takalani ubuntu song that they dance to. We even have a full music video version of the song.
The puppeteering and production values of Takalani Sesame - how has that possibly improved or advanced because it's the same people who stay and keep doing this craft? Innocent Nkata: We have been very fortunate I have to say to have puppeteers who have stayed with Takalani Sesame for such a long time. There are very few substitutes for experience.
The puppeteers of all 5 of the main Takalani Sesame characters have been with us for a very long time. What it means is that the work is of a very high quality.
Puppeteering is very difficult and taxing work. So having had them for a very long time means that they have lots of experience. It also means that their focus is really on producing a high-quality show.
The new characters - Basma and Jad and Grover - for them we had to recruit new puppeteers. This is young talent, fresh artists and part of us developing new puppeteering talent in South Africa.
For them to be able to pick this up and learning alongside these very experienced puppeteers has been once of the things that also strengthens the quality of the show.
Where we're pegging the production values for viewers who are familiar with America's Sesame Street - because that's our mothership and the highest quality of all of our programmes - we'll say our production values are almost next to the quality of Sesame Street.
We deliberately did that because this is a critical milestone - as Takalani Sesame we're celebrating our 20th anniversary, we want to reposition the Takalani brand, consolidating where we have come from and driving a new vision going forward, and responding to children's needs which are becoming even more complex.
It's the first time that the Lego Foundation has become involved or become a partner. I don't think they give you free Lego blocks but what does the Lego Foundation contribute? Just funding or what does the Lego Foundation allow Takalani Sesame to do more or differently? Innocent Nkata: Our partnership with the Lego Foundation is a groundbreaking multimedia partnership.
That partnership is at a global level. A big part of it is in the Middle East, and including South Africa.
It's focused on learning through play, and producing content to promote learning through play on different platforms on television, digital platforms, as well as through community outreach. So it's a far-reaching partnership that goes far beyond just the television.
Its primary focus is to enable the infusion of learning through play into Takalani Sesame media content across the different platforms.
Sesame still retains the editorial control of the production of the show.
When we produce the playful problem-solving block which carries the learning-through-play theme, we work very closely with the Lego Foundation. We consult with them to provide some guidance on how we are treating the learning-through-play theme in the TV show.
■ Takalani Sesame is broadcast on SABC2 on weekdays at 15:30.
■ The English version of Elmo's World News Special will be broadcast on SABC2 on Sunday 2 August at 18:30.
The Muppets and the preschool edutainment Takalani Sesame children's programming block is returning for its 11th season from Monday 1 June on SABC2 at 15:30 on weekdays with some new friends.
The Muppets will welcome some new friends to the neighbourhood for new adventures as they explore the world around them through play, while learning the importance of not giving up when working through a problem.
The 11th season of Takalani Sesame will introduce the 6-year-old Basma and her best friend Jad, the self-declared "cute, furry little monster" Grover, and the clucking, bawking, squawking Chicken.
They will be joined by familiar Takalani Sesame Muppet friends Elmo, the 3-and-a-half year-old red monster with a contagious giggle.
Elmo tries to keep up with the older characters, Zuzu, an imaginative and curious natural leader, Kami, a five-year-old who loves to read and sing, Moshe, the gentle giant who loves to dance and take care of his garden, and Zikwe, who always has a story to tell from his world travels.
Elmo and Zuzu start every episode in their Clubhouse where a child calls in to invite them for a visit to someplace special around South Africa like a skatepark or the Nelson Mandela Children’s Hospital.
They decide to use everyday objects to make a gift to bring along, like a drum or maracas and their Takalani Sesame friends drop in at different points to help them build their special item and solve problems along the way.
Each episode ends by going on a fun ride to deliver the item to their new friend, and together they sing along to the Takalani Sesame ubuntu song and showcase some dance moves.
"Now more than ever, young children and their caregivers need quality early learning at home and the Takalani SesameMuppets are here to help,"says Innocent Nkata, Sesame Workshop South Africa managing director.
"The new season blends the playfulness and humour that Takalani Sesamehas always been known for with the fundamental lessons that children need to thrive, including cognitive, creative problem solving and socio-emotional skills, while nurturing the foundational values of ubuntu."
"At a time when many children are out of school Takalani Sesamewill bring the power of learning through play to children and caregivers across South Africa."
Takalani Sesame, the preschool educational programme utilising America's Muppets puppets, have started production on four brand-new seasons after 12 years on South African television and will continue in a new format when the new 6th season starts on the SABC on 2 September.
The show broke ground when it introduced Kami, the HIV-positive Muppet, in South Africa.
The new seasons of Takalani Sesame will continue to educate children through television and on radio and to support mother tongue-based education. Takalani Sesame is produced as a partnership between Sesame Workshop, the non-profit educational organisation behind Sesame Street; South Africa's department of basic education, Sanlam as sponsor, the SABC and the production partner Kwasukasukela (KWK).
In a format shift, the Takalani Sesame characters will now appear in segments linked to their "personalities": Zikwe loves to travel, Neno has language skills and Kami is interested in science.
The new Takalani Sesame will make use of longer story narratives connected to specific segments to introduce children to a variety of words used throughout an episode.
