‘Sesame Street’ Curbed by HBO Max as 200 Episodes Suddenly Removed From Service

HBO Max is getting ruthless with its latest content cut. Sure, it hurt when the streamer sliced hours of animated content and scripted shows, but now they’re coming for the kids and pulling a large chunk of Sesame Street from their library. Variety reports that HBO Max is removing about 200 episodes of the classic children’s show, reducing their count from 650 episodes to just 456.

The outlet reports that HBO Max now features Sesame Street episodes from earlier seasons including Seasons 1, 5 and 7, plus recent episodes from Season 39-52. A large segment of early Sesame Street content appears to be gone from the service, with Variety pointing out that Seasons 2-4, plus Seasons 8-35 appear to be no longer available.

When reached for comment by Decider, reps for HBO Max did not immediately respond.

While the removal of Sesame Street is shocking, it didn’t fully come without warning … but HBO Max was a pretty sneaky about it. The streamer slipped in that they would be removing “select Sesame Street specials” from their library when first announcing the 37 titles that would be leaving HBO Max this week.

Still, entire seasons of Sesame Street don’t technically count as specials, so it looks like HBO Max was underselling just how dramatic their content cut would really be. And select specials are still available to stream. Per Variety, Sesame Street Mecha Builders, My Sesame Street Friends and The Magical Wand Chase are all streaming on HBO Max as of today (Aug. 19).

HBO Max is cleaning up big time ahead of their merger with discovery+, which will take place next year. When initially announcing the titles that would be cut earlier this week, the company pretty blatantly pointed to the merger, stating in a press release, “As we work toward bringing our content catalogs together under one platform, we will be making changes to the content offering available on both HBO Max and discovery+. That will include the removal of some content from both platforms.”

They added, “At the same time, we’re already starting to bring our content catalogs together like the launch of the new CNN Originals Hub on discovery+ and a curated collection of Magnolia Network content coming soon to HBO Max.”