The Electric Company is an American educational children's television series produced by Sesame Workshop and developed by Karen Fowler. It is a reboot of the 1971 series of the same name. The series ran on PBS Kids Go! from January 19, 2009, to August 27, 2012 with reruns continuing on PBS until August 31, 2014. The series aired reruns on HBO Kids on HBO Family from January 1, 2016, until November 1, 2020, as part of HBO's deal with Sesame Workshop. On some services, the series is called The New Electric Company to distinguish it from the 1971–77 series.
Conception
The new version has similar short animations, parodies, sketches, and music videos to those seen in the original show, but each episode also features a story line designed to teach four to five vocabulary words with a mix of hip-hop- or contemporary R&B-style music.
Each story revolves around the Electric Company, a group of tween and teen literacy heroes who battle a group of neighborhood vandals dubbed the Pranksters. The heroes' headquarters is the Electric Diner, where their friend Shock, a beat-boxing short-order cook who also appears in the short-form segments, resides.
In a nod to the original series, each episode's opening has a Company member call on the others to assemble by yelling "Hey, you guys!!"—a line that (as yelled by Rita Moreno) led off the opening sequence of seasons two, five, and six. In one episode, an actor who plays one of the Pranksters yells the opening line, as her normal character had switched bodies with one of the Electric Company members. Other nods to the original series include appearances by Paul the Gorilla and updated versions of the soft-shoe silhouette segments in which words are sounded out.
The revival includes interactive Web elements and is promoted and extended via community-outreach projects. The first season consisted of 28 weekly episodes. A second season consisting of twelve episodes began airing on January 18, 2010. A third season debuted on February 7, 2011, and ended on April 4, 2011, with new Company member Marcus and new Prankster Gilda (named for Saturday Night Live cast member Gilda Radner). Later episodes omit Jessica saying the five words and went straight to the episode. Later re-airings of "The Flube Whisperer," "He's Not Frozen, He’s Immobile," "Dirty Laundry," "Out to Launch," "Lost and Spaced," "Franscent," "Trouble Afoot," "Gravity Groove," "The Orangachoke," and all airings of the third season were focused on both expressive reading and the five Ws. A fourth and final season had new episodes planned, but ultimately scrapped and instead aired eight past episodes from the first two seasons with new content and interstitials, which began airing on July 9, 2012.
Characters
Main
The Electric Company
The Electric Company consists of a group of four friends who protect the neighborhood from the Pranksters. They all have the power to throw wordballs, blue magical balls that create words on any surface. Each member has a special skill.