Hey, kids! You wanna see Cersei Lannister casually peer pressure Sesame Street’s Elmo into drinking? How about Cookie Monster teaching two robots who believe themselves to be human that sharing is caring? Of course you do.
In celebration of Sesame Street’s 50th anniversary, HBO’s launched a new campaign focused on the concept of respect, and—because the network also produces series like Game of Thrones and Westworld—someone got the brilliant idea of putting together a pair of excellent crossover PSA videos. When you peel back all of the layers of violence, gore, sex, addiction, and the second round of sex that are hallmarks of HBO’s prestige sci-fi and fantasy dramas, they both boil down to being epic stories about people who can’t see eye to eye with one another.
If Cersei and Tyrion could have simply set aside their family drama and made a good faith effort to listen, understand, and respect one another as power players in Westeros, they’d both arguably be much better off. If Westworld’s Bernard and Dolores were able to talk straight to one another about their complicated, shared secret history, there’s a chance that they both would have been able to make it out of the park alive to live freely. Of course, they’d never come to these sorts of realizations on their own, which is why they need Elmo and Cookie Monster to help them out.
It’s always fun when Sesame Street reminds us all how silly the grimdark shows we love actually are—and, honestly, the kids’ show’s jokes do tend to land a little better than either Game of Thrones or Westworld’s. What we need now, though, is for Big Bird or some such to have a chat with the Night King about how it’s not cool to snatch babies and kill dragons. Not cool at all.
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