“Sesame Street”

7 a.m. Saturday on HBO

Like many an urban brownstone owner, “Sesame Street” has come into some cash, and it’s undertaken a lovely renovation.

The new block is so clean you could eat off the pavement. In the restyled opening titles, Elmo, the baby-talking red Muppet, blows soap bubbles that burst juicily in slow motion. Abby Cadabby, the fairy, sends glitter shimmering at the camera. Cookie Monster chomps down on a treat at a sidewalk cafe table outside Hooper’s Store. You could imagine someone ordering the $20 prix fixe brunch around the corner.

The shiny digs are being unveiled after a deal for survival that Sesame Workshop, faced with dwindling revenue from sources like DVD sales, struck with HBO last year. The channel will air the 35-episode Season 46, which begins Saturday. But the shows won’t air free on PBS for nine months.

Within this gated community is a new look, a new format and some new faces. The episodes keep the favorite characters — Elmo, Abby and Cookie Monster get more screen time — but they’ve been shortened from an hour to a half-hour, a more typical length for children’s programming. (PBS introduced a half-hour condensed version of the show in 2014.)

While cutting back some features (the producers have said there will be fewer pop-culture parodies), the show has expanded in other ways. The human cast adds Suki Lopez as Nina, a bilingual Hispanic neighbor. (HBO’s description says she works at the coin laundry and the bike store; perhaps she needs two jobs to afford premium cable.) And a bouncy new closing song stresses social skills as much as the ABCs: “You’re getting smarter, stronger, kinder/ On Sesame Street!”

“Kinder”? That’s a lofty promise for a TV show, but then parents have invested a lot of trust in “Sesame Street.”

PBS will offer half-hour “best of” episodes in the meantime, and it’s not as though scientists are discovering new numbers and letters. But it is dissonant to promote the new format as improved and newly relevant while also arguing that it doesn’t matter how soon children see them.

Maybe the reality is an unpalatable one to say in so many words: Like the newest digital tablet, the latest “Sesame Street” isn’t an essential. But it’s nice, if your parents happen to have the money.

The “Sesame Street” that debuted in 1969, free to the public, was like a tenement commune run by hip parents and their artist friends. The early episodes had beautiful and terrifying number animations scored to wild jazz. In the opening titles, kids frolicked without adult supervision on a city street. Cookie Monster smoked a pipe. The set was gritty and lived-in; incidental traffic noise played over outdoor scenes, and Ernie and Bert shared a dank basement apartment.

It was free-range kids’ TV, experimental, rough and — for all its deserved acclaim — far removed from later generations of educational TV that was sanitized for our protection. A 2006 DVD release of early episodes of the show was labeled “intended for grown-ups.”

“Sesame Street” changed many times before HBO came along. Elmo clawed inexorably up the ranks, claiming the final segment of the show for himself. The theme was rearranged, the color palette brightened. The format — described by one of the show’s creators, Joan Ganz Cooney, as a rapid-fire “‘Laugh-In’ for kids” — became more narrative.

In truth, the new HBO arrangement may make little difference to today’s children, who engage with franchises less through first-run TV than through games, clips and old episodes replayed — and replayed and replayed — on computers and mobile devices. At heart, this version isn’t vastly different from the Elmo-dominated, younger-child-focused “Sesame Street” of the past several years.

To an old resident’s eye, though, the neighborhood has changed. In the second new episode, Oscar the Grouch is back, his dented-up trash can ensconced next to a spiffy recycling bin, in one of those tasteful wooden garbage corrals people pay four figures for in Park Slope, Brooklyn. “There’s nothing but niceness on Sesame Street!” he grouses to cheerful Elmo.

But wait! They’re interrupted by Mucko Polo (Alan Cumming), a “grouch explorer” wearing an Elizabethan ruff, who leads Oscar and friends on a quest to find “grouchy” things — a skunk in a flower patch, a cookie accidentally laced with pepper — by using their senses.

Thank goodness for Oscar the Grouch. He belongs to another time; no pedagogical theory would propose him now, no earnest producer could pitch him. He is unprettiable, irredeemable, hanging on to his battered garbage can like the last rent-controlled tenant in a fancy co-op building.

Kids, being kids, will probably adjust immediately to the new “Sesame Street.” It’s parents who grew up on the old one who’ll be struck by how this show, which once taught them to find wonder amid the grime, now promises kids that they can uncover dirt in a sanitary, upscaled paradise.

© 2016 The New York Times Company