show's length from one hour to 30 minutes across all its broadcast platforms. The new version focused on fewer characters, reduced pop culture references "once included as winks for their parents", and focused "on a single backbone topic." Educational goals Author Malcolm Gladwell said that "Sesame Street was built around a single, breakthrough insight: that if you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them." Gerald S. Lesser, the CTW's first advisory board chair, went even further, saying that the effective use of television as an educational tool needed to capture, focus, and sustain children's attention. Sesame Street was the first children's show to structure each episode, and the segments within them, to capture children's attention, and to make, as Gladwell put it, "small but critical adjustments" to keep it. According to CTW researchers Rosemarie Truglio and Shalom Fisch, it was one of the few children's shows to utilize a detailed and comprehensive educational curriculum, garnered from formative and summative research. Sesame Street's creators and researchers formulated both cognitive and affective goals for the show. They initially focused on cognitive goals, while addressing affective goals indirectly, believing it would increase children's self-esteem and feelings of competency. One of their primary goals was preparing young children for school, especially children from low-income families, using modeling, repetition, and humor. They adjusted its content to increase viewers' attention and the show's appeal, and encouraged older children and parents to "co-view" it by including more sophisticated humor, cultural references, and celebrity guests; by 2019, 80% of parents watched Sesame Street with their children, and 650 celebrities had appeared on the show. During Sesame Streets first season, some critics felt that it should address more overtly such affective goals as social competence, tolerance of diversity, and nonaggressive ways of resolving conflict. The show's creators and producers responded by featuring these themes in interpersonal disputes between its Street characters. During the 1980s, the show incorporated real-life experiences of its cast and crew, including the death of Will Lee (Mr. Hooper) and the pregnancy of Sonia Manzano (Maria). In later seasons, it addressed real-life disasters such as the September 11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina. In its first season, the show addressed its outreach goals by focusing on the promotion of educational materials used in preschool settings; and in subsequent seasons, by focusing on their development. Innovative programs were developed because their target audience, children