TELEVISION REVIEW

The venerable franchise from the 1970s returns in a new form.

By ROBERT LLOYD, Television Critic

Hey, you guys! “The Electric Company” is back.

I am a little too old to have learned my phonics from the original "Company" or my letters from "Sesame Street," but I watched them both anyway, because they were beautiful things, lively, artful and funny, their punning pop-cultural references not actually intended for their small-fry target audience, and the animation miles better than anything else being done at the time -- lovely and handmade and satisfyingly surreal.

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"Sesame Street" has been with us for 40 straight years, but "The Electric Company," which debuted in 1971, lasted only six seasons on PBS before it went dark. A "Laugh-In"-derived olio (like "Sesame Street"), it was designed to help beginning elementary-school students with their reading, and a lot of talent gathered there to get the job done: Its cast included Bill Cosby, Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno; John and Faith Hubley were among the animators; and Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, Joan Rivers and Mel Brooks contributed voices.

Those original six seasons comprised 780 reusable episodes, so it wasn't quite cut off at the knees, but even in reruns it was gone by 1985. Now, after a run of selected old episodes on Noggin from 1999 to 2003 and a couple of successful DVD sets in 2006, a new "Electric Company" bows today on PBS. (This is a preview; new episodes will premiere Fridays thereafter.) It is both bigger and smaller than the original: There will be fewer new shows, only 26 a season, but as a production, it's more ambitious and has left the studio that bound its predecessor for the streets of New York.

Although the series' essential concerns remain the same, the 2009 "Electric Company" inevitably measures the space we have traveled in three decades. Like everything else in the world, the show is faster, louder and busier, which would not necessarily seem to be the best environment for learning. Perhaps the children of today nod off at anything less than frenzy. Studies have no doubt been done.

Also, hip-hop happened: Rap is a natural vehicle in a show about words, and it is the musical lingua franca here. And the whole nature of children's television has changed, as multiple niche channels have made a world in which adults have been marginalized. It seems to have been determined that kids ages 6 to 9 (the "Electric Company" target audience) are more likely to respond to teenagers than they are to grown-ups, no matter how funny, cool or groovy. So, out with the oldsters.

With a production team that includes key creative players from the Broadway musical “In the Heights” and Tony-winner Willie Reale as head writer, the new "Electric Company" hangs its instructional segments on a narrative about a pack of singing, dancing teens with orthographic superpowers, or "mad, mad, super-bad special skills." They can all make letters appear by thinking of them, but when they join the Electric Company, each gets a particular extra ability. Keith (Ricky Smith) can make words into pictures. Lisa (Jenni Barber) is a whiz at anagrams. Their nemeses are the Pranksters, who make the more vivid impression and whose leader, Francine (Ashley Morris), in the opening episode steals Keith's mad, mad, super-bad special skill.

Although the cast is attractive, I was not entranced by this element of the show; it felt unnecessarily complicated and off the point. (I admit, I am not 6 to 9 years old.) The original series spent more time teaching, at no cost to entertainment, and as before, the short segments that demonstrate how words work are clever and funny and culturally referential in the old style. And though I was at first distressed to see Tom Lehrer's sweet ode to “Silent E” ("A little glob becomes a globe instantly/If you just add silent e") rewritten into a kind of "Middle School Musical" production number, it won me over in the end.

Some might say that none of this is necessary because in the future all words will be spelled with as few letters as possible, 2 make them EZ 4 U 2 text, and any words that can't easily be texted will just drop from the language. But for now, kids, English is still the thing. Know your phonemes.

robert.lloyd@latimes.com