Now more than ever, we are a "behind the scenes" culture. Whether we are demanding that our favorite movie be released with hours of extras or following the stars of our favorite show on Twitter, we want to do more than simply enjoy entertainment as it is presented to us. If we love a thing, we increasingly want to take it apart, examine its pieces under a microscope, and put it back together. Are the actors friends in real life? What was this scene like in the first draft of the script? Did you know the star was out of his mind on cocaine when this sequence was filmed? Maybe this knowledge allows us to appreciate things on a deeper level; maybe it simply robs things of their magic and ruins them forever. Whatever the final outcome, we are disappointed when the DVD doesn't include a commentary.

Given the public's bottomless appetite for behind-the-scenes dirt and insight, Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street by Michael Davis should be an easy slam dunk. Sesame Street has been the first favorite show for generations of American children since its debut in 1969, and many of us find its songs and quotable lines running through our heads decades after watching our last episode. An exhaustive, detailed history of the show from the moment of its conception (during a 1965 dinner party conversation about whether television could be used to improve children's lives rather than just hypnotize them) with the full cooperation of all the people who were there should be a riveting treasure trove of information.

Why, then, is this book ultimately so maddening?

Street Gang touts itself as "the complete history of Sesame Street," but it quickly becomes clear that the book is complete in all the wrong places. In his attempt to catalogue every influence and inspiration that make up Sesame Street's DNA, Davis ends up spending as much time setting the scene as he does telling the story. To illustrate how Sesame Street and its Muppets were different than the children's puppet shows that had come before them, Davis feels the need to detail the complete history of Howdy Doody, the biography of the Kukla, Fran, and Ollie team, and the life story and resume of everyone who ever worked on Captain Kangaroo. In fact, the book chooses to devote dozens and dozens of pages to the Captain Kangaroo working environment, Captain Kangaroo's personality flaws, Captain Kangaroo's management style and educational philosophy... all so that it can remind us which Sesame Street staffers worked for him when it mentions them later. Much, much, much later.

The book mentions that one of Captain Kangaroo's writers was a man named Tom Whedon. It mentions that he is the father of Joss Whedon, and that he didn't have a great experience with the Captain, and that he talked with Sesame Street's creator Joan Ganz Cooney before eventually taking a job on her follow-up show, The Electric Company. Tom Whedon never worked on Sesame Street a day in his life. Why is he in this book?

Obviously, these chapters (and there are several) would be wonderfully invaluable if the reader had purchased a book called Life in the Captain's Pocket or The Complete History of Children's Television That Went Off the Air Decades Before You Were Born. Unfortunately, those of us who want to read about Sesame Street will sit through hundreds of pages before the first episode is filmed, which would be fine if those pages had been about Jim Henson instead of what made the Kukla, Fran, and Ollie guy want to go into puppetry.

Luckily, Davis is equally thorough when it comes to the actual creators of Sesame Street, but even those sections are often too complete in all the wrong ways. While the reader picks up a book like this expressly to learn about how Carroll Spinney came to be Big Bird's puppeteer, it is completely superfluous to go back two generations in Carroll Spinney's family history and devote page space to what his grandparents were like before he was born. While it might be interesting to someone, somewhere, which side the grandfather of one of the show's creators fought for in the Civil War, absolutely no part of a book about Sesame Street should take place in the 1860s.

The places where Davis has chosen to be thorough are only frustrating once it becomes clear what he glosses over. When I was in Sesame Street's target demographic, Gordon had a sister named Olivia (although I don't think I realized they were siblings at the time). Olivia was played by Alaina Reed, who would later go on to costar in 227, the mid-eighties Saturday sitcom mainstay. Olivia was on the show for twelve years (1976-1988) a period spanning roughly three to five generations of Sesame Street viewers.

Do you remember Olivia? Because Street Gang doesn't.

After a dozen years on the show during the period the book calls the show's heyday, the character and actress who played her merit not a single mention anywhere in the entire book. Not a paragraph; not a photo; not a footnote. She has been mysteriously disappeared from the "Complete History" so utterly it almost seems sinister. There are any number of characters who get similarly short shrift; while the book cannot be expected to deliver comprehensive chapters on every character who ever ate at Hooper's, it would be nice if the existence of Barkley or Mumford could get a single sentence clause in a book that has just devoted 50 pages to Captain Kangaroo. The book contains more information about Kukla, Fran and Ollie than it does about puppets and puppeteers that were actually on Sesame Street for hundreds of episodes.

The Muppets performed by Frank Oz have been handed off to other puppeteers; at a recent panel, Oz mentioned that he had just performed for the first time in two years. One assumes that he has simply devoted himself to his directorial career now that his partner Jim Henson and fellow performer Richard Hunt have died, but I have read rumors that stalwarts from the Henson days are unhappy with how the Muppets are being handled now. Whether his departure was amiable or not, we do not learn from Street Gang, because his departure is not mentioned at all. Puppeteer David Rudman now performs Cookie Monster; his name may be in the book once.

A PBS affiliate in Mississippi refused to air the show in 1970 because the cast was integrated. You may find that jaw-dropping, but Street Gang does not; the book devotes more words to describing which dish Joan Ganz Cooney served at the dinner party when Sesame Street was first discussed, including a brief bio of Julia Child and the cookbook the hostess got the recipe from. (One is tempted to ask, "What? No page number?")

Between glaring omissions and trips down historical cul de sacs, the book provides just enough riveting backstory as intermittent reinforcement to keep you reading. "Mr. Hooper" was blacklisted by HUAC in the fifties. "Bob" was a wildly popular pop idol in Japan. And then there is the tragic, almost unbelievable story of Northern Calloway, who played David in the seventies and eighties. Reading the passages about Calloway will change the way you look at those old shows forever.

There are similarly fascinating behind-the-scenes stories about the show's struggles for funding (it essentially birthed public television as we know it) as well as its endeavors not to sell out. You will learn why Elmo is Rosie O'Donnell's fault. You will learn how Disney essentially killed Jim Henson. You will learn how late era format changes left creator Jon Stone embittered at the end of his life. Unfortunately, you will learn them all too briefly; the entire eighties, when most readers would have been watching the show, are crammed into a single, slim chapter.

There are pearls to be found in Street Gang, but ultimately it is best read from back to front. Buy it, but start in the index and seek out the content you care about, keeping in mind that content may be outnumbered.

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