It might seem ungenerous to rip “Sesame Street,” a program that applies its longstanding commitment to the notion of urban, cross-cultural harmony to delighting children even as it educates them. And we come not to rip “Sesame Street” itself — although the rote mediocrity that is the indie-rock band OK Go’s video “3 Primary Colors Song,” earmarked for a forthcoming episode, does speak to a shadow commitment: to recruiting celebrity guests whose presences reassure parents that their offspring are absorbing certain (open-minded but tasteful) pop-cultural mores in addition to their ABCs. (It is a diverse but consistently progressive-humanist group of stars who have visited “Seasame Street.”)

Parents of “Seasame Street” watchers will recognize OK Go from the succesfully calculated viral music videos the band has previously produced: The one with the treadmills, the one with the Rube Goldberg machine. These clips were painstaking to make and a hoot to watch. But the visuals far outstripped the audio — OK Go’s dull, jumpy songs. The music for “3 Primary Colors Song” is cloying and simplistic even by children’s television standards. They Might Be Giants OK Go are not. The vocals are mealy, lacking the command, precision, and humor with which you hold young people’s attention. The beat is generic, not over-the-top or fun. The visuals, meanwhile, incorporate some of the band’s hallmarks — vivid colors, of course, but also costumes and stop-motion animation — without any of the inventive gestures or nods to process that have lent their past videos tension and depth. The viewer’s led to a disturbing conclusion: That OK Go thought they could phone in their “Sesame Street” appearance — that, perhaps, they thought the children simply wouldn’t notice. 

But we’re not so concerned about the kids — they’re resilient. It is the tweens, teens, college students, and adults who need a rest from OK Go’s overdetermined attempts to deflect attention away from their music. This is not a career. It is a case of denial. It’s time to get off the treadmill.