It is not often we encounter people whose TV debut is on Sesame Street. Sonia Manzano, of course. Believe it or not, at some point we’ll get to Richard Belzer, who admittedly had previously been uncredited as a juror on the first episode of Saturday Night Live but other than that did Sesame Street even before appearing on The Tonight Show. But both of those make a sort of sense. The whole point of the Sesame Street grown-ups seemed to be that you thought of them on Sesame Street first, and it’s not hard to picture Belzer in the sort of weird little experimental film that often ended up in the in-between segments. (That they were educational doesn’t change that.) But my goodness, there she is. Eating the Number Painter’s threes.

I mean, if nothing else, it does give you an idea of the quality of performances even in minor Sesame Street roles? Stockard Channing may not be a name that comes up all the time, but when she does, it is usually in the context of a good performance of some sort. I grant you that “Mad Painter Victim” doesn’t require a great deal of skill, but so what? She still did a quality job at it, and isn’t that the important thing? And she brought that quality to every other role I’ve seen her in, which again may not be the world’s greatest compliment but is definitely still worth talking about.

Let’s be real; Stockard Channing is a character actress. She’s the sort of person it is not wrong to discuss in context of Margo Martindale or Kathy Bates. However, I consider both those women to be talented actresses worthy of more discussion than they tend to get; let’s be real that the discussion of character actresses lags behind the discussion of character actors in most people’s perceptions. Stockard Channing has done a lot of solid work, both in TV and in movies, and she’s not talked about as much as she should be.

I grant that I haven’t seen her Oscar-nominated performance in Six Degrees of Separation, and I’m not sure anyone seriously argues that she deserved to beat Holly Hunter in The Piano. Still, she did get an Oscar nomination, and she’s won two Emmys. She’s been nominated for three Golden Globes, if you care about Golden Globes. But it does seem as though her work has been quietly accepted as quality over the years even if people don’t talk about it much.

There’s an interesting parallel between Stockard Channing the woman and my favourite Stockard Channing character. Carol Ann in To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar has sspent much of her life defined by her husband. Meanwhile, Stockard Channing was born Susan Williams Antonia Stockard. Meanwhile, in the mid-sixties, before she was an actress, she was briefly married to a man named Walter Channing, Jr. She has kept his name her entire career, using her maiden name as a first name.

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