Television has rarely been funnier than the classic Sesame Street segment that finds young Joey Calvan testing the patience of Kermit The Frog. The girl trusts and believes in the frog, and in some small way must know that he’ll play along when she adds a few stray “Cookie Monster”s to their recitation of the alphabet. The magic of The Muppets is that Jim Henson could maintain that whole atmosphere of connection while still lightly pushing back against his scene partner, something his successors continue to do whenever they turn up on a talk show or at a live event or in an on-camera interview. Be it Kermit, Miss Piggy, or Animal, in an off-the-cuff conversation or a scripted bit, they’ve always allowed whomever they’re talking with to slip away from the unstated rules and social contracts of human interaction. Keep believing, keep pretending, and in that moment, you too could be a Muppet.
That’s the guiding principle of Muppets Now, the Muppets’ new streaming series and Disney’s best effort to date at bringing Henson’s most famous creations back to TV. It’s not the entirety of what makes the Muppets work (and some of those other qualities are, fortunately, on display here, too), but it’s a good starting point. On Muppets Now, the Muppets get grown adults to answer deeply personal questions, smear their faces with makeup, and splatter a pizza parlor’s entire menu against a wall. It’s the kind of show where a tense taco cook-off between Danny Trejo and The Swedish Chef ends, like Kermit and Joey’s ABCs standoff, in a heart-melting show of affection.
Muppets Now largely succeeds at folding flesh-and-blood guests into its proceedings, and for the most part shows no wear from the bumpy ride the characters took to Disney+. It’s an intriguing package to put the franchise in, a variety show with unscripted elements presented as the Muppets’ big foray into subscription on-demand video—with all the teetering on the edge of disaster that implies. It eventually reveals a limited range of offerings (it’d make a repetitive binge), so it can’t quite beat out HBO Max’s The Not-Too-Late Show With Elmo for the title of The Muppet Show’s true streaming successor. But in terms of quality, entertainment value, and honoring the disorderly spirit of the characters, it’s a vast improvement over the muddled 2015 mockumentary The Muppets.
Like that show, Muppets Tonight, and MuppeTelevision before it, Muppets Now translates The Muppet Show into the televisual lingua franca of the day. Drafting off the cast’s too-short run as genuine viral-video stars, every episode comprises updates from Muppet-fronted faux webseries like “Lifestyle With Miss Piggy,” in which the perpetually aggrieved star delivers beauty, fashion, and health tips that she herself clearly has no plan of following. For its backstage framing device, Muppets Now drags and drops itself onto Scooter’s work computer, where he frantically uploads each segment to the cloud in between video calls, unwanted pitches from Fozzie Bear, and, in one inspired touch, real-time test marketing from erstwhile opera-box hecklers Statler and Waldorf.
There’s an ingeniousness to the way Muppets Now casts its classic characters in contemporary roles and formats: Miss Piggy as aspiring influencer, the Swedish Chef thrust into a cooking competition with Tasty-style overheard photography, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker running Muppet Labs like one of those YouTube channels where household objects are torched or crushed in the name of science. Fresh, informative, but most importantly, funny—the Chef’s culinary catastrophes are juxtaposed with dishes you’d actually want to eat and Bunsen’s amped-up experiments increase the already high stakes of puppeteering near an open flame. There’s also just something appealing in who’s getting the spotlight here: While disclaimer-spouting Joe The Legal Weasel and “gobbling gourmand” Beverly Plume represent some new faces, Muppets Now emphasizes characters who thrived in the slam-bam rhythms of The Muppet Show but had less presence in recent, more narratively focused projects.
It’s thrillingly kinetic and rib-tickling right up until the point where routine starts to dampen the sense that anything can happen within the confines of Scooter’s appropriately cluttered desktop. This is forgivable: Formula is the life blood of family entertainment, and Muppets Now isn’t a production on the scale of its broadcast predecessors—and even those shows had their running gags, recurring segments, and go-to punchlines, some of which are the bases for this show’s highest highs. But Muppets Now feels hemmed in in a way those other shows didn’t, particularly in the Piggy segments, which, through the four episodes screened for critics, always feature the same two guests stars: Taye Diggs and Linda Cardellini. (To their credit, both are incredibly game.) On the other hand, each installment of Lifestyle begins with a new iteration on a “Robot Repair”/“Peanut Butter Is One Word Don’t Write One Word” joke involving the title, and those kill without fail. Just goes to show how even the smallest dab of creative variety can benefit a formula.
The show finds other avenues for invention, boasting a visual playfulness that builds from the vocabulary of those earlier YouTube shorts and litters the frame with prop gags and Easter eggs. Pay close attention to the name and logo of the videochat app that Scooter and the gang use; watch as the Scandinavian gibberish flies in the onscreen graphics of every “Økėÿ Døkęÿ Køøkiñ” face-off. For that matter, marvel at the skill with which the current generation of Muppet performers sell the illusion of their characters peering into web cameras. (Considering the “now” that Muppets Now is premiering in, the always logged-on relevance of Scooter orchestrating things remotely picked up some COVID-19 resonance on its way to Disney+.)
But that’s also why the best segments of Muppet Now are the ones with the most in-person and in-puppet interaction. It’s never better than when Pepe The King Prawn is confounding the contestants (and sidekick/announcer Scooter) with seemingly spur-of-the-moment challenges on “Pepe’s Unbelievable Game Show,” or when one cast member after another emerges to pile questions onto Kermit’s “Mup Close And Personal” interview with RuPaul. (Fingers crossed this sets up a friendly Muppets-Drag Race alliance that waves away the copyright restrictions preventing any contestant from doing a Miss Piggy impression for Snatch Game.) Even as the structure of Muppets Now grows a little monotonous, the contents retain the promise of a “T-U-Cookie Monster” around every corner.
128 Comments
Am I the only one who would really dig just a revival of the classic Muppet Show variety show style show? This looks fun but just imagine an hour long variety show with Danny Trejo as the guest?
Nah, pretty sure everyone wants that. None of the later muppets series that (as this review points out) tried to emulate the current dominant TV show style have worked nearly as well, and perhaps because they’re massively out of style a variety show format would probably seem pretty fresh right now. They could totally tool around with parts of the format to modernise it, but the muppets are one of those evergreen cultural touchstones like Pee-Wee Herman that can’t really be described or recreated, so its probably best to just stick with what was most well received about them.
Muppets Tonight did have the variety show format it was just set on an SNL style television series instead of a live theater.
I don’t think they were all failures, but that was a clear attempt to update the format and I don’t think it worked as well as a result.
Wasn’t Muppets Tonight a variety show?
The new Looney Tunes Cartoons on HBO Max do a great job of demonstrating how taking old characters and just letting them do the thing that people loved in the first place can work. Amazing how taking Bugs Bunny and just giving him an antagonist and a bunch of dynamite to use over a 5-7 minute cartoon still works just as well in 2020 as it did back in 1950.
The Looney Tunes, The Muppets, superheroes… these things are elemental. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, just let them do their thing as they always have and people will flock to your streaming service just as they did to movie theatres, television stations, and comics.
It’s insane how few studio executives seem to understand this.
Just a redoing the classic Muppets Show would be phenomenal.
Or I could just watch that clip over and over.
Thank you for helping me remember why I had a massive crush on Sandra Bullock throughout pretty much my entire adolescence.
How about ponying up the cash and just putting the original muppet show up on Disney+
I’ve been begging for it since the Jason Segal Muppet movie.
I’m all in on this. Just bring the old show back. It’s time to get things started.
If my day is going to shit or even looks like it’d heading that way, I throw the Muppet Show theme song on and I just let the nostalgia wash away the filth. Some things are eternal.
I liked Muppets tonight and Jim Henson Hour, but I definitely would be much happier if they just did more Muppet Show. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – there’s plenty of room for creativity and originality within the format, nothing wrong with using something that works for the framing device.
For sure you could include video shorts, podcasts, streaming, all kinds of things consistent with today’s delivery platforms. But at the core that content comes from the show.
The live shows they did at the Hollywood Bowl and O2 were pretty much just live Muppet Shows and they worked wonderfully.
I’d be happy just being able to watch the old episodes. There’s always been chatter about the song rights, but I’m pretty sure Disney could figure that out. Plus, I seem to remember there being DVD compilations back in the day, so I’m not sure why we can’t just have them.
I own the first three complete season dvds. The fourth and fifth seasons have been coming soon for a decade now. You also can’t legally stream the show anywhere. There have been some season four and five episodes released on best of collections and the like, but the fact that there is no legal way to watch most of the fourth and fifth season is aggravating, and shows what is so messed up about modern copyright law.
Right. The modern copyright laws which the Disney corporation basically created and insisted upon. Sigh. https://www.theiplawblog.com/2016/02/articles/copyright-law/disneys-influence-on-united-states-copyright-law/#:~:text=Under%20the%20Copyright%20Act%20at,to%20change%20the%20Copyright%20Act.
There should be a base fee that an artist gets paid for use of their song. If they are against it being used for moral reasons (like a politician they don’t endorse using it a rally, or use in an advertising campaign for a product that the artist disagrees with), they should be able to block its use, but they shouldn’t be able to negotiate it to exorbitant amounts. Especially as this is a tv show that was recorded before the days of home video and streaming, so those rights were never even considered. If you’ve gotten the rights to use a song in a movie or tv show, you should be able to distribute that tv show or movie unaltered on any platform that they choose. A lot of this is stupid. I’m not going to watch the Vincent Price episode of the Muppet Show just to listen to their cover of “I’m Looking Through You” instead of seeking out the Beatles original. It’s either a song that I own and already like, or something that I wasn’t going to choose to listen to or something that I haven’t heard of but might develop an interest in because The Muppets exposed me to it. In some ways, it’s free advertising for a lot of these songs that younger generations wouldn’t be familiar with.Also, while this may not help the Muppet Show much since many of the songs used were from the 60s and 70s, the period where people own the rights to works is way too long. Things made in the 30s, 40s, and possibly even the 50s should be in the public domain by now. There should be a period where the original artist is able profit off their work, but eventually the public should be able to use the work freely, as working off of other pieces of culture is how much of culture is made. (And before someone claims that is uncreative, most Shakespeare plays were based off of preexisting stories, and stuff like The Inferno or Paradise Lost is pretty much Bible fanfiction. A lot of classic works of literature are based off of older stories. A lot of classical music takes melodies from folk music. Plus sampling has shown how snippets of other songs can be used to create new art in creative and transformative ways. Think of how much great work could be done if there were more public domain samples available.)
I agree, especially since the Muppet Songs were covers. What’s sadder, I think, is that often it’s the studios that own the rights instead of the creators/artists.
Yeah, that’s something that I didn’t really address. I just used the word artist as a kind of catch-all for a rights-holder, but most of the time it is a major corporation that holds the rights to something. I think that makes it worse because these people hold no attachment to the art beyond its monetary value. If I was in a rock band and someone wanted to use my song in their tv show or movie, I’d be flattered and try to negotiate a reasonable price from them. But the corporation just wants to get as much money as they can, which I think ironically might hurt their ability to make money in the long term.Some stories about how ridiculous this can get:Murray Gold (the composer for the first 10 seasons of the revived Doctor Who) once was involved in a project where the person in charge of it wanted to use 30 seconds of Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock.” Gold looked into it, and it would have cost more money than the entire music budget for the show to use 30 seconds of “Jailhouse Rock.”The Classic Doctor Who serials The Chase and Remembrance of the Daleks both had DVDs held up because of rights issues. The Chase contained an excerpt from a Beatles’ performance on Top of the Pops (ironically the only version of that recording to survive), and Remembrance of the Daleks played a Beatles’ song as a way to establish the 60s setting. Luckily, the scene from The Chase was just filler and was easily edited out, and the song in Remembrance of the Daleks was easily swapped out with a cheaper song, but the fact that they had to do this at all is ridiculous.The cult classic sci-fi TV movie The Lathe of Heaven had a horrible time getting a DVD release because a crucial plot point involved a character playing “I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends” by The Beatles on a record player. They only had rights for the initial broadcast. The song’s lyrics were plot and thematically important, so replacing it with another song would hurt the movie. They ended up using a pretty lousy cover version for the DVD release, but it’s a problem that didn’t need to exist. If you can track down a copy of the film somewhere, I highly recommend it. It is really underrated, partially because of this needless copyright problems that make it really hard to find a copy.In an interview, one of the showrunners of Supernatural was asked why they didn’t use any music by Led Zeppelin in the show, since there were a ton of references to the band’s music in the show, the character Dean played a ton of seventies and eighties rock music in his car in the show, and Zeppelin seemed like the sort of band that Dean would be into. He responded that it was simply too expensive.One of Wayne’s World’s most famous jokes (the “No Stairway” sign gag) was ruined when the rights for just the first couple notes of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” were pulled for every showing after the original theatrical release. The scene makes no sense with any other song, but they had no choice to replace it because they couldn’t get the rights. To literally five seconds of a song. Nobody is going to not buy “Stairway to Heaven” because Wayne’s World played five seconds of the opening riff on an acoustic guitar. This. Makes. No. Sense.There was a woman who got involved in a multi year lawsuit because she uploaded a video of her young child dancing to a Prince song on YouTube. The sound quality was poor and the video only played a snippet of the song, so you couldn’t really use the video as a substitute to listening to the song. She wasn’t making any money from this as this was before YouTube monetization was a thing. Didn’t matter.I get that some of these examples are from the UK, but they have similar copyright laws and generally tend to honor copyright rights from the US unless a different group holds those rights in the UK. Regardless, the system is broken if it blocks access to so much culture for so many people.
The annoying thing about the UK system is the BBC has a blanket license to use practically any music for free for broadcast, but that doesn’t extend to home media (it also doesn’t extend to referencing the song being played, or even showing album art, but that’s a different story), this has lead to a lot of shows that used licensed music liberally having a tough time ever getting a home media release, in some cases being heavily edited for release, in some cases never having official releases.
Legitimately didn’t know this. That’s interesting.
However, Disney itself is one of the most vicious opponents of public domain works (specifically, anything they might want going out of copyright) and has been actively working to extend those copyright periods to ridiculous lengths. So they’re basically reaping what they have sown and I have zero sympathy for them. I do have sympathy for all of us who would love to watch the muppet show. Maybe all the artists could demand ridiculously high fees for the licenses? Disney can afford it.
Yeah, I mostly agree with you, but probably some executive looked at it and said that the cost wasn’t worth whatever profit that they’d get. It’s possible that they are trying to negotiate streaming rights right now, but it’s taken a while. The problem is the Muppet show has so many preexisting songs. There are 2 to 3 covers per episode most of the time, and it’d only take 1 or 2 rights holders (who could easily own the rights to multiple songs from multiple episodes) being unreasonable. Unlike a tv show that has music in the background, you can’t easily swap out music, either. I’m sure that Disney would love having The Muppet Show on Disney+, as I could see many people subscribing just for that, but I’m guessing that the cost is too high to justify it in the eyes of Disney executives, especially right now. I’d love if they could get the episodes that they can get music rights to up there at least. I’d like all of them, but I’d take some of them.Also, it’s heavily ironic that most of Disney’s animated films were based off of public domain works. That’s come back to hurt them, as they’ve run out of public domain works to work off of, due largely to policies that they created.
I hadn’t thought about it, but it’s also possible that they’re being deliberately blocked. I could see that if some of the songs are owned by, say, Warner Bros. Records, that they’d block it outright, ask for a ridiculously high price, or ask for something ridiculous like a portion of the profits purely out of spite and not wanting to help out the competition. I don’t have any evidence that this happened, but it wouldn’t shock me.
There’s already a precedent for what you’re describing as far as having a set fee; that’s how covers are handled. If you’re a member of the RIAA and anyone else in the RIAA can cover your song without restriction, but they have to pay you a set royalty. If that had not been set up decades ago cover songs would be much, much less common than they are now. and while there are plenty of horrible cover songs out there, a there are a lot of them that are truly inspired and some that are better than the original. as a culture we’re better off with more freedom to adapt and use copyrighted material as long as the copyright holder is fairly compensated.
Yeah, I knew that there was something like that for covers, but didn’t know much about specific details. Thanks for the info. I think that just further proves that a system like that could logistically be set up and work for using copyrighted material made by others in media, and would still result in fair compensation for the original rights holder.
The Muppet Show is an old-time vaudeville show with weekly guest stars, explosions, and penguins. It’s not a difficult formula to understand. But for some godawful reason, Disney and everybody else associated with the show’s multiple revivals since Henson’s death somehow fail to grasp this fairly simple concept.
Every single time they insist upon “modernizing” the Muppets, to make them “relevant.” The Muppets were never relevant. That’s what makes them so wonderful. They were still putting on a vaudeville show in a broken down theater in the 1970’s.
It sounds like this new show is a step back in the right direction (and ironically, YouTube has sort of become a 21st century resurrection of vaudeville where no-name performers pour their heart and soul into doing something stupid for three minutes of attention and a smattering of applause from a minuscule audience) but yes… if you truly want to bring the Muppets back, go back to the old Muppet theater, dig up some dusty music hall tunes from the 1920’s, and then get suitably weirdness-friendly guests like Florence Welch, Danny Trejo, Conan O’Brien, or Kate Miccuci to sing a duet with a goat… who then explodes.
I would like that as well. I guess the variety show format is seen as dead so instead there have been decades of attempts to seem current. The other problem is no one since Jim Henson passed away has really managed to blend the mixture of insanity and heart in the best manner.
Danny Trejo could just be the permanent guest star ala Alan Davies on QI. It would be awesome, because how could you go wrong with Danny Trejo, muppets, and random guests of the week? I grew up with the Muppets, Seasame Street, Mr. Rogers, all that. and I am perfectly fine with the new interpretation of the Muppets. Somehow the Muppet movies (at least the first two) were staples of my church’s showings for kids. And it always irritated me that we were watching the movies on Sunday nights when we could have been watching the actual Muppet Show.Still bitter after nearly 45 years. (Think my therapist is calling…)
Yes! I mean, you could maybe make it a bit more of a “sketch show” like SNL if you wanted to make it feel a bit updated, but I totally agree.
Sounds like it’s literally everybody BUT whoever makes the call on these things. Maybe it seems like a safer bet to shoehorn the muppets into whatever is the dominant format of the moment.
half hour please, then I am in
By the third episode I finally realized what’s been missing from modern takes on the muppets: the canned laughter of a ‘live studio audience’
I maintain that the 2015 Muppets show deserved better, if only for giving us Fozzie Bear experiencing a micro-aggression.
They broke Miss Piggy!
I will never forgive them for that.
That said, I’m keeping Disney+ an extra month just for this.
I said for years that a terrific vehicle for the Muppets would be a puppet remake of Larry Sanders, with Kermit as Larry, Fozzie as Hank, and Piggy as Artie, and the 2015 Muppets had so much potential to be that while falling so far short of being that.
I think it was trying to be mor like 30 rock with Kermit as Liz, Piggy as Jena, and Gonzo as Tracey.
30 Rock is basically a live-action remake of the Muppets as it is, with an expanded role for Sam the Eagle.
I feel like it really had potential, but then they just made all the Muppets mean and selfish and it made no sense
they just made all the Muppets mean and selfish and it made no senseExcept in the case of Miss Piggy, she was always like that.
They also did a soft reboot in the middle that brought the show back in line with the general tone while keeping the fun elements they had created, and I think the show it became would have been more of a success. It’s a shame they didn’t give it another season to see if it could figure out the kinks.
Mean? How do you mean mean?
It brought us the Swedish Chef singing “Rapper’s Delight” at karaoke and I will be eternally grateful for that.
+! for real cant hate on that! I laughed for days
Yes!
“He said ‘good grief’ like ten times in a row”
Greatest karaoke performance ever.
The Karaoke Bar episode with Ed Helms was by far the best – and it was the best thing Ed Helms had been in a long while. I’m kinda lukewarm on Ed Helms’ career but the dude shines when he’s among Muppets.
The 2015 show was way better than this column is giving it credit for. I thought it was actually quite good. Way better than most of the Muppets relaunch attempts over the last 20 years or so (which isn’t saying much but still).I think the issue is its more of a niche audience type of thing. There was no way network television was going to have the patience to let it do its thing unless the show hit hyper-specific ratings numbers.
Fans of The Office, 30 Rock, and The Muppets are a surprisingly small cross section. Personally, I really liked it.
I just really wish the show had been a little more 30 Rock and a little less The Office. It had potential and it got better over time, so I was bummed it didn’t get a second season, but I do think the mockumentary format didn’t suit the content at all.
I’m a fan of all of those things, but never watched a single episode because the reviews were mediocre and The Muppets haven’t been great for a long time (the 2011 Jason Segel Muppet movie’s 95% on Rotten Tomatoes is completely insane, to the point where I felt burned when I actually watched it)
I really wanted to like it, and I do agree that it is better than it’s reputation, but forcing it into the mockumentary style really didn’t work IMO. Also I seem to remember that they made Kermit and Piggy’s relationship much more dramatic and modern / realistic, I think they had been married and divorced, but still had a bunch of romantic tension between them? I wasn’t the least bit interested in that. The old-fashioned relationtionship they had in previous iterations of the characters (where the actual relationship is never really defined, and it’s heavy on the banter between the character as opposed to a more dramatic will they / won’t they) works better in my opinion. I wish they had given it a second season, becuase there were also really, really funny parts and those problems weren’t antyhing that couldn’t have been overcome given the potential of the show.
Indeed. It was delightfully funny for first 4-5 episodes, then it just became… eh for rest of the season.Untapped potentials wasted there.
I still go back & rewatch Animal drum-dueling Dave Grohl.
That whole episode was one of the better ones.
You know what I liked it. I thought it was witty and funny, although I can totally understand why some people didn’t like it, I def would have kept watching it.
I have watched the 2015 Muppets through three times. It was everything I wanted from a modern Muppet show. It’s telling that this review trashes on that show while not even mentioning that Kermit no longer sounds anything like Kermit.
And they wrote the best Pepe.
It definitely improved towards the middle and end of the season. I would’ve been curious enough to check out a second season.And it was the inspiration for my name/avi
I’m watching it right now, and… it’s really good! It’s actually damn funny, and I honestly don’t know what people were complaining about. Yeah, the first couple episodes were a little uneven. But it was really hitting its stride by the 5th episode.
I liked the last one a lot
Also, I just noticed Disney+’s Search system is stupid. There’s only letters. No space bar or a delete button. How dumb is that?
Never mind. Now it’s poppin up. Weird.
I use D+ through a PlayStation and there are options for those.
They and numbers eventually popped up. It’s weird. I was searching for something and then realized I need a space and it wasn’t there. Then I backed out, typed that up there and then went and used search again to make sure. Then there they were.
Thanks for a great review/preview of what we can look forward to this weekend!Caught a typo you might want to fix: with Tasty-style overheard photography, Did you mean overhead photography?
I won’t act like the 2015 series was perfect, but there was plenty to like (the jokes and the boundry-pushing puppetry effects). I swear I read it was pitched for the 2016 season, but ABC wanted it that fall, so we got a rushed product.I’m glad to hear this has come out okay, especially because they were originally shot to be shorts. Whittling them down and squeezing them into a half-hour hasn’t dampened the entertainment value of them, it seems.
Much like the actual Office, I just think it needed a little more time to figure itself out.
“I want to go to Bombay, India and be a movie star” – Gonzo,
I want a Bollywood muppet movie as much as I’ve ever wanted anything.
And the crew genuinely had no idea about Bollywood when they wrote that line.
This feels like a safe place to say that, even as a 34-year-old, even though I know the muppets are puppets, I still kind of sort of believe they’re real. In my random daydreams of being a guest on one of their shows, I ponder the disillusioning, cognitive strain of actually witnessing their muppeteers at work. Could I bear it?!Just me? Oh. Okay. *whistles super casually*
And now we all start speculating on the casting for the Muppet parody of Hamilton. Don’t act like you don’t know that’s coming.
There’s already a fan-made version with bad Muppet impressions. It was very viral a week or two ago, but I think that was purely because of the concept. The execution is terrible.
Yeah, it’s good for a couple of minutes of laughs (mostly at Beaker), but gets old quick.
The thing was better than it should have been, mainly because the guy for whatever reason was pretty good at the Frank Oz voices. But overall, I agree with you, it needed a lot more polish.
Maybe I was harsher than it deserves. It has a few moments. But some of the voices are awful (to be fair, some are quite good, too — like you say, Fozzie and Piggy), and the repeating joke of “It’s not singing, it’s clucking!/meeping!” gets pushed way too hard.
Kermit = HamiltonGonzo = BurrGeorge Washington = Sam the EagleLafayette / George Washington= FozzyKing George = Waldorf and Statler
I’d go with Waldorf and Statler as Jefferson and Madison. Problem with this is someone’s gonna get shot in the end… no one wants dead Muppets.Except me, because I keep searching for the “A Nightmare on Sesame Street” clip and keep coming up with nada.
King George should be Miss Piggy!
King George = Uncle Deadly
Reading this thread I was going to say just that. The part he was born to play.
But Miss Piggy is voiced by a man.
Who cares as long as she sounds the same? Or is it gender appropriation?
I think she’s always been voiced by men, but men voicing women characters is now seen as problematic.
i swear to god no one on earth gives a shit
Cooking competition shows, youtube disaster and stunt vids, American Gladiators, etc…. all have roots in the original Muppet Show. Just saying. Think it through. Us Gen X’ers learned our subversive television tastes from this and SNL.
When Muppets Most Wanted came out, Disney hired me to be all the Muppets’ social media channels in between movie projects. The movie had bombed, so the job didn’t last long. But my half-ass pitch back then was to take the Muppets online, treat it like a series of Youtube videos. It’s not exactly a genius, one of a kind idea, but where’s my money, Disney?
That apparently tender embrace between the Swedish chef and Danny Trejo alone looks worth it.
Good night Danny Trejo.
Now can someone figure out definitively where Muppet Babies is. Some rumors sites claim the entire series was destroyed…
My main question is “how is Whitmire’s replacement for his other characters?” As I’m assuming that they recast Rizzo given they fired him.
Rizzo seems to be retired, for now at least. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if they eventually bring him back. Peter Linz would be a good choice, I think?
They have a voice actor for Rizzo on Muppet Babies so I don’t think it’s an active decision not to have him tbh. Most of the replacements for Whitmire seem to have been doing the voice in other media so I suspect they have people in mind at a minimum.
Is my 8 year old that likes the Muppets (be it Muppet Treasure Island or the Muppet Movie or old episodes of the Muppet Show or watching Muppet Babies with her sister, etc.) going to be able to watch this with me or does it veer too adult?
Anything to wash out the bad taste of the stupendously awful “The Muppets.” show.
Uncle Deadly alone made the last show worthwhile. And that’s not the first time I’ve said that.
So then why does it get a ‘B’? I do not at all understand AV Club rating system. Inconsistent is the nicest way to describe it.
I’ve been rewatching old Muppets stuff before this starts, and am now on Muppets Tonight, which I haven’t seen since they first aired almost 25 years ago, when it was my favourite show. I think it mostly holds up well. It’s obviously hit-and-miss, but not
any more so than most other sketch shows, or a lot of the original
series. The main thing I like about it, compared to almost every Muppet
project since, is that it’s about 70% new characters, rather than just
the old ones who’ve been around since the 70s or before. A handful of
the characters from the show have stuck around (mostly just Pepe, Carl,
and Bobo), but almost all attempts to create new Muppets in the last
twenty years have been failures, and they seemed to have just stopped
trying, so I’m glad there’s a few new characters in this.
From what I’ve seen, a lot of Muppets get workshopped for a long time before they become regulars. Bobo actually went all the way back to Muppets Take Manhattan. He wasn’t the exact same character, but someone was already messing around with him. Elmo is a good example of this as well.
There were some great “for the adults” moments. Bobo trying to chat up Cindy Crawford with Rizzo talking him through it via an ear piece; and Miss Piggy faking a sneeze with Billy Crystal.
Muppets Tonight basically was The Muppet Show, and it still kills me that it flopped so hard. I maintain that not having a stable platform is the biggest reason why.
Now for a good Muppet film.The last good one was, what… Muppet Treasure Island?
I liked the 2011 Muppet Movie with Jason Segel and Amy Adams. Maybe not as great as some of the classic movies, but it was very entertaining nonetheless.
Yeah, The Muppets was good. Before that the last good Muppet movie was Muppet Christmas Carol. Treasure Island is fine, but uneven.
I couldn’t stand that movie. The human characters seemed faker than the Muppets, and the Muppets didn’t have much heart to them. A lot of Muppet stuff from the past 20 years doesn’t have a lot of genuine heart to them. I just didn’t care about anyone in the movie because they were all sociopaths acting a part.
The human characters seemed faker than the Muppets, That was kind of the theme of the story
Muppets Most Wanted is the most Muppety they’ve done since Henson died.Christmas Carol is excellent but not very Muppety.
Admittedly, I haven’t see that one. I did see the one prior, which wasn’t great.
muppets most wanted is amazing. except for ricky gervais’s song that hurts to watch
Muppets Tonight is my favorite TV show of all time, so I hope this even a fraction as good!
Look up the Muppets Take the O2 and tell me that a relaunch of the original show wouldn’t work today.
Joey Calvan: I love you (kisses Kermie on the forehead).Me:
I’ll renew Disney+ for another whole year if you they shoe-horn in “Pigs in Space”
There’s no space between Muppets Tonight and the original show, except that Muppets tonight nay have been slightly better (other than the tragedy of there being no Scooter). And The Muppets was also great.
This will warp you:
I’ve only seen the first episode of this but was enormously disappointed. It felt muted, bland and predictable, and I can only presume the next three episodes are a huge improvement, otherwise I won’t be able to understand this review being so positive at all.
Perhaps it suffers because I watched The Muppets Movie and The Muppets Christmas Carol in the lead up to it as well, but yeesh, it’s just so weak, so tired, and some of the gags are just oddly out of character, I can’t imagine Kermit being a photo bomber at all, and the Swedish Chef seems quite depressed here, I presumed there’d be a pay off to that, but it never came.
Oh yeah, and the guy doing Kermit’s voice is often poor too, he’s okay in the segment with RuPaul, but elsewhere he’s far too nasally.
I feel the same way, both about the episode and Vogel’s Kermit. Really made me appreciate Henson even more, from a pure voice performance perspective.
Absolutely, I watched The Great Muppet Caper last night and the difference was astounding, not only in performance but also in the intelligence of the script, and just how bloody fun it was too!
Uncle Deadly is back bay-bee!
I just watched the first episode, mostly because this review made me optimistic… and seriously? That’s your idea of what a good Muppets show looks like? Woof.
The pilot was rooooough. And the “Matt Vogel is closer to Henson’s version” people are crazy.
Ok, so. As of me writing this comment, only the first episode is available and it’s mostly awful. And I say this as somebody who isn’t too snobby about comedy. The bit with Kermit and Walter was good, but most of the rest was so hard to watch. It’s just constant over-telegraphed jokes that they then beat into the ground, combined with cringey human-Muppet interactions. I don’t know if part of the problem is that they have 4 or 5 cameos rather than one reappearing guest star, but man. It is rough.I’ve never seen RuPaul in anything before, only knowing of him peripherally. Does he always do that super-affected laugh or was that just him being really uncomfortable in this specific interview?
Based on this article, I still have some hope it gets better. But if so, they shouldn’t have led with this.
I’ve watched two episodes now. It’s not good. Everything feels disjointed, due to some really aggravating YouTube-style editing. So many cuts and unnecessary digital zooms. Usually the humor doesn’t have any time to breathe. The window dressing of remote work was perhaps necessary given the current situation of things, but I don’t think they made it come together. The Muppets are best when they are together, when they are somewhat unscripted. It’s like this is going for a completely different audience. I actually think I liked the recent ABC series better than this.
Since my comments on this were just liked, drawing this back to my attention, I’ll take this time to say: it wasn’t good. Not cringey like the ABC series, but also simply not funny. It got to where my whole family would groan when the Bunsen and Beaker intro would start.