Way back in 1976, The Muppet Show premiered with a distilled and perfected version of Jim Henson’s vision for his puppet characters. Anarchic, weird, funny, and heartfelt, the original series ran for five seasons, and the Jim Henson Company – and relatively more recently Disney – have been trying to chase that creative high ever since. Your mileage may vary as to what worked through various movies, TV shows, and YouTube shorts, but a new one-off special premiering on Disney+ and ABC is the first time in nearly 50 years that someone has captured that same lightning in a bottle. Simply put, the new Muppet Show is comedic perfection – and it proves that you don’t actually need to reinvent the wheel, at least when it comes to the house Henson built.
Executive Produced by, among others, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the one neat trick to figuring out how to make The Muppet Show works, it turns out, is to just do The Muppet Show. So all the Muppet characters are back to basics, from Kermit trying to hold a live variety stage show together, to Miss Piggy being a diva, to Gonzo trying – and failing – to pull off an impossible stunt. None of this is strange territory for how The Muppets have operated over the past half-a-century, but the special takes the step further to recreate the Muppets stage, the audience, even Statler and Waldorf heckling from the balcony.
It’s also presented in a format that just doesn’t really exist anymore: the Vaudeville-style variety show. There are music acts courtesy an extremely game guest star, Sabrina Carpenter. You’ve got celebrity cameos from Rogen and Maya Rudolph. But most of the half-hour running time is taken up with quick, goofy bits and surreal sketches that are more conceptually hilarious, in line with what Henson used to do, than the more premise driven sketches you might see on Saturday Night Live.
The special is laugh-out-loud funny, and often sneakily so, as this “new” Muppet Show remembers that the funniest part is letting the puppets – and therefore the puppeteers – be specific with their movements. A bit featuring dancing chickens is funny because dancing chickens are funny. Similarly, a number involving rats on a street seems to be dead on arrival, but steadily evolves into one of the most uproarious parts of the half hour. It’s not complicated what The Muppet Show is doing, and that’s the point… Even the longest sketch on the show, a parody of costume dramas like Bridgerton called “Pigs in Wigs,” is mostly an excuse to throw out silly puns and have – you guessed it – pigs in wigs, than say anything substantial about the genre.
But more than that, what The Muppet Show remembers is that what’s presented should be utter anarchy, held together with tape and bubblegum. Too long, The Muppets have been depicted as either incredibly competent, or worse, nostalgia-bait. This special plays with that with an opening that seems to be leaning into nostalgia before utterly skewering that anyone could be nostalgic for a mess of a show like this.
We are, of course. Or rather, audiences who grew up with The Muppets do have that fond nostalgia. But The Muppets never do, and never should. Nobody hates The Muppet Show and loves The Muppet Show in equal measure more than The Muppets, who may clash – see the eternal conflict between Kermit and his star/true love Miss Piggy – but never punch down. They perform because that’s literally what they were made to do, and that can-do attitude feeds from Kermit on up.
The Muppet Show special gets that, always one step from disaster while ultimately ending in a satisfying place that makes the argument that this will hopefully be the first of many, many more Muppet Show episodes to come.
Once upon a time, The Muppet Show was the most sensational, inspirational, celebrational, Muppetational show on TV. If The Muppet Show special is any indication, it’s time to get things started once again.
The Muppet Show premieres February 4 on Disney+ and ABC.
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