8 AR THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2020Television
At the dawn of “The Muppet Show” in the
late 1970s, a visit to the Muppet Labs con-
sisted of watching its nebbishy proprietor,
Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, demonstrate misbe-
gotten inventions like an exploding hat or a
self-destructing necktie with a brief burst of
pyrotechnics, a canned explosion sound
and a puff of smoke.
Today, a return visit to those labs on the
Disney+ series “Muppets Now” features
Honeydew and his agitated assistant,
Beaker, using a homemade device called
the Infern-O-Matic to reduce everyday
items — a carton of eggs, a wall clock, a gui-
tar — to smoldering piles of ashes.
If this scene from “Muppets Now” feels
manic and combustible — and even a bit fa-
miliar — that is by design: as Leigh Slaugh-
ter, vice president of the Muppets Studio,
explained recently, she and her colleagues
are hopeful that this series will conjure up
“that true Muppet anarchy — that complete
chaos.”
She added: “If they’re going to take on
real-world science, we thought, we have to
burn things. We have to drop things. We
have to blow things up.”
“Muppets Now,” a six-episode series that
debuts on July 31, is both Disney’s attempt
to bring those familiar, fuzzy faces to its
streaming service and a parody of internet
content. Its segments feature characters
like Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef in
rapid-fire comedy sketches that lampoon
popular online formats.
The new series also strives to reconnect
the Muppets with the disorderly sensibility
they embodied in the era of “The Muppet
Show” and get back to basics after other re-
cent efforts to reboot the characters fizzled
out.
“The thinking is to stop trying so hard to
be like everybody else and just be the Mup-
pets,” said Bill Barretta, a veteran Muppet
performer and an executive producer of
“Muppets Now.” “Let’s celebrate the fact
that they all have to deal with each other
and just be silly and play and entertain
again.”
Nearly 45 years after its debut, “The
Muppet Show” (which originally ran in syn-
dication from 1976 to 1981) remains a high-
water mark for the franchise. Fueled by the
subversive imagination of the Muppets cre-
ator, Jim Henson, and a small band of like-
minded performers and writers, it was a
backstage showbiz satire bolstered by
kitschy celebrity hosts and a madcap atti-
tude inherited from sketch shows like “Sat-
urday Night Live” (where the Muppets had
previously appeared) and “Monty Python’s
Flying Circus.”
The popularity of “The Muppet Show”
paved the way for hit films like “The Mup-
pet Movie” (1979) which tempered the may-
hem of the TV series with a sentimental
streak and endeared founding performers
like Henson and Frank Oz to a generation of
viewers.
But keeping the Muppets relevant to
modern audiences has proved elusive, par-
ticularly since they were acquired by Dis-
ney in 2004. (The Muppet characters creat-
ed for “Sesame Street” remain the property
of Sesame Workshop, a nonprofit organiza-
tion, while other shows like “Fraggle Rock”
are owned by the Jim Henson Company.)
A 2011 film, “The Muppets,” written by
Nicholas Stoller and Jason Segel (“Forget-
ting Sarah Marshall”) was a critical and
commercial hit that won an Academy
Award for its song “Man or Muppet,” writ-
ten by Bret McKenzie. But a 2014 follow-up,
“Muppets Most Wanted,” was a disappoint-
ment and quickly curtailed the revival.
In 2015, an ABC sitcom called “The Mup-
pets” drew attention for its single-camera
mockumentary style (similar to shows like
“The Office”) and a plotline in which Kermit
and Miss Piggy broke up. But the show was
not well-received; it was troubled by staff
changes and canceled after one season.
Barretta, who plays Muppets like Rowlf
the Dog and Pepe the King Prawn, said the
approach of that sitcom “was too much, too
stereotypical of the characters.”
Dan Silver, who is vice president for origi-
nal unscripted content at Disney+, agreed
that serialized plot twists were not neces-
sarily going to bring viewers back to the
Muppets. “Sometimes it’s not about if Piggy
and Kermit are going to get together,” he
said. “It’s about, how does that make some-
thing funny in a skit?”
The Muppets have had other contempo-
rary successes that seemed to point to a
path forward, including a 2009 viral video in
which they performed Queen’s pop-rock op-
eretta “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and a live
show presented at the Hollywood Bowl (in
2017) and London’s O2 Arena (in 2018).
Eric Jacobson, a Muppets performer who
now plays Fozzie Bear and Miss Piggy, said
that the live concerts were a crucial step in
steering the puppet troupe back to its fun-
damental values.
“They were very collaborative experi-
ences,” Jacobson said of the shows, which
included classic Muppets numbers like
“Mahna Mahna” and “Rainbow Connec-
tion.”
“There was a real conscious effort to go
back to the Muppets’ roots, to play up the
personalities and that sense of abandonthat people really respond to,” he added.
Last year, Disney announced that it was
working with the Muppets Studio to create
a sketch show. (Another planned Muppets
series being prepared by Adam Horowitz
and Edward Kitsis of “Once Upon a Time”
and Josh Gad of “Frozen” was halted
around this time amid creative differences.)
Silver, the Disney+ executive, said that
“Muppets Now” should reflect the elasticity
of the underlying property. Like Mickey
Mouse or the Simpsons, he said, the Mup-
pets are meant to “live among us — they’re
not a nostalgia play, they just exist in what-
ever time we’re in.”
What makes the Muppets work, he said,
can be found in something as rudimentary
as the early test footage for “The MuppetMovie” that shows Henson and Oz roaming
the countryside as they ad-lib dialogue for
Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy and Fozzie
Bear.
“It’s just Jim and Frank figuring out, how
do you put them in the real world outside a
studio?” Silver said. “It’s completely impro-
vised and it’s hilarious. The whole frame-
work was there. It just needed to be appro-
priated into today.”
The structure of “Muppets Now,” he said,
was also suggested by going back to the
early days and taking a cue from the origi-
nal “Muppet Show,” which was in part a
sendup of comedy-variety programs of the
1960s and ’70s. As Silver put it: “If ‘The
Muppet Show’ was a subversion of Sonny
and Cher and Ed Sullivan, what would that
be in this day and age? And the answer is
YouTube.”
Taking the programming formats of
streaming video and populating them with
its antic characters, “Muppets Now” gives
us segments like a beauty and lifestyle vid-
eo blog hosted by Miss Piggy; a cooking
competition with the Swedish Chef; and
cheeky cameos from celebrities like Aubrey
Plaza, Danny Trejo and Linda Cardellini.)
Most of the sketches were filmed last
summer, amid a process that the Muppet
performers said was collaborative and open
to a wide range of inputs.
“When we’re on set, there is discussion
among the Muppet performers with the
writer and the producer and director,” said
Matt Vogel, who plays Kermit the Frog.
“We’ll talk it through before we shoot
something,” Vogel said, “and even when
we’re shooting things, the Muppet perform-
ers are pretty adept at ad-libbing as long as
it’s character-appropriate.”
Still, some remaining footage for intersti-
tial segments was produced during the co-
ronavirus pandemic. This required per-
formers to record themselves at home and
required spouses, partners and children to
lend a hand or keep quiet during their cre-
ation.
“I have five kids, and they’re all used to
having Muppets around the house or being
on set with Muppets,” Vogel said. “They’re
always very respectful and kind, but they
have their own kid lives that they’re more
concerned about than whether or not Ker-
mit’s playing the banjo in their basement.”
Disney and the Muppets Studio are hope-
ful that “Muppets Now” will provide a start-
ing point for further projects.
“We definitely have ambitions for the
Muppets to be doing more,” said Slaughter,
the Muppets Studio vice president. “But
there’s nothing that we’re ready to reveal at
this point.”
In the meantime, the creators and per-
formers on “Muppets Now” said that, in try-
ing to reproduce the do-it-yourself aesthet-
ics of the internet, they felt they had also
tapped into something essential about the
Muppet characters: They are proud under-
dogs who seem to do their best work with
limited resources.
“The Muppets have always flown by the
seat of their pants,” Jacobson said, explain-
ing that they operate on “primitive produc-
tion values and a very low bar that they set
for themselves.”
“Our aim was to produce these segments
as though they were held together by spit
and glue,” he added.
The fact that “Muppets Now” is arriving
during a summer when viewers are fam-
ished for original content felt consistent
with the minimal aspirations of its title
characters, Jacobson said.
Summoning up a self-deprecating senti-
ment that could just as easily come from the
mouth of Statler or Waldorf, Jacobson said
with a laugh, “People’s expectations for
anything new on television have gone down
so much that the Muppets can actually de-
liver.”Familiar Faces, Back to the Mayhem
‘Muppets Now,’ a new Disney+
series, taps the anarchic sketch
comedy roots of the characters.
By DAVE ITZKOFF‘The thinking is to stop
trying so hard to be like
everybody else and just
be the Muppets.’In a nod to “The Muppet
Show,” “Muppets Now”
features sketches set at
Muppet Labs, above.
Miss Piggy, far left, hosts
a beauty and lifestyle
video blog. Below, other
sketches include Fozzie
Bear and a cooking
segment hosted by the
turkey Beverly Plume,
with the celebrity guest
chef Carlina Will.PHOTOGRAPHS BY MUPPETS STUDIO/DISNEY+