Backstage on the new special, “The Muppet Show,” Sabrina Carpenter excitedly greets Miss Piggy, in whom she recognizes a kindred spirit. “I grew up watching you,” Carpenter says. “My parents grew up watching you. Their parents grew up watching——”
The joke, of course, is that Carpenter ends up offending the diva by implying that she’s old. But there’s a truth to it, too: Since the madcap critters lit the lights on the comedy-variety “Muppet Show” in the 1970s, every generation has gotten its own Muppets.
Sometimes we get them more than once. In 2015, ABC — which had aired the prime-time update “Muppets Tonight” in the 1990s — premiered “The Muppets,” an awkwardly edgy workplace mockumentary. (“This is not your grandmother’s Muppets,” the president of ABC promised/threatened at the time.) In 2020, Disney+ gave us “Muppets Now,” a streaming show about Kermit and company producing mini streaming shows, which lacked the original’s theatrical pizazz.
The premise for “The Muppet Show” of 2026, a (for now) single-episode special premiering on Wednesday on Disney+ and ABC, is comparatively simple: It’s “The Muppet Show.” And wocka wocka wocka, that’s all you need.
There’s no newfangled hook, no contrived rationalization to bring the characters up to date, no pretensions toward heft or hipness. There are songs and slapstick and jokes, and nobody, blessedly, stayed up too late thinking about the reasons why. (Because Muppets, that’s why.)
The opening makes this attitude clear, as Kermit enters the familiar Muppet Theater to a melancholy rendition of “The Rainbow Connection,” walking past black-and-white photos of past guests like Harry Belafonte and Steve Martin. He plops himself with a sigh at his backstage desk, where he notices that the musician Rowlf is plinking out the song at the piano. “What’d you think this was, some kind of sentimental montage in your head?” Rowlf asks. “We’re doing the show again, frog!”
And away we go. The brilliance of the best Muppets entertainments has been to kindle the warm embers of sentiment, then douse them with a blast of seltzer. This was a strength of the 2011 comeback movie, “The Muppets,” starring and cowritten by Jason Segel; that film loved the franchise on its own slapstick terms, without either reinventing it or smothering it in reverence.
Now it’s the turn of Segel’s “Freaks and Geeks” co-star Seth Rogen, who produces the new special and makes a cameo. (Rogen already stars for Apple TV in “Platonic” and “The Studio,” the latter of which may now qualify as his second-best showbiz spoof on air.)
Rogen, fuzzy-faced and genially explosive, is an excellent fit; the appeal of the franchise has always come partly from how well it brought out the Muppetude of its human guest stars. It certainly does this for Carpenter, a brassy, cannily cartoonish performer who seems born to the job. No sooner was her casting announced than a poster on Bluesky imagined a bit: “sabrina wears the same outfit as miss piggy and miss piggy gets mad at her.”
That this precise gag happens scarcely two minutes into the special is not a failing but a selling point. This show knows what you want from the Muppets, and it’s going to shoot the stuff at you like Ping-Pong balls from a cannon.
You want Statler and Waldorf dropping insults from the balcony. You want Kermit neurotically melting down over cast dramas and production crises. You want Dr. Bunsen Honeydew to subject his assistant Beaker to a misbegotten experiment in Muppet Labs, and you want the fallout from that experiment to disastrously and hilariously involve Maya Rudolph (who played the Muppet rock star Janice in a 2007 “Saturday Night Live” sketch, in which Rogen played Rowlf).
Disney has for some reason declared the specific musical numbers to be spoilers, but even the most current ones feel like they could have aired in the show’s original heyday. This is not a complaint, nor is it one to observe that the comic spat between Miss Piggy and Carpenter is a bit that could have been written for Linda Ronstadt in 1980.
“The Muppet Show,” it turns out, doesn’t need to be retooled for a new era, because the Muppets exist outside of time. These are, in fact, your grandparents’ Muppets, and your parents’. And yet they’re exactly the Muppets you need right now.
James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics.
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