“The Muppet Show” special is mediocre. This is as it should be: good and right.
The beloved show Jim Henson created 50 years ago, after leaving “Saturday Night Live,” made flappable imperfection its governing ethos. The goal wasn’t to create a flawless night of entertainment; it was to mine the chaos of a production, especially backstage, for joy and laughs. Bad, on the Muppets, has always been good: That Fozzie has terrible punch lines is exactly what made his sketches fun. Miss Piggy’s insistence on her talent is marvelously undercut whenever she actually performs.
Seth Rogen (along with executive producers including Maya Rudolph, Evan Goldberg and writer Albertina Rizzo) has resurrected the show as a 30-minute special that doubles as a backdoor pilot for a possible revival. Director Alex Timbers preserves the show’s loose, bubbly sense of fun. The episode — featuring a pitch-perfect Sabrina Carpenter as Kermit’s guest star — doesn’t feel overproduced or overthought. It is merely (and I mean this as a compliment) another episode of “The Muppet Show.”
Sure, there’s (sporadically) a sense of occasion. “We’re doing the show again, Frog!” Rowlf says, thrillingly, when Kermit — who starts the show mopily switching on the lights of the old theater — stumbles on him playing “Rainbow Connection.” Rogen makes a brief cameo in which he’s unceremoniously bumped. But the show barely feels any need to introduce itself to new audiences. There’s no effort to modernize. This is not ABC’s “The Muppets,” the sitcom that launched in 2015 with Kermit and Miss Piggy estranged (and Piggy hosting a talk show). Or 2020’s “Muppets Now,” an ostensibly unscripted show consisting of various acts, with Scooter acting as a bridge between them.
I’ve never considered what the opposite of a reboot might look like, but “The Muppet Show” — with one exception, which I’ll get to — basically nails it. The special is unapologetically nostalgic and gloriously so. How magical it is to see that grand old marquee exactly as it was, to hear “it’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights,” and to watch all those fuzzy goofballs deliver that absolute bop of an opening song without a single concession to how time has, in fact, passed. (The exception is Carpenter, whose many delightful scenes opposite Miss Piggy keep driving home — to the latter’s mounting annoyance — how old she is.)
There are a few Easter eggs for superfans; in her opening number, Carpenter inflicts mild violence on a number of male Muppets in what feels like a nod to Rita Moreno’s legendary (and Emmy-winning) guest stint, which featured her singing “I Get Ideas” while genially assaulting her dance partner. But the show feels less scholarly and responsible than simply straightforward. Scooter once again knocks on the guest star’s dressing room door to announce the seconds till the curtain rises. An At the Dance segment makes good use of Pepe the King Prawn. Gonzo — still voiced, incredibly, by Dave Goelz — does one of his trademark daredevil stunts with a highbrow twist. It’s not that good. A Muppet News Flash prominently features Rudolph (who suffers some ill effects following a more-than-usually-perplexing Muppet Labs segment). Grumpy critics Statler and Waldorf get plenty of screen time. Best of all, the background teems with Muppet extras Muppeting hither and yon without lines or roles. Together, they create an impressively dense and populated panorama featuring some tremendously artful puppeteering that you might not even notice the first time you watch.
Carpenter’s energy is ideally calibrated for a program like this, and her final number, which I’m not allowed to describe here but which features two main Muppets, is genuinely iconic. Eric Jacobson’s Miss Piggy remains excellent throughout the episode as she struggles to absorb Carpenter’s praise while sustaining her own sense of rivalry. There is a notable change, however: She expresses surprisingly little tenderness toward her Kermie.
That brings me to the fly in the ointment, so to speak. Like Piggy, I found myself more annoyed than charmed by a frog I once adored. Kermit, “The Muppet Show’s” star and protagonist, doesn’t work well in this iteration. Matt Vogel, who took over voicing the character when Steve Whitmire was fired a decade ago, is a versatile and gifted puppeteer. But his Kermit doesn’t sound or act like the Kermits of yore, and that’s weird enough — and sufficiently drastic a change from the original, which is otherwise so faithful — that it does start to become genuinely distracting. Vogel’s Kermit is far less flappy, his jaw far less clenched. He’s less vulnerable, less volatile, less tender, less stressed. Watching Kermit decompensate over the half-hour has always been one of the show’s chief pleasures. You could practically watch Kermit’s blood pressure rising as he struggled to preserve his tolerance, patience and equanimity until he exploded — screaming or waggling his hands and head while gazing at the sky. This Kermit is comparatively composed and sedate. That’s a shame. A Muppet that’s less physically expressive is also less compelling.
That’s not a small problem. But it might not be a huge one, either. Especially since the special seemed to be tilting away from Miss Piggy’s pursuit of the frog in charge, which structured so many of the original show’s storylines.
I have other notes. I found myself thinking, for instance, of ways various sketches could have been punched up. (Some seemed more random than funny.) Then again, that’s always been the case. “The Muppet Show” has never been about being great. It’s been about feeling good. And on that front, boy, does this silly little special deliver.
The Muppet Show 50th Anniversary Special is streaming on Disney+.
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