‘The Muppet Show’ Review: Seth Rogen’s Faithful Reboot of a TV Classic Plays the Hits

1 week ago 6

In the two decades since acquiring The Muppets, Disney has never appeared to have a clear idea of what to do with Jim Henson’s beloved characters.

Things started off strong with the 2011 film “The Muppets,” a charmingly nostalgic reboot that went out of its way to remind us why we loved Kermit, Fozzie, Miss Piggy, and Gonzo in the first place. The film’s success suggested that a new era of big-screen adventures was on the horizon, but that fizzled out after 2014’s “Muppets Most Wanted” disappointed at the box office.

The franchise then shifted its efforts to the small screen with Bill Prady and Bob Kushell’s 2015 mockumentary series (which was also titled “The Muppets”), which stripped the characters from their vaudeville roots and presented them in a dryly hilarious single-camera sitcom that didn’t shy away from adult situations. That series remains one of the boldest and funniest experiments in the franchise’s history, but it quickly ran into a roadblock: Many fans didn’t want to see these characters grow up. Storylines about Kermit committing infidelity and Fozzie getting confusing dating app results after describing himself as “a bear looking for love” were too far for some purists, and the show was shamefully cancelled after a season.

Since then, the Muppets have largely sat on the sidelines of the Disney empire. There has been safe short-form content (“Muppets Now” and “Muppets Haunted Mansion”) and spinoffs about side characters (“The Muppets Mayhem”), but it’s been a decade since the company made any serious attempt at bringing the primary characters back into the mainstream.

It’s out of character for a conglomerate that’s so ravenous for content to sit on a blue-chip IP for so long, but the delay reflects a real predicament: the Muppets are timeless and beloved, but there’s a narrow range of situations you can place them in without changing things too much. If the modern Muppet audience isn’t broad enough to support consistent theatrical films, and the diehard fanbase doesn’t want things to change too much, what do you do?

Apparently, you give everyone exactly what they’re used to. That’s the approach taken in the new reboot of “The Muppet Show,” which hails from executive producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. The half-hour variety show faithfully reassembles the format that made the Muppets household names in the 1970s: a mixture of sketches and musical numbers with a hearty dose of backstage antics as Kermit and his loyal theater troupe put on a show with a rotating celebrity host. Scooter is still the frazzled stage manager, Miss Piggy is still making diva demands about her wardrobe and screen time, and Statler and Waldorf are still roasting the entire product from their box seats. If you squint hard enough to mask the fact that the camerawork is slightly better than the original series, you could convince yourself that it’s still 1974. Until Sabrina Carpenter shows up.

In between performing her hits, she fawns over Miss Piggy and duets with Kermit with the appropriate amount of expressiveness and theatricality. There’s no objective way to quantify this, but Carpenter passes the same “human with Muppet-like qualities” eye test that made Jason Segel such a great Muppet co-star a decade ago. The single best choice the reboot makes is its host, as it’s hard to imagine anyone who understands the assignment better than Sabrina does here.

More than anything, this iteration of “The Muppet Show” is safe. The episode is filled with precisely constructed one-liners that have been the foundation of Muppet humor from the very beginning. (Adult topics are occasionally alluded to, but plausible deniability is always there for parents who need to explain why they’re laughing.) Most of the jokes are funny, some are hysterical, and a few others fall flat… but that’s always been the “Muppet Show” experience. The show is essentially a kid-friendly “Saturday Night Live” with puppets, and its value proposition is not that different from Lorne Michaels’ longtime show: a comforting weekly format with an ensemble cast you grow to love, a different celebrity every week, and a collection of sketches of varying quality that will always contain enough gems to keep you somewhat entertained. That was the standard set by the original series, and the reboot clears that bar beyond any reasonable doubt.

The pilot is ostensibly a one-off special, though Kermit himself makes it clear that more episodes are in the cards if all goes well. Viewed through that lens, it’s hard to dock the first episode too many points for originality. When rebooting a property as beloved as “The Muppet Show,” the first priority is not to screw anything up. Rogen and company managed to achieve that, providing a nostalgic foundation that should give them as much runway as they want for future experimentation. The real test will be how much they take advantage of that runway — the new special is a fun trip down memory lane, but it’s easy to see the throwback format getting old after a while — and how far Disney and Muppet fans will let them go.

But even if the pilot proves inconclusive, we should all be grateful to live in a world where new episodes of “The Muppet Show” are being produced. And this creative team, which also includes veteran Broadway director Alex Timbers, demonstrates enough love for the source material to earn the benefit of the doubt. The Muppets are beloved enough that this could become the rarest of pop-culture rarities in 2026: a monocultural event. Just like celebrity week on “Sesame Street” is one of the most coveted gigs in Hollywood each year, it’s easy to see a world where every A-lister with a project to promote wants to stop by “The Muppet Show” and have Kermit and Scooter barge into their dressing room with a crisis to mitigate. Here’s hoping the reboot grows into its own style and a new golden age of Muppets is upon us.