Muppets Now describes itself as the Muppets Studio’s “first unscripted series,” which is a good way of easing you into the premise of the six-episode season debuting Friday on Disney+. In short, webchat-heavy episodes that suggest even the Muppets obey the rules of social distancing, Kermit, Miss Piggy, Gonzo, and the rest of the gang entertain with a compilation of short, “unscripted” sketches, each tailored to a different Muppet’s strengths.
Miss Piggy stars in “Lifesty,” a talk show where she walks the viewer through different ways to be fabulous—attended to, for some reason, by Taye Diggs and Linda Cardellini in every episode. Kermit and Miss Piggy both host “Mup Close and Personal,” an interview show where nothing seems to go as planned. Pepe the King Prawn hosts a surprisingly entertaining game show in which he makes up the rules as he goes along, with two new hapless humans as his contestants every episode. Dr. Bunsen and Beaker have a Mythbusters style science show, where they use absurd experiments to demonstrate the laws of physics. And Swedish Chef stars in “Okey Dokey Cooking”—the official title has more diacritics and umlauts than I’m using—where he battles a human chef, Iron Chef-style. His human opponents are wonderful foils to his bizarre mumbling; naturally, many silly word jokes are made, including a gag where he tries to make Danny Trejo’s chicken molé tacos by wrapping a Muppet mole (the animal, you see) in a blanket-sized tortilla.
The segments are a little all over the place, some funnier than others. But what makes Muppets Now gel is that it lets the Muppets be chirpy entertainers, which was an element missing from the last effort to make the Muppets relevant: ABC’s short-lived sitcom The Muppets. That show focused on the “real,” backstage lives of the characters, which didn’t really play up to the Muppets’ strengths. Muppets Now is definitely geared to a younger audience, but it works better, overall. Which is good, because it has to stand in for all the Muppets content that didn't make it to Disney+ (boo!) and another modern-era Muppets project that never saw the light of day.
It is, of course, a little futile to compare Muppets Now to the Jim Henson era of the Muppets—specifically the great The Muppet Show, which last aired in 1981. Back then, the characters weren’t just placeholders for our own nostalgia; they were dynamic, bizarre forces of creative genius, embodying both the cynicism of show business and an infectious, one might even say gonzo optimism. Maybe the saddest thing about Muppets Now is that the show doesn’t seem to know what to do with the Muppets’ main Muppet, Kermit the Frog. It’s not just that his voice has changed, though it has—after Steve Whitmire was fired by Disney for, the company said, “unacceptable business conduct,” the voice actor and puppeteer was replaced by Matt Vogel, who in Muppets Now plays him a little less squeakily, a little less fragile.
But that’s not Vogel’s doing alone; it appears to be Disney’s design for the character’s evolution. Kermit’s character has shifted in the modern era—a little less “Rainbow Connection,” a little more disgruntled dad. It’s noticeable, in Muppets Now, that Kermit is kind of the group’s boss, and little more than that—there aren’t many segments where he shows up to be a funnyman or a singer. His most frequent recurring bit is in the legal disclaimers that come before Bunsen and Beaker’s science show, where a mammalian lawyer muppet named Joe from legal cackles to the audience that they better not try the experiments at home. Even here, Kermit’s the straight man. If Muppets Now seeks to reclaim the glory of The Muppet Show in future seasons, they will have to find a place for Kermit—his strange sensitivity, his sinuous limbs, his terror of Miss Piggy’s sexuality, and his robust, undying optimism, all rolled into one.
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