The Muppet Show is back and better than ever before. Well, not better, exactly. I guess a more accurate description would be exactly the same as. But after so many decades of failed attempts at keeping up with the times—after Muppets Now and Muppets Tonight and The Muppets Mayhem, not to mention the Office-style mockumentary series known simply as The Muppets—the Disney/ABC brain trust has realized that Jim Henson’s frantic felt creations work best the way they always have.
As the title suggests, the new version of The Muppet Show is faithfully modeled on the original series, which ran from 1976 to 1981, to an extent that might put off audiences weary of endless reboots with no ideas of their own. But the single episode, now streaming on Disney+ and airing on ABC tonight at 9, is the best kind of fan service, created not just for fans but by them. When Seth Rogen, who serves as one of the new episode’s executive producers, tells Kermit the Frog (performed by Matt Vogel) that it’s been a lifelong dream of his to appear on the show, or when guest star Sabrina Carpenter gushes that she can’t believe she’s meeting the Miss Piggy (Eric Jacobson), there seems to be very little acting required. They’re as giddy as we are.
Variety shows were already beginning to wane when Kermit and Co. made their television debut, but the show had the insight to frame itself as a backstage farce, with a cast centered on a character who feels more like a beleaguered stage manager than the ostensible boss of the troupe. Vogel’s Kermit doesn’t have the antic quality of Henson’s, and it’s not just that the voice always sounds slightly off; he lacks the two-minutes-to-curtain desperation of a harried impresario who’s just barely holding the whole mess together. And the ambient chaos is turned down a notch overall; rather than subduing her enemies with a karate chop, this Miss Piggy merely threatens to get her lawyers involved. But up in the balcony, veteran hecklers Statler (Peter Linz) and Waldorf (Dave Goelz) offer commentary as pissy and pointed as ever, and they go out on an unexpectedly sharp note that suggests this new version might have more to offer than mere nostalgia.
The Muppet Show’s world requires a specific type of performer, a triple (or at least double) threat who can sing and dance alongside snaggletoothed monsters with just the right note of bemused detachment. Which is to say that either Sabrina Carpenter was born for this moment or her very existence forced the universe to coalesce around her. In one sketch, she’s a waitress in a rowdy bar, smashing a bottle over the head of an unruly patron in a trucker hat as she lip-synchs the lyrics to “Manchild.” In another, she’s warbling a lover’s duet with Kermit that doubles as a Dolly Parton homage. Carpenter’s doing shtick, even metashtick, riffing on her long-running gag about how she never wears a wig, but she winks at the material without placing herself above it. It may be corny, but it works.
Some of the episode’s sketches can feel a tad random, like a musical interlude of Rizzo the Rat singing the Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights”—just, why? But that ultimately feels of a piece with the spirit of the show, even if the through line of this particular episode is Kermit needing to cut acts from the schedule rather than throw in half-conceived ones to fill the time. It’s not that every little bit is great, or zingy and self-contained enough to make for a good viral clip. (“I hope that you at least enjoyed some of it,” a sheepish Kermit says to his audience by way of a farewell.) But the overall effect is much greater than the sum of its parts, and quite enough to justify making more of these.
“It’s hard to believe we’re back on the very stage where it all started,” Kermit muses at the beginning of the show, “and then ended, and is maybe starting again, depending on how tonight goes.” It’s a nod to the one-off nature of the special, which, as a brief caption reminds us, exists to prop up the visibility of “Disney’s Muppet Properties and Characters.” But it’s also an acknowledgment that this is just how show business works, and it’s better to let the Muppets be true to what they’ve always been than to crudely modernize them in the vain hopes of hooking a new generation. There are so many current stars it’s tempting to imagine hosting future episodes—picture Benson Boone doing backflips with the Great Gonzo—but if all this new version does is steer a few curious viewers into the Muppet Show archives, consider it a frog well done.