We're At Now, Now
Roughly three months ago, I wrote about the unique and sometimes frustrating experience of revisiting new Muppets content with my 5-year old son. In that essay, I mentioned how we watched the produced-in-pandemic video of Kermit the Frog (now performed by Matt Vogel) singing “The Rainbow Connection” and how my son reacted to the new voice by saying that it sounded like someone playing Kermit.
I mention that here because today, as you may have noticed, the embargo has dropped on Disney+’s new original show, Muppets Now. (Not then. Now. Right now.) The six-episode series is an improvised set of sketches put together for your entertainment. I’ve seen the first four episodes and they are…fine. They’re fine. A few days later, I can with strong clarity recall just a couple of the sketches that made me snicker or laugh. But for the most part, it’s…just fine.
Now, when this show was first announced — the Muppets putting on a show, with celebrity guests — you may have thought, “Hey, are the Muppets finally doing a new version of The Muppet Show?” They are not. Whatever this show is, it’s decidedly not The Muppet Show — and, to be clear, it’s not trying to be. The framing device of Muppets Now — and I know, you’re thinking that a show with the Muppets doesn’t need a framing device — is that Scooter is in charge of uploading each sketch from the show. When? Now, of course. And as soon as he does, we watch those sketches.
The four episodes made available to critics cycle between a small series of sketches: one is an interview segment titled “Mup Close and Personal”, another features Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker doing their exploding-science thing, another has Miss Piggy doing a lifestyle show with Taye Diggs and Linda Cardellini, and so on. These are all sketches made for YouTube, a choice made deliberately based on comments from this article in The New York Times last week. “As Silver put it: “If ‘The Muppet Show’ was a subversion of Sonny and Cher and Ed Sullivan, what would that be in this day and age? And the answer is YouTube.”
“Silver”, to be clear, is Dan Silver of Disney+. And reading his quote, I find myself with two takeaways: one is that, sure, if you look at The Muppet Show specifically and solely as a subversion of 60s- and 70s-era variety shows, a new Muppet show would probably have to subvert something else. The second takeaway is that “if” is doing a hell of a lot of work. I was born in the mid-1980s, and so too were many fans of the Muppet Show, meaning that we grew up in an era where any variety shows lived on, perhaps, via TV Land. If at all. I love The Muppet Show, and I don’t care what it subverted.
I’m with Griffin. The basic premise of The Muppet Show is exceedingly easy to replicate. Actively trying to make the equivalent of viral videos isn’t, precisely because so few viral videos were made with the intent of becoming viral. They just struck a chord with people, often accidentally. I can’t say if any of the clips from Muppets Now may strike similar chords. My instant reaction is that they won’t.
Muppets Now isn’t bad. It’s…again, fine. It’s OK. Per that Times article, though, I am mystified to learn that most of the sketches were filmed before the pandemic, in part because so many of these bits feel like they were driven by a need to be as stripped-down and simplistic as possible. Part of the problem is that the Muppets rarely bounce well off each other here, sometimes because they’re separated by video screens. (To wit: Kermit and Piggy are almost never on screen together in these episodes, which is an extreme missed opportunity.)
Watching Muppets Now makes me think of the old story told by the late Roger Ebert in some of his reviews. It’s the story of the old master who’s visited by the child prodigy, who plays for the old man a very complicated piece of music. The child plays the music flawlessly, never missing a beat. When the child finishes, the old master says, “You know the notes. One day, perhaps you will know the music.” I want the Muppets back. I do. And Muppets Now is certainly a much better attempt at re-re-reviving them than the ABC sitcom from a few years ago. But, to put it the way my son did, it feels like someone playing these characters, instead of these characters being themselves.