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After the (very good and much superior to its predecessor) Muppets Most Wanted underperformed, The Muppets are now coming back to TV... in a show called The Muppets!
Vulture: (excerpts from a longer article)
Today, there are no true variety shows in prime time. If The Muppets were to just remake The Muppet Show as it is, it would be resurrecting a TV format rather than skewering it.
The new format doesn’t mean there won’t be guest stars, musical numbers, and other variety elements.
Based on the preview, my interest is piqued. I heartily approve of the prominence of Gonzo, my favorite Muppet, and of the fact that Walter doesn't say a dang word. It looks as though The Muppets' corporate overlords at Disney may now recognize that, despite not being entirely human, the characters' natural audience is not kids but adults.
Vulture: (excerpts from a longer article)
After a two-decade absence from series television, ABC announced Tuesday that the Muppets will once again have a weekly time slot: Tuesdays at 8 p.m., starting this fall. Their comeback vehicle is The Muppets, and it’s being overseen by comedy veterans Bill Prady (The Big Bang Theory) and Bob Kushell (3rd Rock From the Sun).
The Muppets are now working on a (fake) late-night TV show.
Back in the 1970s, The Muppet Show had the gang putting on a vaudeville-style spectacular. Prady says The Muppets will find our furry friends “producing a late-night show like [Jimmy] Kimmel, and it’s hosted by Miss Piggy.” (Finally — a woman gets a network late-night show!) “Kermit is the executive producer of the show, which puts him in the same harried, caught-in-the-middle situation,” Prady adds. “Miss Piggy is Miss Piggy, in terms of her personality and her approach to things. The staff you’ll see working on the show — some are human, some are bears and frogs. And no one seems to notice.”
There’s a reason the new series isn’t a variety show like the original.
After talking to Prady, it seems clear he and his team aren’t looking to reboot the iconic characters or radically remake them. Instead, they’re just trying to do the same thing the original show did: gently satirize the popular culture of the time. “The Muppet Show was a variety show because when it was on, that was the dominant form of television,” Prady explains. “If you turned the TV on then, what [did] you see? Sonny and Cher and Carol Burnett and Flip Wilson and Richard Pryor and Lily Tomlin. That was television. So The Muppet Show made fun of variety.”
After talking to Prady, it seems clear he and his team aren’t looking to reboot the iconic characters or radically remake them. Instead, they’re just trying to do the same thing the original show did: gently satirize the popular culture of the time. “The Muppet Show was a variety show because when it was on, that was the dominant form of television,” Prady explains. “If you turned the TV on then, what [did] you see? Sonny and Cher and Carol Burnett and Flip Wilson and Richard Pryor and Lily Tomlin. That was television. So The Muppet Show made fun of variety.”
Today, there are no true variety shows in prime time. If The Muppets were to just remake The Muppet Show as it is, it would be resurrecting a TV format rather than skewering it.
The new format doesn’t mean there won’t be guest stars, musical numbers, and other variety elements.
The Muppets will delve deeper into the personal lives of the characters than the original show.Prady says his interest in going beyond the felt with the Muppets goes back to the 1970s and ’80s. “I used to imagine when I was watching the old Muppet Show that there’d be a bar across the street [from the Muppet theater],” he says. “And after they finished doing the show, Fozzie would come up to Kermit and say, ‘You know, it wasn’t our worst.’ That’s the show I wanted to see, and that’s the show I want to do. I want to see the rest of the lives of the characters you exactly know.”
Based on the preview, my interest is piqued. I heartily approve of the prominence of Gonzo, my favorite Muppet, and of the fact that Walter doesn't say a dang word. It looks as though The Muppets' corporate overlords at Disney may now recognize that, despite not being entirely human, the characters' natural audience is not kids but adults.
