Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, Joe from Legal, and a beaker with his mouth open perpetually on Muppets Now.
Photo: Courtesy of Disney +
As The Muppet ShowJim Henson’s glorious and groundbreaking 1970s comedy / puppet sketch comedy, Kermit the Frog & Co. have been reinvented many times on television. They have been animated and degraded in Muppet Babies (twice), pushed into the ephemeral the Muppet show restart Muppets tonight, and then pushed back to the fake ABC documentary series The Muppets, which aired for a single season on ABC in 2015 and 2016.
Now it’s happening again in Muppets Now, the new Disney + comedy that places familiar characters based on felt, as Disney says, in its first “unscripted” series. In each episode, overworked producer Scooter loads the digitized segments from each episode so they are available for streaming. As you drop and drag the files to your desk, and are usually filled with requests and concerns from your colleagues, we can see each one, from Miss Piggy’s weekly attempts to offer health and beauty advice to the show. Swedish chef’s cooking with the over-emphasized title, “Økėÿ Døkęÿ Køøkiñ”.
In other words, Muppets Now is based on a contemporary entertainment environment, more or less like The Muppets It was five years ago, but it wisely works in a vein of sketch comedy reminiscent of The Muppet Show. In Muppets NowMiss Piggy still “hello-yaaas! “and says,” Kiss, kiss. “Beeker, faithful assistant to scientist Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, continues to make colossal mistakes while frequently” Meep, meep-ing “during his regular segment,” Muppet Labs Field Test. “For those old weanlings in “Pigs in Space” and “Muppet Labs” The Muppet Show forerunner of the “Muppet Labs Field Test”, all these bits will be recorded as that: bits like those reminiscent of the golden age of Muppetry. Younger viewers, on the other hand, may perceive the blocks within each episode as the equivalent of YouTube clips. That’s what is so clever about the way Muppets Studios has designed this series – any generation can enjoy it and believe that it connects directly to their own sensibilities, a quality that overly grown-ups strive to be edgy. The Muppets was missing (Although it was filmed in 2019, the segmented and occasionally videoconferencing format also makes Muppets Now It occasionally feels like a more polished version of the fare we’ve become accustomed to seeing during the pandemic.)
Also, in this more than stressful world, who doesn’t need some Muppets in their life? I was more than happy to dive into the first four episodes of all six of the season, which are released one per week starting this Friday, and their recognizable mix of silly humor that has always defined the best comedy of the Muppets. I laughed more than once during Pepé’s Unbelievable Game Show, presented by Pepé the King Prawn, who, despite Scooter’s objections, insists on inventing his own games and rules every time he invites a couple of contestants to play. In one installment, he abandons a planned trivia contest and instead forces his two guests to participate in a staring contest; in another, he fills a lightning round with meaningless questions like “Is there someone named Dave here?”
A “Mup Close and Personal” feature, a one-on-one interview between a Muppet and a celebrity that inevitably spirals out of control, allows Miss Piggy to start a conversation with guest Aubrey Plaza by asking something that should be asked on redder rugs, if the Red carpets are one thing again: “What is your favorite and very personal story that your publicist has written for you?” I never expected part of Muppets Now to remind me Between two fernsBut I was pleasantly surprised that this was so.
Not all jokes and details land. The parties with the Swedish chef are not as fun as the The Muppet Show It used to be, probably because you don’t spend enough time tossing ingredients into the air. “Økėÿ Døkęÿ Køøkiñ”, essentially a cook between the Swedish chef and a real famous chef, is introduced by a new character named Beverly Plume, who is a turkey, which makes him a bit strange when the dish being cooked involves chicken. (Fortunately, Beverly is never forced into a situation where she has to try a poultry dish.) The cooking segments also slip into a semi-educational element by introducing cuisines from a variety of cultures and demonstrating how to cook them. . Even some of the science lab parodies impart legitimate information about how speed and sound waves work while making sure Beeker’s nose gets crushed.
But just when you think Muppets Now It’s drifting too far into children’s show television, leaving a bit of a joke for fans who got hooked the first time Kermit and the gang declared it was time to start the music and turn on the lights. In one episode, Joe From Legal, the series’ legal adviser who is a weasel Muppet in a lawsuit, insists that the segments be tested in focus groups. The information scrolling on the test console includes this important fact: “54 percent ask why there are so many songs about rainbows.” Muppets Now It is something new and very 2020. But the rainbow connections of the franchise have clearly not been forgotten.
