Entertainment

The Muppet Show's Return Is Ruined By Filling It With Sly Adult Content

By Joshua Tyler
| Published 1 hour ago

In a world gone mad, we could all use a little simple, silly, innocent fun. It’s the perfect time for a revival of The Muppet Show, and, on the surface, that’s exactly what Executive Producer Seth Rogen has given us.

His new version of the classic variety series on Disney+ looks, sounds, and feels exactly like the iconic Jim Henson series from the 1970s and 1980s. On that front, it’s a triumph. A perfect production.

Classic Muppet Show backstage chaos on Disney’s revival of *The Muppet Show*.

Except, there’s one big difference, and it’s this: Jim Henson’s version was the ultimate in wholesome, family-friendly entertainment. Seth Rogen’s version only pretends to be.

It’s normal for family-targeted shows to work in a couple of edgy jokes that’ll go over the heads of little kids who might be watching with them. That’s part of the fun for parents. However, what would you think if instead of one or two sly adult references in your Pixar movie, there were twenty? Or thirty? And what if all those sly adult references were only about one specific inappropriate thing? At what point would you start thinking… hey, is this Pixar movie trying to tell my kids something?

Sabrina Carpenter makes Kermit uncomfortable by bragging about sleeping with a married man.

Because that’s exactly what The Muppet Show is doing. It’s only thirty minutes long, but I counted at least ten references to various kinds of sex in those thirty minutes. Actually, not just references, most of them seemed to specifically revolve around celebrating full-on, willful cheating.

There’s a joke where Sabrina Carpenter tells Kermit she likes kink. There’s an entire sketch that totally revolves around Piggy cheating on her lover. After that, it’s back to Sabrina Carpenter so she can brag to Kermit about banging a married man.

Then there’s a segment with Maya Rudolph where she seems to be sort of getting frisky with a grumpy Muppet in the audience. Oh, and two of the musical numbers are popular songs about sex. Though the second one is sung entirely by rats, and it’s hilarious. The third song has Piggy replace Kermit as the object of Sabrina Carpenter’s desire.

There are more, and to Seth Rogen’s credit, I guess, they’re all structured in a way that little kids probably won’t realize what’s going on. But it’s a significant portion of the show, which is a very weird thing to do for your debut episode of The Muppet Show. It’s not the jokes themselves so much as the volume of them, crammed into a short thirty minutes of otherwise perfect Muppet silliness.

Piggy replaces Kermit for a love song with Sabrina Carpenter.

I get and support the desire to work in some sly adult jokes for the parents; it’s a family show, not a kids’ show. But why are they all sex references? And why are there so many of them?

The best parts of The Muppet Show are when it does fully get away from sex and cheating and engages in sillier gags. My favorite was a setup early in the episode where a Beaker mishap leads to eyeballs bouncing all over the Muppet theater. That, in turn, snowballs into Maya Rudolph being pronounced dead, and ultimately ends in a classic saxophone gag buried in the end credits.

It looks and feels so much like The Muppet Show that I worry parents won’t realize their kids are being fed a steady stream of sexualization, or whatever it is. In an era when people are already wary of Disney’s tendency towards showing inappropriate content to minors, filling the debut episode of your attempt to revitalize the greatest family television show of all time with adult references is, to say the least, a very odd decision.

All the elements are there for The Muppet Show to be the right thing at the right time, if Seth Rogen can just get control of his libido. Maybe they’ll fix it in the second episode. Who am I kidding? This is a Disney show. Of course they won’t.