Muppets Now

Muppets Now gives us the purest Muppet content in a very long time. ... Muppets Now is the total spiritual successor to the groundbreaking and iconic ’70s Muppet Show. Truly, the variety show of yesteryear would be a playlist of totally bonkers YouTube vids today.

It’s a bit like the old show in that it’s full of small sketches and segments, and in some ways, it reminded me of John Mulaney’s popular Netflix show for kids that adults also enjoyed, The Sack Lunch Bunch. ... The show really shines brightest when it’s about Miss Piggy.

Muppets Now delivers a continuous barrage of information — some educational, some silly, and all entertaining.

It’s got wit, warmth and charm in abundance, and although it includes adults in its fun it doesn’t cater to them.

Delightful. ... The felt-and-glue Muppets have always excelled at interacting off the cuff with flesh-and-blood humans, and some of these segments are certainly unscripted, if not entirely improvised, which leaves room for real reactions and interesting rhythms; it makes the show feel modern without being needlessly edgy.

I more than happily immersed myself in the first four episodes of the season’s six, which roll out one per week starting this Friday, and their recognizable mix of silly-meets-meta humor that has always defined the best Muppet comedy.

The Muppets have always been funniest when spoofing showbiz, and the same is true of Muppets Now. Though it lacks some of the warmth and sophistication of The Muppet Show, its characters have been smartly updated for the streaming era.

“Muppets Now” is a smart enough update of the franchise that it should have no trouble satisfying longtime fans while converting new ones.

For The Muppets, putting on the show has always been as entertaining as the show itself (often more so), and this format loses much of that element. ... Luckily, the characters, even those that have been entertaining us for decades, are so fleshed out and timeless in their personalities and quirks and silliness that they can make a project like Muppets Now work for both old fans and, hopefully, a few new ones.

The best segments of Muppet Now are the ones with the most in-person and in-puppet interaction.

The freewheeling and often frantically rib-tickling Muppets Now is as close as these puppet masters have come in a while to recapturing the joyfully anarchic spirit of the classic The Muppet Show of the 1970s. [3 - 16 Aug 2020, p.4]

“Muppets Now” improves on the ABC sitcom because it understands what the Muppets are and why we love them. ... But with the segmented format of “Muppets Now,” you lose the big-scale interaction among characters that animated the 1970s variety show. The connective tissue here mostly consists of Kermit and Scooter teleconferencing. There are some nice throwaway jokes there. But just like all the Zoom webinars you’re attending these days, it’s not quite the same.