It started out in a bubble of
goodwill as the most anticipated show of the fall, with a great preview package
and gangbuster ratings. But along the
way it seemed to lose its buzz and its ratings, requiring a mid-run EP switch
and garnering it bubble status six episodes into its run. What happened? How did the good times go so wrong?
There is one complaint that’s most
common among Muppet fans. For a lot of
them, the show’s more adult sense of humor has been a stumbling block. But the sort of jokes the show’s employed add
nothing new to the franchise; it’s the kind of tenor and pitch they’ve been
using since the 70s, when Kermit danced with Lydia the Tattooed lady and said that
bib and napkin, knife and fork would be the only way his lips would touch pork.
My problems are duel: the
character Flanderization and the downright meanness of the scripts.
In some ways, the Muppets gets something
right about Kermit and Piggy’s base tenors – Piggy has always been a diva with
a cruel streak and Kermit’s always been a hardworking showman who believes in
his ragtag group of performers who runs himself to the bone in the name of his
showbiz dreams.
The Muppets take this idea and
twists it; now Piggy is so obsessed with hogging the spotlight she refuses to
share it with anybody, bearing violent grudges and existing as a permanent
stormcloud of temper. On the old show,
her chops and kicks had a distinctly feminist edge to them, delivered to an
overbearing Gonzo, an insulting Kermit or to her sexist Pigs in Space co-stars;
on the Muppet Show she could team up with Raquel Welch to deliver the song
‘W-O-M-A-N’; here, she argues with fellow diva actresses over ruined auditions
or competitive charity endeavors. The
show has forgotten the basic tenant of Piggy’s existence – she was fearlessly
feminist.
Kermit is the same careworn,
hard-working frog we’ve always known, but the show takes his stress and
exacerbates it – on several occasions he talks about being worried that Piggy
will kill him, and he’s forced to take a retreat to deal with his stress. This stress has made him manipulative – at
one point he deliberately turns the staff against Piggy after a happy night of
karaoke leaves him the sole responsible functioning adult at a staff meeting
the next day.
In most of the Muppet-related
shows that have been released an existed, Kermit and Piggy have some sort of a
relationship, be it one-sided attraction (The Muppet Show), boyfriend-girlfriend
(Muppets Take Manhattan) or friends on the road to being lovers (The Muppet
Movie). Every single one of those
projects focused on some larger goal, be that putting on a show, making it big
in Hollywood or on Broadway, landing a scoop and stopping jewel thieves, or turning
Michael Caine’s heart toward the light. But
The Muppets focuses so exclusively on the failed relationship between Piggy and
Kermit and on Piggy’s outré behavior that it feels formulaic. There’s no feeling of teamwork and no love of
showbiz; everyone is neurotic, cynical or downright tired. Other character problems abound; indeed, mainstays
such as Gonzo and Rizzo often get ignored in favor of a long plot about
Fozzie’s awkward romance with a human woman.
Other characters are flattened; the Electric Mayhem are stoners, Bunsen
and Beaker are romantically involved, and that’s the grand sum of the jokes
told about them.
And then there’s the show’s
mean-spiritedness. It’s one thing for
the characters to fuss and fight with each other, that was a constant mainstay
of the original show’s existence; it’s quite another to make us feel like the
characters lack a core value system and don’t really care about each other. The Muppets’ core value system have always
revolved around faith ad dreams – Kermit’s fantasy of making it big and
bringing all of his friends with him, a journey the audience was invited to
take part in; in The Muppets the characters are either unhappy stars or miserable
wage slaves; there’s no room for dreams.
For even friendship.
To watch the show is to feel the pain of trying to pack child-size
wonderment and belief into an adult-sized cube of cynicism.
And that’s one thing the Muppets
have never been. Cynical.
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