Only one new episode, Wed eve 04-Feb-2026, 9 pm Eastern Time
Attaching the entire NYT review. Summary: they love it.
Review: This is Your Grandparents' 'Muppet Show,' Fortunately
-------------------------------------------------------------
Nobody put too much thought into reinventing the gonzo variety
classic for its revival. That's what makes it a delight.
Backstage on the new special, "The Muppet Show," Sabrina
Carpenter excitedly greets Miss Piggy, in whom she recognizes
a kindred spirit. "I grew up watching you," Carpenter says.
"My parents grew up watching you. Their parents grew up
watching--"
The joke, of course, is that Carpenter ends up offending the
diva by implying that she's old. But there's a truth to it,
too: Since the madcap critters lit the lights on the
comedy-variety "Muppet Show" in the 1970s, every generation
has gotten its own Muppets.
Sometimes we get them more than once. In 2015, ABC - which had
aired the prime-time update "Muppets Tonight" in the 1990s -
premiered "The Muppets," an awkwardly edgy workplace
mockumentary. ("This is not your grandmother's Muppets," the
president of ABC promised/threatened at the time.) In 2020,
Disney+ gave us "Muppets Now," a streaming show about Kermit
and company producing mini streaming shows, which lacked the
original's theatrical pizazz.
The premise for "The Muppet Show" of 2026, a (for now)
single-episode special premiering on Wednesday on Disney+ and
ABC, is comparatively simple: It's "The Muppet Show." And
wocka wocka wocka, that's all you need.
There's no newfangled hook, no contrived rationalization to
bring the characters up to date, no pretensions toward heft or
hipness. There are songs and slapstick and jokes, and nobody,
blessedly, stayed up too late thinking about the reasons why.
(Because Muppets, that's why.)
The opening makes this attitude clear, as Kermit enters the
familiar Muppet Theater to a melancholy rendition of
"The Rainbow Connection," walking past black-and-white photos
of past guests like Harry Belafonte and Steve Martin. He plops
himself with a sigh at his backstage desk, where he notices
that the musician Rowlf is plinking out the song at the piano.
"What'd you think this was, some kind of sentimental montage
in your head?" Rowlf asks. "We're doing the show again, frog!"
And away we go. The brilliance of the best Muppets
entertainments has been to kindle the warm embers of sentiment,
then douse them with a blast of seltzer. This was a strength of
the 2011 comeback movie, "The Muppets," starring and cowritten
by Jason Segel; that film loved the franchise on its own
slapstick terms, without either reinventing it or smothering it
in reverence.
Now it's the turn of Segel's "Freaks and Geeks" co-star Seth
Rogen, who produces the new special and makes a cameo. (Rogen
already stars for Apple TV in "Platonic" and "The Studio," the
latter of which may now qualify as his second-best showbiz
spoof on air.)
Rogen, fuzzy-faced and genially explosive, is an excellent fit;
the appeal of the franchise has always come partly from how well
it brought out the Muppetude of its human guest stars. It
certainly does this for Carpenter, a brassy, cannily cartoonish
performer who seems born to the job. No sooner was her casting
announced than a poster on Bluesky imagined a bit: "Sabrina
wears the same outfit as miss piggy and miss piggy gets mad at
her."
That this precise gag happens scarcely two minutes into the
special is not a failing but a selling point. This show knows
what you want from the Muppets, and it's going to shoot the
stuff at you like Ping-Pong balls from a cannon.
You want Statler and Waldorf dropping insults from the balcony.
You want Kermit neurotically melting down over cast dramas and
production crises. You want Dr. Bunsen Honeydew to subject his
assistant Beaker to a misbegotten experiment in Muppet Labs, and
you want the fallout from that experiment to disastrously and
hilariously involve Maya Rudolph (who played the Muppet rock star
Janice in a 2007 "Saturday Night Live" sketch, in which Rogen
played Rowlf).
Disney has for some reason declared the specific musical numbers
to be spoilers, but even the most current ones feel like they
could have aired in the show's original heyday. This is not a
complaint, nor is it one to observe that the comic spat between
Miss Piggy and Carpenter is a bit that could have been written
for Linda Ronstadt in 1980.
"The Muppet Show," it turns out, doesn't need to be retooled for
a new era, because the Muppets exist outside of time. These are,
in fact, your grandparents' Muppets, and your parents'. And yet
they're exactly the Muppets you need right now.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/arts/television/review-the-muppet-show.html>
