‘The Muppet Show’ Special Event review: There may be a few strings attached

“It’s the return of The Muppet Show — back on the very stage where it all started, and then ended, and is maybe starting again, depending on how tonight goes.”

Kermit the Frog delivers this line early in the special event, and it’s hit me harder than most anything else that’s aired recently. On the surface, it’s just a joke, of course. It’s a mild, self-deprecating, slightly bewildered joke that has always been Kermit’s signature register. Beneath the surface, though, it’s also an admission.

This is a backdoor pilot. Everyone in the room knows it is a backdoor pilot. Disney knows. The press knows. The fans… Yeah. We know better than anyone. And so Kermit says it out loud, folds the corporate audition into the comedy, makes the awareness itself part of the bit. It is, in its way, the most self-aware thing the Muppets have done on television in a while.

It’s been a brutal 15-years for the Muppets on the small screen. Since Disney acquired the franchise in 2004, every single television project built around these characters has failed to find a sustainable audience. And the reasons why are worth examining closely, because the 2026 special appears to have learned from each one. Whether it has learned enough is a more complicated question than it seemed before viewing. The answer is: mostly yes, with caveats.

A brief, slightly depressing history.

The most instructive failure remains the 2015 ABC series, simply called The Muppets. It was a half-hour primetime mockumentary—The Office with Muppets, essentially—and premiered to nine million viewers. Not bad at all. But then it collapsed to fewer than three million by the finale. The postmortems were predictably brutal: it was rushed, the tone was wrong, the format didn’t suit the characters. But none of these diagnoses identified the real problem, which was structural. The Muppets was a workplace comedy. It took place in an office. The characters went to meetings. It was, in almost every way, a perfectly competent piece of modern television. It was, for the most part, enjoyable. But it was clearly a catastrophic fit for characters who had never, in 40 years of existence, been defined by anything so small.

The Muppet Show—the original, a masterpiece that ran from 1976 until 1981—was not a workplace comedy.It was chaos contained in a theater, organized around the ancient, slightly absurd structure of “putting on a show“. That structure was the engine, so when you took it away, you didn’t really have the Muppets anymore. You had something else wearing their faces.

The Muppets Mayhem, which arrived on Disney+ in 2023, made a different kind of mistake. It was actually a good show. It was warm, funny, well-made. But it focused on Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem recording an album, and Disney cancelled it after one season because it simply didn’t draw viewers. It gave you a corner of the theater when what people wanted—what people have always wanted, even if they couldn’t articulate it—was the theater itself.

The 2026 special gives them the theater. And for the most part, it works.

A panic attack of a pilot.

What works best in this latest iteration of The Muppets is the structure. The engine of the special is a classic Muppet premise. Kermit, ever the harried showrunner, has overcommitted. He told every single character their sketch sounded “fun” as a way to make them feel better. And now he has to put on a show in which not all of them can have the spotlight. There is a real, almost existential pressure to this. It’s meta in the sense that they only have one shot at this, that the theater has been dark for decades, that the stakes are absurd and also somehow enormous. And that’s the right premise for a back-door pilot, because it is structurally a premise about whether the show deserves to continue. Kermit’s panic is the audience’s question, after all. And the special spends its runtime answering it.

The answer, broadly, is yes! But with an asterisk. The special is indeed a whole lot of fun. It is genuinely, warmly, consistently fun in a way that none of the Disney-era television projects have managed to be. The comedy has a looseness to it, a willingness to be silly that felt constrained in previous attempts. There is an opening musical number in which Sabrina Carpenter sings while physically brawling a bar full of rowdy, apparently drunk Muppets causing mayhem. And it lands. Not because it’s sophisticated, but because it is exactly the kind of gleeful, slightly absurd spectacle that the variety-show format exists to contain. The jokes are cheesy, and they’re cheesy in the right way. In the way that suggests the writers know exactly what they’re doing and are having a fun time doing it.

The special is also edgier than you might expect. This is where it gets interesting but, also, slightly complicated. At one point, Carpenter makes a joke to Kermit about enjoying “kinks” when he mentions the show has some kinks to work out. Miss Piggy spends a recurring sketch at a costumed ball searching for her secret lover. The tone is not crude, exactly, but it is knowingly adult in a way that feels less like the Muppets and more like a certain era of four-quadrant television specials. The kind that tried to thread the needle between family entertainment and something that wouldn’t bore the adults in the room.

A show for the adults in the room. And maybe the kids sitting near them.

This is, unmistakably, a show that is primarily targeting millennials and Gen Xers. Disney knows, and has probably known since 2015, that children today broadly do not much care about the Muppets. What they’re banking on is the parent who grew up with these characters sharing something they loved with their younger kids. Something that doesn’t insult either generation’s intelligence, but doesn’t assume the adult in the room is only there as chaperone. It’s a sensible strategy. Whether it is the right one for the long-term health of the franchise is a question the special has no way of answering.

The standout, the thing that makes the special feel like it might actually have a future, is the dynamic between Carpenter and Miss Piggy. Carpenter plays her role with a kind of ditzy, sincerely delighted reverence for Piggy that is both funny and, crucially, not condescending. She’s not playing someone who finds the Muppets quaint or charming in an ironic way. She finds them wonderful, and she performs that wonder with enough sincerity to make it infectious. Piggy, for her part, has a running bit in which she insists that her lawyers are in the process of suing Carpenter for stealing her “look.”

The back-and-forth between the two builds across the special in a way that feels organic rather than manufactured. Their best moment together is a musical number (a boat rendition of a famous love song that begins as a duet between Kermit and Carpenter before Piggy arrives and, inevitably, takes it over). It’s the same kind of scene that the original series did better than almost any other television show in its time.

A few more odds and ends.

Seth Rogen, despite being billed as an executive producer and guest star, is barely in it. He has two quick scenes, one of which is the Fozzie exchange from the teaser. Maya Rudolph, in a quieter supporting role, actually gets more screen time, which is either a sign that Disney is being smart about not letting the celebrity cameos overwhelm the show, or a sign that Rogen’s involvement was always more about the production side than the performance side. Probably both.

The special’s best single bit belongs to Gonzo, who launches a stunt on self-driving skates while listing off best actress nominees throughout film history. The skates go haywire almost immediately, and Gonzo—still listing actresses, still attempting the stunt—careens through the rest of the special, darting through scenes, interrupting other sketches, a loose cannon that nobody can stop. It is wonderfully, stupidly random, and it works because it is exactly the kind of recurring chaos that the variety-show format was built to accommodate. A single joke that becomes a structural element, that enriches every scene it passes through. It’s Muppet writing at its best, and it’s something that no other format can contain.

The special ends with a musical number that Kermit improvises on the fly. No spoilers, of course, but the point is about how they are all just sort of making this up as they go along. How the show doesn’t have all the answers and doesn’t need to. It is a gentle, slightly self-deprecating closer, and it lands precisely because it does not oversell itself. It doesn’t promise that the Muppet Show is back for good and better than ever. But it does promise that the Muppet Show is indeed back. And it’s still offering up some whimsy and fun when you might need it most.

Let’s put on a show!

Director Alex Timbers brings a true understanding of live-performance rhythm to the special. A sense of pacing and spectacle that you feel in the way scenes are staged and transitions are handled. It doesn’t really feel like a television special made by someone who thinks in television terms. It feels like a show, in the oldest sense of the word and it may be the single biggest reason the special succeeds where previous attempts failed.

Whether it succeeds enough to earn a series order is a question for Disney’s metrics departments, not television critics. But as a piece of entertainment, a statement of intent, and even a proof of concept, the 2026 Muppet Show special is the first Disney-era Muppet project that actually feels like it understands what the Muppets are.

It’s not trying to reinvent them or making them relevant by stripping away everything that made them beloved. No, it’s just simply letting them be what they’ve always been. Ridiculous, sincere, slightly chaotic, and purely fun.

The Muppet Show special event will premiere on Disney+ and ABC on February 4. Watch the trailer here.

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Images courtesy of Disney.