The Muppet Show Revival Is Not for Gen X and That’s OK

Why do Statler and Waldorf, the two curmudgeons sitting in the balcony during every episode of The Muppet Show, have box seats to a show they supposedly hate? In the opening credits, they even have their own refrain: “Why do we always come here? / I guess we’ll never know. / It’s like a kind of torture / to have to watch the show.” In truth, these two old men were the original trolls before social media made hate-watching commonplace, and they’d never admit that they simply enjoy a good train wreck.

But of course that’s the meta of The Muppet Show: everything goes wrong behind and in front of the curtain, and we get to enjoy the backstage shenanigans. The mayhem is the entertainment! But what if Statler and Waldorf represented a different aging demographic: the original audience of The Muppet Show from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s? Would they watch the current special airing on Disney+ and find it lacking in the spark that made The Muppet Show of their youth remarkable? Would they throw metaphorical tomatoes from the balcony?

This isn’t entirely a hypothetical. I, a Gen X-er watched the Sabrina Carpenter special with my family, wanting to share and recapture the magic of the show I remembered from when I was in elementary school. But when the show was over, I felt underwhelmed. Aside from a Miss Piggy skit and a Bunsen Honeydew & Beaker segment, it was mostly musical numbers. Was this The Muppet Show I grew up with? Why did it feel so… insufficient?

Meanwhile, my teenaged daughter loved it! As someone whose exposure to The Muppets mostly consisted of YouTube snippets like the iconic cover of “Bohemian Rhapsody” or the Swedish Chef’s “Popcorn” earworm, seeing a full-blown variety show with a current artist like Sabrina Carpenter was a revelation. She immediately asked if we could go back and watch the old episodes somehow.

And that’s when I realized why I found the special lacking. I was unfairly expecting it to be everything all at once, even though this event episode was the same half hour as a regular installment of The Muppet Show. It wasn’t enough for me because Sabrina Carpenter was a modern artist getting in the way of Fozzy Bear the prop comic and Pigs in Space and all the other acts I remembered. Obviously, the guest host wasn’t for a 50+ viewer who might as well have been seated with the geezers in the balcony.

My daughter and I agreed on one thing: there needs to be more of The Muppet Show. I’ll freely admit to welling up during Rowlf’s piano montage at the beginning as the footlights came up on the familiar stage, and the final ensemble number, another Queen cover, was inspiring to say the least. In these times when everything seems to be going wrong behind the scenes, it would be nice to know that Kermit and Scooter could be there to make it alright in the end… no matter what those cynics Statler and Waldorf say.

The Muppet Show event special is available to stream on Disney+ now.