The Muppets: Got Silk Review

Got Silk feels like the first real misstep of The Muppets since it started picking up steam. It almost works, but not quite. Stuff comes together in the end, but the first half is kind of a drag.

Really, it has all the right ingredients that it should be great. Our main storyline is about Miss Piggy coming to realize the fact that she has no friends. As she tries to rectify that, Uncle Deadly is stuck having to shadow her and help keep it from being completely awkward. On the upside, this would’ve been absolutely insufferable prior to the show’s overhaul. Piggy’s now only egotistical and lacks self-awareness when before she had a short fuse and was a terrible person to deal with.

A silver lining’s a silver lining.

It still ends up being an uncomfortable affair, but without any real funny gags to keep it afloat. Uncle Deadly may be one of the best characters on the show, but even he can only do so much with the first two-third of this plotline.

The other plot is a little bit stronger, although it reeks of feeling like we’ve already seen this. Kermit butts heads with the show’s new antagonist Pizza (again, announced “Pa-Chay”) over Pizza’s desire to include blatant advertisements in the sketches. To get the writers on his side, he buys them snazzy new suits and takes them out to lunch.

Again, this should be awesome. Gonzo, Pepe, and Rizzo (the writers) are an excellent trio. The scene of Pepe completely losing his cool and slapping Gonzo around is certainly a fine moment and a comedic highlight. It’s just that it doesn’t really go anywhere, it doesn’t meet its potential, and the stakes are a little too low for us to care. In fact, the only reason there are any stakes to begin with are because of a tacked-on and otherwise uninteresting couple of scenes about Kermit dealing with being dumped by Denise.

That plot finds a satisfactory ending involving RuPaul, but it’s still just kind of there.

Piggy’s ending, on the other hand, is golden. Musical guest Ingrid Michaelson does a number and her song “The Way I Am” hits onto the emotion and context in the same way Dave Grohl’s “Learn to Fly” did in an earlier episode. Things go from uninteresting to extremely touching in the final two minutes.

Without spoiling, it also gives us one of the silliest, most absurd sights of the show’s history. It’s built on something mentioned early in the episode and goes to show that in terms of comedy, talking about something funny might cut the mustard but it simply doesn’t compare to actually seeing that very situation play out.

Got Silk is a competent episode of The Muppets, but it certainly isn’t memorable. Few jokes land despite starring some of the strongest characters on the show. When this series is looked back upon in the future as a lost gem that only lasted a mere season, nobody will consider Got Silk to be their favorite episode, nor will they even recall much about it to begin with.