The Muppet Show

The Chaos We Kept

I went in wondering if we really needed yet another swing at Jim Henson’s greatest creation. Disney’s handling of the Muppets these past twenty years has been, at best, uneven. But the moment I hit play on Alex Timbers’ 2026 *Muppet Show* revival—a tight 30-minute special for the franchise’s 50th anniversary—I felt myself unclench. Timbers doesn’t “update” them or sand anything down. He just strikes a match and lets the whole thing careen across the stage the way it always did.



Timbers, the Broadway guy behind the gloriously unhinged worlds of *Beetlejuice* and *Moulin Rouge*, gets these characters on a gut level. He pitched the idea as a “strange brew of maximalism, mischief and heart,” and that’s exactly what you’re watching. No cell phones. No Kermit spitting TikTok slang. It doesn’t feel like a reboot so much as accidentally catching Season 6, Episode 1—like they never stopped in 1981. The frame is packed in the best way. Let your eyes drift and you’ll catch deep cuts like Thog (back to his properly enormous scale) and Mildred Huxtetter hovering at the edges.



The special’s steady hand is Sabrina Carpenter, who slips into the chaos of the variety-show format like she grew up backstage. Acting opposite felt puppets without telegraphing the joke takes a very specific deadpan, and she nails it. Her back-and-forth with Miss Piggy—two divas casually threatening each other with lawsuits—lands as genuinely sharp. And it’s hard not to notice Carpenter borrowing a little of Piggy’s mythic self-regard and folding it into her own pop-star swagger. The best beat, though, is weirdly the calmest one: wedged between Seth Rogen pop-ins and pyrotechnics going sideways, Carpenter, Kermit (Matt Vogel gives him this anxious warmth), and Miss Piggy do a soft, sincere “Islands in the Stream.” The camera stops fussing. The lights dim. For three minutes you just… buy it.



If this half-hour backdoor pilot turns into a full series, we’ll see—but it more than earns its spot on the schedule. *The DisInsider* called it “a celebration of 50 years of Muppets that doesn't feel too over-congratulatory,” and that’s dead on. It isn’t a museum display. It’s a functioning little theater held together with duct tape and flop sweat, reminding you why this beautiful mess worked in the first place.