This is your grandparents' Muppet Show, fortunately

Backstage on the new special, The Muppet Show, Sabrina Carpenter excitedly greets Miss Piggy, in whom she recognises a kindred spirit.

- ■JAMES PONIEWOZIK

“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 which premiered on Wednesday on Disney+ and ABC, is comparatively simple: It's The Muppet Show. And wocka wocka wocka, that’s all you need.