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.
