‘The Muppets’ spoilers: New showrunner on change in tone, ‘human’ villain
It’s been a while since we’ve posted anything new on “The Muppets,” but this show remains a little bit of an enigma on ABC. There are some genuinely funny moments in it, but the first half of season 1 started to sag to the point where some of the characters ventured a tad too far from what we feel is there happy medium. Miss Piggy got a little too angry, Kermit got a little too sad, and we were missing a little bit of a spark. The show did improve as we got further into the fall, but how do you let people know that who have already tuned out the show? It’s so hard to convince viewers to give something a show once more.
The network is still doing what they can to shake things up and bring new life to what was an ambitious show from the moment they ordered it. Kristin Newman (who knows a thing or two about silly fun from her work on “Galavant”) was brought in to replace previous showrunner Bob Kushell, and speaking to The Hollywood Reporter she details some of the changes that are coming in the final episodes this season:
“I’m bringing in a human bad guy who will, I hope, be used to unite the Muppets fighting against him — instead of fighting against Piggy and fighting against each other. The human threat is obviously from the network because they work on a TV show. He is a branding guru named Pache — played by [recurring guest] Utkarsh Ambudkar (The Mindy Project, Pitch Perfect) and he has rebranded warlords and network presidents and he has a lot of slick ideas and it’s all about new, new, new and slick, slick, slick, which is not The Muppets. The Muppets are all about joy and zaniness and heart and the way that they have to fight this bad guy is by binding together. They’re going to bring the people who have been backstage on Up Late With Miss Piggy,doing more sketches and bits and bringing more joy back to her show.”
All of this to us sounds great, given that The Muppets have always been characters that work better when they can unify against an opposing force; plus, we always like mixing them with humans. You’ll be able to see much of this new direction when the show returns starting on February 2; we’re going to at least give the new concept-of-sorts a try, and hope you do as well.