The Muppets' Review: The Gang Looks Great, But Too Much Piggy

Which is to say, they look great — there’s a brightness to Kermit’s green that sometimes glows like emerald, that handsome devil — and The Muppets features fine technical polish: The puppetry and however the heck they film these creations display excellent technical artistry.  Alas, The Muppets arrives with two flaws: rather less funny, and with too much Miss Piggy. I freely admit that I have a long-standing antipathy toward Miss Piggy. Chalk it up to decades of people over-using Piggy’s faux-shocked catchphrase, “Moi?,” and my general feeling that with the ascendance of Piggy as a popular character in the 1970s, the Muppets as created by Jim Henson lost some of their bite.  Related: A Look Back at ‘Muppets Tonight,’ ABC’s Failed ‘90s Muppet Revival So the news that this sequel to The Muppet Show would center around the backstage shenanigans of a talk show, Up Late with Miss Piggy, didn’t thrill me. Neither did the pre-premiere publicity that Kermit and Miss Piggy had broken up — I know millions of people have fond feelings for these characters, but the media’s assiduous playing-along-with-the-joke, let’s-pretend-this-is-real strains my normally jovial nature.  My bias against this kind of thing is borne out by the first two episodes of The Muppets available for review.

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