If you’re at all surprised to learn that I’m a fan of the Muppets, I can only assume that you haven’t paid the slightest attention to anything I’ve ever written or said or performed or eaten in the entire expanse of the universe, because the Muppets are straight-up delightful. They’re a magical creation. Jim Henson and company willed into existence a troupe of actors of such wild, chaotic, and lovely clashing personalities that virtually any kind of story can and has been told with them over the years. All of that makes it even more sad how, since the Muppets were purchased by the Walt Disney Corporation and Shadow Government and Tire Emporium back in 2004, they have consistently shown an inability to use these characters properly. 

That’s not to say there haven’t been high points. In 2011 we got The Muppets, a new film in which Kermit and the crew were brought back together after an unspecified time apart to save their home, the Muppet Theater. The movie was funny, clever, and full of fantastic music, which is pretty much all you want from the Muppets. It was a great film, and it felt like Kermit the Frog and Company were back on track.

But the train derailed quickly. In 2014 we got Muppets Most Wanted, a sequel that failed to capture the magic of the previous film. The next year the gang returned to television in a new series (also just called The Muppets) which was an Office-style mockumentary series starring our favorite felt-covered friends. The show was weak at first, and although it improved quite a bit over the course of its season, it was too little too late, and the second season was never ordered. Since then appearances of the Muppets have been sparse: a few web shorts, some appearances in commercials, and a Disney+ Halloween special, Muppets Haunted Mansion, which wasn’t bad. But it wasn’t great either. What was going on? Why was it so damned hard for Disney to figure out what to do with these characters?

The Muppets are an incredibly versatile troupe. They’re musical comedians, sure, but that’s not all they are. Each of the main Muppets has spent decades being refined and shaped, given a life and a personality that belies their existence as scraps of cloth and foam rubber. They have become iconic figures, as well-known and recognizable in pop culture as Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny, but nobody was doing anything worthwhile with the characters…until earlier this year, that is. A few months ago, Disney+ dropped Muppets Mayhem, a brilliant miniseries that gave the Muppets a showcase they’ve been sorely lacking for years and, moreso, it gives us a blueprint for what Disney should do with these characters moving forward.

Muppets Mayhem is the first Muppets production in which the spotlight is shined not on Kermit, Piggy, Fozzie, or Gonzo, but on the Muppet Show’s house band, Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. Although those characters have been around just as long as the rest of the crew, they’ve never really been developed much beyond some stereotypes: Dr. Teeth was a parody of Louisiana musical legend Dr. John, Janice was a cliched hippie chick, Zoot was that zoned-out musician who probably got his hands on a few too many family unfriendly-substances back in the day, Lips was the guy who mumbles, Floyd Pepper was the closest thing this group had to a straight man, and Animal was…well…Animal. Muppets Mayhem starts here, but it goes so much further than that. 

In this show, an aspiring record executive (played by Lilly Singh) finds out that the Mayhem owes her struggling company an album and sets out to spur them to get in the recording studio and make good on their contract. This kicks off a ten-episode quest of discovery for both Lilly’s Nora character and each member of the band itself. Over the course of the series every one of the Mayhem gets a chance to shine, is given unexpected backstory, and is developed into a character as rich and meaningful as the A-list Muppets we’ve been following for years.

So why, after being hit and miss for so long, did Disney knock it out of the park with Muppets Mayhem? For the answer to that, I think we need to look back at their last solid success, The Muppets. That film was written by Jason Segal and Nichollas Stoller, who spent years pitching on it and working on the script, even pulling in help from the Pixar storytelling brain trust (which, in these halcyon days before The Good Dinosaur, had never failed at making a successful film). The story these two conceived took the Muppets back to their roots, to the Muppet Theater, where they had to band together and put on a smash hit show to raise the money to save their home. It’s such an overdone premise, but it’s absolutely perfect for the Muppets, because of who and what the Muppets actually are.

Jim Henson created and recreated his characters over and over again over a span of over twenty years before the characters gelled into their final form in 1976 with The Muppet Show. The premise, if you’re one of the two people on the planet who’ve never seen it, was that Kermit and his friends were old-fashioned Vaudeville-style performers, putting on a nightly show with the help of some celebrity guest stars. Although earnest and sincere, most of the Muppets brought chaos in their wake, and it was up to Kermit to try to keep it all together. Most of the great Muppet productions since then have run with that premise in one of two ways. Either it’s a story about the Muppets and their performing troupe (such as The Muppet Movie and The Muppets Take Manhattan), or it is a story being told by the “actors” in the Muppet troupe (which explains the meta-humor in The Great Muppet Caper and in most of their adaptations of other stories, such as The Muppet Christmas Carol and The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz). The further we get from that formula, the weaker the Muppets get. 

Segal and Stoller understood that. What’s more, they showed a true reverence for the characters that was clear in every word of dialogue and every note of music. After nailing it with one film, though, Segal stepped aside for Muppets Most Wanted…which promptly fell apart since it was about Kermit’s evil twin and a crime caper. It’s not that a crime caper doesn’t work with the Muppets (see the aforementioned Great Muppet Caper), it’s that the attitude behind the movie was essentially, “Well, we don’t quite know what to do next, so let’s try to do The Great Muppet Caper again.”

The Muppets floundered again until Muppets Mayhem, which was co-created and produced by Adam F. Goldberg. Goldberg is probably best known as the creator of the sitcom based on his own family and upbringing in the 1980s, The Goldbergs, a show which at its best took a loving and reverential eye to the pop culture of Goldberg’s childhood and used it to tell stories of an often dysfunctional but ultimately loving family, and if that isn’t exactly the primary qualification for anybody trying to tell a story about the Muppets I don’t know what is. Goldberg, like Segal, lived his formative years at a time when the Muppets were at their peak, and brought the obvious love for the characters into what he did in Muppets Mayhem by expanding on their world, not denigrating it.

This is the secret, Disney, and any other company out there sitting on a classic IP and trying to figure out what to do with it. Admittedly, it can be difficult to decide what to do with older characters when the goal is to introduce them to a new audience. A lot of kids these days would reject anything that their parents pushed on them as a reflex action. And sure, times have changed – a modern child who watches The Muppet Show will have no context for the vaudevillian background of the characters.

But the thing is, neither did we. Those of us who grew up with the Muppets in that first go-around (Goldberg, Segal, myself – you know, the first three names you would think of) didn’t have any exposure to Vaudeville. We didn’t care. It was as irrelevant to us at the time as the fact that Bugs Bunny was doing impressions of Clark Gable and Peter Lorre. We didn’t know and we didn’t care. We didn’t know that Fred Flintstone was a total knock-off of Ralph Kramden, and guess what? We didn’t care. Because these classic characters are still entertaining even divorced from their original context.

So throwing out the context argument, what we’re left with is figuring out what it is people love about the characters even with the context gone. With the Muppets, there are two essential elements: the performing element and the family element. Every great Muppet production has served one or the other. Most of them have served both, but most Disney Muppet projects have lacked that. A Muppets Christmas: Letters to Santa and Muppets Haunted Mansion both told stories with the performing bit in the background at best. Letters to Santa showed a team of Muppets banding together, but it was in service of a new character that we’d never seen before (or since) and only were supposed to care about because Gonzo cares about her. Not that that’s a bad reason, but in a one-hour special, it’s not really enough. Haunted Mansion, on the other hand, showcases Gonzo and Rizzo invited to a “fear challenge” at the – well hell, I don’t have to explain where it happened. The closest thing to a family storyline here is when we discover Gonzo’s greatest fear is losing his friends, which again is perplexing, since there’s nothing in decades of Muppets lore that would indicate this is a sticking point for him.

Too many studios try to reboot a classic franchise by stripping it down to the name only and making it “edgy” or “controversial.” The prevailing attitude seems to be that they can’t win the kids, so instead they’ll go for the crowd who enjoys things “ironically” by mocking fans who had the audacity to care about the characters in the first place. (The thesis of Geek Punditry is to explore those things we love, so I won’t get too much into the shows and movies that have committed this sort of cinematic crime, but I will say that the most recent offender was Very Egregiously Lascivious and Mostly Abhorrent.) I simply don’t understand the mindset that says the way to make an old concept profitable is to attack the people who loved it in the first place, and yet we see that happen again and again.

That’s why Muppets Mayhem was so delightful, so charming, and so wonderfully surprising. It was a story about a group of performers who are, in fact, family. It was about bringing new people into that family. It didn’t just have great music, it was about great music. It made us take a look at characters we already loved and, in the process, come to love them even more. And when it went meta – and boy, did it go meta – it never did so at the expense of the people who have watched and loved them for nearly 50 years. 

There has not been any announcement about a second season of Mayhem either way – neither confirming it or saying that it won’t be moving forward. Streaming services like Disney+ are notoriously secretive with their numbers, but the show hasn’t been yanked off as a tax write-off yet, so it can’t be doing that badly. If there is no more, well, the ten-episode run is perfectly self-contained and ends in a very satisfying way. But I hope it doesn’t. I hope we see more of the Mayhem, more of Nora and Moog, and more unexpected and hilarious celebrity guest stars in a second season. Even if we don’t, though, I’m happy that we got what we did, and when Disney sits down once again to decide where to go with the characters in the Muppet studio, I hope they take a look at what they just did and realize that we all need a little mayhem once in a while.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. “Which Muppet are you?” was the question long before Sex and the City fans tried to co-opt the concept, you know. Which Muppet are you? Blake is usually a Fozzie.