MUPPETS NOW
We’ve long suspected that “Muppetational” isn’t actually a word.
WE COULD ALL DO WITH SOME laughs right now. Thankfully, the Muppets are riding in to save the day with their new Disney+ series Muppets Now. Featuring the classic stable of characters such as Kermit, Miss Piggy, Gonzo and the Swedish Chef, along with more recent additions like Pepe the Prawn and others, the whole gang is back together making a show to bring some light back into the world.
Under the felt and behind the camera is long-time Muppet performer Bill Barretta (Pepe, Rowlf, Dr Teeth). He and fellow executive producers Andrew Williams and Sabrina Wind are putting forward a contemporary version of the OG The Muppet Show spirit in Muppets Now. Instead of Kermit desperately putting together a variety act in a dusty theatre, Muppets Now collects recurring sketches hosted by Kermit, Piggy, Pepe, Dr Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker and more.
It’s poor, bespectacled Scooter, who has graduated to post-production coordinator, who has to wrangle all the egos and collect the final pieces from his remote pals. “The Scooter stuff was the throughline of it all, which I think is really fun,” Barretta tells Red Alert. “He’s the right person for the job, but the bad news is that everybody’s calling him and getting in the way of it.”
MUPPETRY MASTERCLASS
Barretta says the recurring sketches that make up each episode came out of their creative circle asking one another, “Who should be calling and checking in? We started to tailor [the show] to that idea as well. We’re just saying, let’s try something new that makes us laugh and we think is cool and funny. And I think it works.” Segments audiences can look forward to include “Lifesty With Miss Piggy”, “Okey Dokey Kookin”, “Muppet Labs” and “Mup Close And Personal”.
“I think that [list] grew organically as decisions were made about how do these play best and are people going to dig this on its own, or together?” Barretta explains.
The sketches evolved out of the year-long rapport of the core six performers that make up the Muppet troupe today: Peter Linz (Beaker), Matt Vogel (Kermit), Eric Jacobson (Animal), Dave Goelz (Gonzo), Dave Rudman (Janice) and Barretta. As they’ve worked together for so long, the show was able to be
crafted as unscripted, allowing their gifts of improv to lead the way. “I know what to expect from those people,” Barretta says with warmth. “Their pairings that have happened over the years; it all just has to do with relationships.”
But this show also makes room for some new personalities. “My favourite new character is Joe,” Barretta enthuses of their fuzzy lawyer who sucks the fun out of everything. Asked if Joe is a weasel, Barretta laughs and replies, “We don’t want to say weasel because he’s a lawyer. But I think he is. And I love Joe because he just has such a bad sense of humour.”
There’s also another newbie in the shape of Beverly Plume (Julianne Buescher), a turkey co-hosting the Swedish Chef’s new cooking show, which is a legit recipe-based segment. “A real person making something delicious is always a good thing,” Barretta says, “So we thought, ‘Let’s see if we can get that out there and just get in the way of it and have some fun with it.’”
Real-life cooking icons will also appear alongside the Swede, and other celebs will be central to the fun. “RuPaul, we worked with before. And for the others, I think it was just who was excited to come play with us. Who are we excited to play with again? Seth Rogen is another great guest that we have. Roy Choi, Taye Diggs, Danny Trejo…”
Barretta and co hope Muppets Now can connect across the different generations as they, hopefully, sit down together to watch it. With Jim Henson’s untimely death 30 years ago this past May, the show is a reminder of what the Muppet creator valued so dearly.
“[It was] caring about each other,” Barretta explains. “You can disagree with somebody, or you can be very different from someone, but you can still love them and you can still tolerate each other and you can have patience. That’s a big thing for me that these new generations are able to recognise and understand: patience.
“I just want people to be able to take a breath, sit down together, watch something entertaining that touches your heart and makes you laugh, makes you cry for a minute, makes you feel. I always push for heart and soul, and my main goal is to keep passing that out.” TB
Muppets Now starts streaming on Disney+ from 31 July.
We’re just saying, let’s try something new that makes us laugh and we think is cool and funny – and I think it works
UTOPIAS AREN’T ALL THEY ARE cracked up to be. Take Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The 1932 novel revolves around a futuristic society obsessed with achieving happiness… no matter what the price. NBCUniversal launches its Peacock streaming service in the US this month with the latest small-screen adaptation of the groundbreaking tale. Showrunner David Wiener believes that the literary masterpiece is one of those rare novels that has become more relevant as time progresses.
“What Huxley worried about considerably is how people would use technology to hold the inconveniences and boredoms and less pleasant aspects of the world at bay,” Wiener tells Red Alert. “He was concerned that would cost people something. That’s exactly what we’ve done.
“He even predicted things that have come to pass, such as in vitro fertilisation and genetic engineering. All the nuances of the book that were so revolutionary in 1932 are really believable now. Culturally, it’s more of a mirror of this time than it was of its own.
“The reason Brave New World is distinct not only in the canon of literature, but also from a lot of the speculative fiction and futurism that’s on television, is it’s a utopian show,” he continues. “It’s a utopian show that investigates the dystopia inside of people. Rather than entering a world where the threat is always present, where it’s zombies or some regime, the threat in Brave New World is much more subtle, in that it comes from the conditioning and the belief system the people that we meet subscribe to. It’s a much more human show.”
Brave New World is required reading on many school curriculums. But for the benefit of those who might be unfamiliar with the source
All the nuances of the book that were so revolutionary in 1932 are really believable now
material, Wiener paints a picture of this less than perfect landscape.
“Brave New World is about a society many years in the future where people really only feel pleasure,” he explains. “As part of that society, people are organised into castes. What makes it a stable, pleasant place to be is that although people are still in a hierarchy, nobody wants to be anything but what they are. It’s a place where people don’t look towards the future. People have no sense of the past.
“A lot of the scourges that affect us today – racism, money, violence and all kinds of strife that we take for granted as part of our existence – they don’t have to contend with,” Wiener continues. “But that brings up other problems for them. There’s this need to stay distracted, to stay in a place of pleasure. To do
that, they employ artificial means. There’s obviously a lot of sex, but it’s all fuelled by the dependence on the drug called Soma.”
Set around 2540, the show unfolds in New England, a place of peace and instant gratification. When citizens Lenina (Jessica Brown Findlay) and Bernard (Harry Lloyd) venture to the Savage Lands, they witness a violent rebellion and encounter John the Savage (Alden Ehrenreich). The pair’s lives are irrevocably turned upside down when John returns home with them.
“Our contemporary John is a red-blooded, 20-something from the Savage Lands, an area that isn’t part of the New World,” Wiener explains. “When John comes to the New World, he is the centre of a lot of curiosity and assumptions that have been made about ‘savages’. People are interested by him, titillated by him. He opens the people around him up to feelings that they have never felt before, like jealousy, ideas about monogamy, competition… notions about possessiveness, belonging and love. He’s an inadvertent revolutionary that way.
“As for Lenina, she becomes the lens into our world and, arguably, the centre of the story,” he adds. “She changes a great deal over the course of the show.
She, and Bernard. On some levels, they’re exposed to big feelings for the first time. In a very complex way, there’s a John Hughes element to it. It’s fully grown adults dealing with emotions and consequences that they’ve never had to face before. It makes for a lot of great drama.”
Wiener hopes that the nine-episode series will provoke plenty of discussion amongst viewers about the true meaning of happiness.
“Happiness is a really tricky word and maybe not a fair one for what’s good or beneficial,” he says. “All the things that make us human are in some way tied to our loss, our suffering and our ability to see that pain in each other. That’s the thing lacking in the New World. They don’t have romantic love because they want to avoid the pain of losing it.
“There are many things the show touches on, including questions about power, questions about sex, questions about class, the environment and technology… All these things are baked into the themes of the show.
“But, deep down, beneath all of it, is the question about whether happiness is really what we’ve been told, or is it something we have to look inside ourselves to find?” he concludes. “It might be different for individual people. That’s what I hope it
reflects on.” BC
Brave New World is currently streaming on Peacock in the US, and is set to come to Sky One / NOW TV in the Autumn.