The Muppets Mayhem It is impossible to watch this brilliant series without a massive grin
over 2 years in The guardian
There is just no TV show that wouldn’t be improved by adding of Muppets. This hilarious series is packed with cameos from celebs who are all having the time of their livesIf you get out of your Westminster bubble and sit and think about something for once, you’d realise that essentially every film or TV format would be improved with the addition of Muppets. Pride and Prejudice but Mr Darcy is bright purple. The Devil Wears Prada with Miss Piggy as Miranda Priestly. A Superman reboot where Clark Kent is the only human actor in the whole thing. Seinfeld but Kramer is an 8ft-tall Big Bird-type. Think further outside of the box: Gogglebox could be improved with Statler and Waldorf; for First Dates, replace Fred with Kermit, and Merlin with Animal. Thinking about this has actually ruined the next week of TV for me. Every time I watch something with humans in it, I’ll be pining for Muppets.Anyway, there’s The Muppets Mayhem (Disney+, from Wednesday 10 May), at least, which is brilliant. On the surface it’s just Daisy Jones & the Six but the band are all Muppets and there’s a lot less sexual tension, but there’s actually more to it than that. Mayhem stars Lilly Singh (one of those YouTube-famous curios you have never heard of, but it turns out she’s actually more renowned than most people alive and has 13.4 million followers on Instagram) as Nora, a messily aspirational girlboss whose life is in cheerful disarray and she needs a big win at work and maybe a love triangle subplot to achieve her destiny. Have you seen that story before? Of course you have, but you have not seen it with a band of Muppets, and that is the point: every time a chair turns around and the character is a puppet, I laugh. Every time Animal says anything, I laugh. Though the story throughline is fairly cornily safe – an ancient touring band need to record their first ever album, but keep getting distracted because they are all jolly little puppets, and I haven’t seen to the end but I assume they do record the album then play a sold-out show – the levity of the puppets cranks everything up to a higher level. It’s just really, really funny to see a perfectly round, 3ft-high Muppet driving a van while Lilly Singh has a career crisis. Continue reading...