Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - The Muppet Show (2026)

Welcome back midnight viewers to Father Malone's weekly round up. I am Father Malone and with me is the pug tasked with saving Earth in three hundred and twenty two days. Missus ripley g. We are going to talk about the Amato and the Argo, but not today, sweetie, that's its own episode. How's your week been, Gang?

I am trying to follow the middle path myself. I got back into It's like a half hour of fighting in slow motion. I love it. Speaking of fighting, how about that Grogu and the Mandalorian trailer, or the Mandalorian and the Grogu, or the baby Deoda and the Mando Mando guy. Anyway, I saw the teaser a few months ago and I thought, why do they release teaser trailers if they're going to be this underwhelming?

Sincerely, this isn't Batman eighty nine, where any random footage will do. And now I feel that way even more. With the finished one we just got oo boy, I thought it was fucking exhilarating. We got and or covering the serious Star Wars, and now it seems the rollicking adventure portion is back in good hands. We've been worried about you, Star wars.

We only want to help. This trailer looks pretty fucking amazing. We get a lot of huts, I do not know which, but we get a hut gladiator it looks like, and lots of jetpacking through urban streets if I can love that, And we get Martin Scorsese as an alien vendor. I'm not joking. Listen, I can use some information.

WHOA for this price, I'll tell you whatever you want. I'm looking for a hut calls for the night. Thank you tell me that's not the director of After Hours right there. I have one quibble I always do, don't I, And that's the continued baby behavior of Grogu. I get it.

Not much time has passed since we first met him, but I've seen that little green bastard force choke fools and toss stormtroopers off the walls of an all metal room like they were rag dolls. So let's jump ahead from the innocent Nafe pounding on buttons of a control panel of a starship. Other than that fucking a man, I'm looking forward to May twenty second. What else have I been looking at the side of my desperately lonely life. Oh, I've been filling that void with a bunch of terrible stuff.

I tried to watch that Springsteen film Deliver Me from Nowhere. You know what's unfulfilling as a viewer watching someone come up with a piece of art that we already know. I think we were all pretty mesmerized in that Peter Jackson Beatles documentary watching Paul McCartney come up with Get Back on the Fly. But that was get Back, and it was the Beatles, and it was really the Beatles, because you know what, the scenario around it is pretty fucking mundane, which is how I assume most songs are written. Not everything is looking around and taking in things.

Hey man, let's really make a statement. Also, I can't stand Jeremy Allen White. I liked him on that million seasons of Shameless as Lip, and I like that first season of The Bear, but I just can't take that dude seriously. Maybe it's me, No, it's the Internet that's wrong. I could bore you with a dozen other movies and series I have tried and failed to get through four this week's roundup, but my god, it'd be such a waste of everyone's time.

I don't even want to name them. Lest I plant the germ of an idea for you to watch any of them. Nah, fuck it. These were terrible Night Patrol, another fumbling vampire flick with some actually pretty good performances in it, But overall, it's two hours of time wasted unless they make a sequel, at which point I rescind this ruling and encourage you to watch this as a prologue because it does have a great ending. Sue me, but don't watch it.

Do not watch the movie overall. Oh here's a hot take. Don't watch Robin Hood Prince of Thieves. That's right, in case you were going to fire up the VCR and pomp in that tape from nineteen ninety one. Don't it is terrible.

The accent alone, man, I remember the furor at the time. They made a joke of it in that other terrible Robinhood movie, Men in Tights. But the accent is the least of the problems with Kevin Costner. Has anyone ever confused that guy for a rogue a knave? He's so awkward in everything in this film, and the film is just a historic free for all, and it's got that cuckoo sumplot about how all the wealthy are a bunch of blood drinking Satanists.

You know what? Wait now, never mind, still a bad movie forsooth. I guess this is the spot where we're gonna open the mail from a row. He's over on the Patreon channel, HP and I started our Star Trek Fest away missions, with our first stop being Planet Colombo. We watched the Leonard Nimoy and Shatner fronted episodes.

Nimoy was only in one, Shatner in two, but we watched the first of the Shatners. That one, in fact featured Trek's Walter Kanigg, and HP mentioned it was the first time he'd seen him acting in a regular accent. Trish wrote in, oh, HP, Kanig's character best on Babylon five had a non Russian accent unless you never saw his episodes. Let me speak for HP here, Trish, I have his proxy. I'm speaking as HP, and now I am a terrible science fiction fan, and I have no excuse for my lack of knowledge.

Okay, back to me, the very knowledgeable fan of the things I'm actually discussing. On the same subject, Jason wrote in to recommend the Columbo episode Double Exposure, which has quote Chuck McCann playing a projectionist again, and the murder involves subliminal messages cut into the film. I answered him there, but I'll do it again here. Mike White, Chris Nash, you have a Colombo show called The Shabby Detective, and I was supposed to be on to talk about that particular episode, but there was a scheduling thing and I never got around to it. But with your recommendation, Jason, I am going to watch it because I love Chuck McCann and I love a good projection booth.

Those were the letters from our Patreon listeners. None of you ever write in about the regular shows, dear midnight viewers. So that's the end of pen pals. Oh wait, this isn't pen pal related. But sometimes I look at the analytics on this show to see where we're being received around the world, and I'm looking at the past week in Australia.

Let's go to New South Wales and Sussex Inlet. If you're in Australia right now and you're in Sussex Inlet, HI, I'm follow alone. You can follow me on Instagram. That's at Midnight Underscore viewing. It's linked in the show notes follow me there, hit me up.

I have questions for you, and in fact, if any of you want to get in touch with me, Instagram is probably the best place to do it. You ought to go there just to watch the stupid videos I put out literally every day, sometimes twice a day, So go there. But if you want to hear the Star Trek episode that away mission where we're talking Colombo, go to patreon dot com slash fatherm alone. That's also in the show notes. Also, that's the end of the call to action.

Hit at HP. That's ship job. Yeah, thank you HP. You know the number one way that Muppets can appeal to today's teens Kubrick style org scene in Bert and Ernie's bathtub. Ah, the Muppets, Jim Henson and the Muppets Sesame Street SNL The Muppet Movie.

They had a caper, they took Manhattan. They were on pirate ships and making twisted old Miser's feel empathy. They were from space and had storytellers, and Henson had his own hour. There were Muppets Tonight and Muppets Now and Muppets Mayhem, but they were all of them pale imitations of the one and only the Muppet Show Sunday afternoon at five thirty. That's fun for all of that.

On The Muppet Show we got the wonderful comedy and music, plus the hilarious Miss Nancy Walker. The way you wear your hat away, you sip your team. No, no, can't take that away from me. Fun for the whole family. On The Muppet Show.

It's my frank kid. Ah. Don't they make a lovely couple Nancy Walker and Sweetens, I mean join the Muppets Sunday at five thirty. Premiering in September of nineteen seventy seven, The Muppet Show was produced by Sir Lou Grad for ITV in the UK, which accounts for how many guest stars were English in those first couple of years. The Muppet Show had been attempted a few times before on ABC Television back in nineteen seventy five, and that was around the same time they were making appearances on SNL.

The Muppets Valentine's Special and The Muppet Show Sex and Violence were run as specials, but they were pilots. We all know that The Muppet Show was under Jim Henson's precious tutelage, but it really found its voice and its format in the second year under head writer Jerry Jewel. Jewel had been with Henson in all Things Muppets since Sam and Friends, a Washington d C. Affiliate show created by Henson that he ran from nineteen fifty five until nineteen sixty one, and Jewel would go on to not only work all five seasons of The Muppet Show, but also wrote Emma Daughter's jug Band Christmas, The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, Fraggle Rock, all seasons, basically everything until nineteen ninety nine's Muppets from Space.

He passed in two thousand and five, but his legacy cannot be overestimated, particularly when it comes to that original Muppet Show. In the mid nineteen seventies, vaudeville was about as old fashioned as you could get, even though variety shows were multiple and many for Christ's sakes, those were just vaudeville shows with lecra and disco boots. So it's natural that the group of Pumpet entertainers would make that their framework. Hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and better than your typical episode of Captain and Taneil's Super Fun Variety Hour, The acts presented on The Muppet Show, while fantastic on their own, we're just set dressing literally to the actual heart of the show backstage.

It's not an amorphous sketch show where now Mims Piggy is a cavewoman and now she's a surgeon, although the format allows that, this is about a diva who reigns on stage enough and how other characters have to navigate her. The Muppet Show was also not a showcase for whatever album or show the guest of the week had dropped by to promote. In fact, I can hardly remember any plugging at all. Instead, they'd be pressed into a ridiculous Muppet scenario on stage and then have to deal with the insanity and ego and foibles of everyone toiling away behind the scenes. These puppets have jobs, man.

I'm not saying we wouldn't have found them as enjoyable or as enduring if we'd only had the Muppets on Sesame Street and then in feature films. I'm just saying that something about spending time with these actors and singers, acrobats and blockheads and scientists as they went about their job made them not just entertaining but entirely relatable. Sure, Fozzi Bear had the worst dad jokes in history, and that was the act. But he's also fretting stage left before he goes on, and he's crushed afterwards. There's a lot of feelings in the felt, a lot of pathos in these puppets.

Now you all know me, You know how I hate nostalgia. So I was worried that my rejection of every Muppet property since that's attempted to capture the original show's magic, was based on the time and place in which I experienced it. I was four when The Muppets came on the air. I'd already been taught to read by them on Sesame Street, and now here they were struggling to entertain me. So yeah, the formative properties of all things hence and are formidable and carry a ton of fucking weight with me.

Also, I couldn't bear to watch Kermit interact with a cgi blob and feel good about myself. The closest to the initial spark of the original series was Jason Siegel's The Muppets in twenty eleven, although it ended up feeling a bit uneas even overall, I don't care about Walter or is human pals. I am interested in the Muppets getting that theater back open, though. That theater, to me is their version of the USS Enterprise. So of course they followed it up with another great Muppet Caper style escapade with most wanted.

As for the recent shows, I don't know, man, So when they announced this latest version, I wasn't skeptical. I just didn't care. In an age of too many reboots and remakes seemingly with no purpose beyond another fucking dollar bill in someone's pocket, I've basically given up hope on this troop altogether. Holy fuck, it's the Muppet Show, Rolf. Have you been playing this whole time?

Well? Would you think it was some kind of sentimental montage in your head? I'm doing the show again, Fronk. Oh my god, it's you. You're my idol.

You're sweet go on. I grew up watching you. My parents grew up watching you their parents. We are so excited to be back where it all started and then ended and then is maybe starting again, depending on how the night goes before. It's a little bit show and it starts right now.

Maybe we're a little rusty. It is a wonderful thing back in the theater of giving the people what they truly want. Right, It's always been a dream of mine to be here. Got any other dreams. It's time to get things started on this sensation.

We're still working out a few kings, that's all right, and I love a kink sho. We can't believe they're doing the old show again. Well, if it ain't broke, no, they are broke, lush why they're doing it? Good to be back, seth Rogan a man. I once gave a pair of panties to as a gift.

That's true. That actually happened, and he said, all right, man, and I'm not gonna do the laugh, but he did it anyway. I've sung that Fellow's praises on many occasions. The studio is sublime. But then everything he's attached himself to, if not a success, you can at least feel was an attempt at it.

Nothing he puts his name on ever feels cynical. And let's be honest, he's responsible for a lot of fucking quality out there. I realize he's got a partner, Evan Goldberg. Just assume I'm talking about both of them. Okay, here's a list of his accomplishments, just as a producer, Preacher, Future Man, The Boys, Invincible, Pam and Tommy, jen v Tales of the Teenage Mutant, Ninja, Turtles, and now The Muppet Show, apparently a dark Winged Duck, and a Tailspin reboot around the way as well.

So when I saw his name in the credits, I shouldn't have worried. Now this is apparently a special, a one off tribute to the original show. That's the official word at the moment, which would be a real fucking shame considering how successful this was. Just like Henson saw that Vaudeville was and if it ain't broke, don't fix its situation, so too have the showrunners here had the realization that if you tune into The Muppet Show, you probably want to watch the Muppet Show. I don't need to know more about Doctor Teeth in the Electric Mayhem than we've been presented in between acts on this show.

Certainly don't want to get to know their tour manager or executives at their label. You know what I do enjoy Miss Piggy slowly going ballistic at the notion that her act might be dropped because the evening is overbooked. That's the drama I'm looking for. I don't need anyone saving the theater from some developer. As far as I can tell, Scooters, Uncle J.

P. Gross is still the owner here. As a matter of fact, I like Stetler and Waldorf up in their opera box cursing out said pig after a disastrous number. Oh, how about a random fucking musical number of a contemporary tune for no good reason at all. Rizzo the Rat does a great fuck in cover of blinding lights, just like they used to do with random double headed monsters singing duets to themselves.

They have done a remarkable job here because this could have been just a tired retread, but it feels identical to that earlier show while simultaneously feeling totally contemporary. It doesn't hurt to have Sabrina Carpenter as the first guest, though seth Rogen does appear as well. The best cameo on the entire thing is Maya Rudolph as an audience member. Every fucking word out of her mouth had me cackling. Oh and that's a weird thing.

Speaking of contemporizing the show, remember when an act would end, and they'd cut to a wide shot of the audience from stage right. They repeat that here, but the image is crisper and half the audience is human. It's really distracting in a good way. Now distracting that is not so good. Yes, I told you I have quibbles with everything.

Let's talk Kermit. No one was ever going to replace Jim Henson. It's just ridiculous, And kudos to Brian Henson for not pulling a null blank and insisting his genealogy gives him dibbs on a character's legacy. Steve Whittmeyer had been a Muppet performer since nineteen seventy eight. He joined The Muppet Show midway into season three and created the previously mentioned character Rizzo the Rat.

He was a Skepxies in the Dark Crystal, He was Wembley on Fraggle Rock, and a few weeks after Jim Henson's death in nineteen ninety he was asked to take over the role the role of Kermit the Frog. Whitmeyer not only did a fair approximation of the voice, but he nailed all of Kermit's little ticks that Henson had employed over the years. Now, Matt Vogel is also a long time Muppet performer, though he never knew Jim Henson. He joined the company in nineteen ninety six, a full six years into Whitmyer's tenure, and he technically wasn't with the Muppets proper. He started on Sesame Street as an understudy for Big Bird.

That's an important role at the company. Evidently understudy not every performer can be everywhere in schedules or schedules, in budgets or budgets, so it's only a good idea to have a B team, particularly given that he now is Big Bird. He took over full time since Spinney's retiret in twenty eighteen, one of a slew of characters he inherited mainly from Jerry Nelson. Since two thousand and eight, he has been Count von Count, Uncle Deadly Low Zealand, Doctor Strangebork and Sweetem's Oh How I Love Sweetems, the character not the evil Confectionery Corporation in Pawnee, Indiana. Both of these performers are wildly talented Witmeyer and Vogel, but Vogel is now Kermit and has been since twenty twenty.

I bring all this up because people seem to be having a hard time accepting him based on this special and I just think you've been accepting him for some time now. Part of this is because this is a concentrated dose of Kermit and thus easier to scrutinize, and some of it is because he doesn't seem to land those little puppet ticks that Whitmeyer had down. And I get it. Sometimes his voice just goes off and it ain't Kermit, but then after a second it is in those little sleights of hand that Whitmeyer employed. In particular, there's a thing Kermit does when he's unsure of a situation where he hitches his mouth all the way back.

It's so fucking recognizable, and for the last ten or so years of Whitmyer's tenure, it became, at least to me, very similar to Dana Carvey's impression of George Bush. Bush had a moment of not gonna do it, and that became nahgn Dad. It's not an impression anymore. It's a caricature, found a hook and he fucking ran with it. So while Vogel might not be pulling all of Henson's tricks, he's also not overfucking doing them.

Plus there was the whole matter of Whitmyer's termination where now this is according to Brian Henson, who was the one who asked him to take the part in the first place, that Whitmyer had basically taken ownership of the character in his mind. He refused an understudy during his entire employment, and would frequently clash over whether or not he thought Kermit should do this or say that, Hey, performer, is it in the script, then you say it or you do it. I'm all for fighting for quality, and if that's all it was, then I owe mister Whitmyer an apology. But you can't scream about integrity after you appear. And the Muppets Wizard of Oz Or it's a very merry Muppet Christmas movie, and a Vogel is doing a fine job.

He's got a lot on those narrow green shoulders, So won't you give him a chance? I am not, however, giving a chance to mister David Rudman. I'm calling you out. Rudman. You do a fine scooter, but stay away from Janice.

What the fuck is this? Janis was a Richard Hunt character, so it's not like it hasn't been a man playing her, but that was kind of the joke. She had the deepest voice around, the most California attitude in creation, and now Redman is pitching her higher, giving her more valley and less whiskey. Oh for sure, because you know, like I can read Aura's and yours is like bad. It is ooh totally and we're breathing.

Is unacceptable. Do not allow Janie to speak again. I love Janis nurse, Janis jelly belly, giggling, dancing and a wiggling honey. That's the way I am. As I said.

This isn't a series as far as I know. Hopefully it was like the Muppets Valentine Special from so many years ago and was a secret pilot because this was a fucking delight. Although we all loved the end of the Muppet Movie where Kermit gives his speech to Arson Wells, it's the culmination of a journey in an emotional payoff for those dreamers, but we don't need that at the Muppet Theater. This is just another night of insanity here. So hopefully if they do go to series, they will perhaps lay off the treacle at the end.

We already love the Muppets. We already feel warmly toward them without anyone holding our hands to get there. No one needs a stirring speech at a variety show unless Peter O'Toole is swinging in and punching out gangsters. That's my favorite year reference. Should I cover that?

Yes? I think I should double feature with Turk one E two. How's that for some eighties bangers? And how's that for the end of the show. Watch the Muppets and tune back here on Monday.

We'll be back with another trek fest. Tune in then, and like I said, shown outs folks, looking at you South Wales. Until next time from me and Ripley Jean, try to enjoy the Daylight Wife's Michael movie. Write your own ending, keep leaving, keep pretending we've done just what we set out, and