Since their series debut in 1976, Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy and the rest of the Muppets have attained an iconic status in pop culture, as evidenced by the four Emmys this picked up last month for Disney+’s “The Muppet Show” special featuring Sabrina Carpenter. It’s an achievement that is all the more impressive given how close they came to obscurity.
“It was such a hard road to get ‘The Muppet Show’ made,” says Lisa Henson, daughter of Muppets creator Jim Henson and CEO of The Jim Henson Company.
Having created puppets for “Sesame Street” and “Saturday Night Live” in the early 1970s, Henson was itching to make his own show. But after two failed “Muppet Show” pilots for ABC and some further development work for CBS that went nowhere, he was stuck – until a British television producer called Lew Grade came along. “It was a real study in perseverance,” says Henson’s biographer Brian Jay Jones.
Grade, the founder of production company ITC, had a background in vaudeville and an empty studio outside London. He saw potential in Henson and his band of merry Muppets and offered $125,000 for a 30-minute episode, which in 1976 was a “spectacular amount of money” as Jones puts it, on the condition Henson and his team made the show in the U.K. Henson agreed (aptly, he ended up living on a road called Frognal Gardens in London).
The two men – one a British lord, the other a Mississippi-born “big kid” as one of his puppeteers, Louise Gold describes him — quickly formed a remarkable partnership. “[Grade] really believed in Jim Henson as kind of a genius who should be trusted to do what he wanted,” says Lisa Henson.
Grade’s trust – and investment — paid off. “The Muppet Show,” which celebrated its 50th anniversary last month, premiered in the U.K. on Sept. 5, 1976 (because it was syndicated in the U.S., each local station chose its own premiere date for that fall). Before its launch it was already making waves. As a Feb. ’76 edition of Variety reported from the NATPE television conference in San Francisco under the headline “Muppet Mops Up,” “The Muppet Show’ sold to 60 markets before NATPE even opened. “Its cream-of-crop status was being attested to by those who had it and those who did not,” the report stated.
Gold joined the show in Season 2, just as muppet madness was really taking off. Literally Henson’s right-hand woman (she played the right hand for a number of his puppets while he played the left), Gold describes him as “the most fun, hardworking, generous, crazy boss you could possibly imagine.”
Henson died in 1990. His Muppets live on. Lisa Henson attributes their longevity to the depth of their personalities. “None of none of them are perfect. None of them are evil,” she says. “They’re all multi-dimensional, fallible, funny characters.”