Movies

'Muppets Now' Arrives On Disney+ This Summer

Muppets Now premiere
By Ben Pearson

Last summer, word began to spread that Disney was developing a short-form series featuring The Muppets for the Disney+ streaming service. An official announcement soon followed, revealing that the series would be called Muppets Now and it would land sometime in 2020. And thanks to a recent press release, that wide release window has been officially narrowed down to Summer 2020. Get the details about the series below.

Yesterday, Disney announced a new round of casting for this weekend's Disney Family Singalong Vol. 2 on ABC. The Muppets are set to open that show, and buried in the press release is this line:

"Fans of The Muppets can also see more of Kermit, Miss Piggy and friends in the upcoming Disney+ series, Muppets Now, premiering this summer."

At last year's D23 Expo, the company first revealed that the unscripted Muppets series would be coming to Disney+.

There are currently ten different pieces of Muppet-related content on Disney+, ranging from The Muppet Movie to a Disney Junior Muppet Babies series called Show and Tell. But there's always room for more (including The Muppets Take Manhattan...why isn't that on there?), and the company has at least seemed loosely willing to revitalize the brand after the disappointing Muppets Most Wanted hit theaters in 2014.

The characters haven't appeared in their own movie since then, but on the TV side of things, The Muppets appeared in an ABC mockumentary-style series that only lasted one season. After that, Frozen and Beauty and the Beast actor Josh Gad and Once Upon a Time creators Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz were developing a Muppet revival called Muppets Live Another Day; that project ended up being scrapped last fall, but you can read some of their pages from it here. So Muppets Now will mark the first big return of the beloved characters in several years. (Gad, Kitsis, and Horowitz are now working on a Beauty and the Beast prequel spin-off show.)

Early rumors about Muppets Now claimed the show would be comprised of segments of a game show, a cooking show, and a talk show featuring an unnamed Muppet girlfriend, but none of those rumors have been confirmed yet. Here's hoping the short-form format will free up the writers to create memorable, engaging, hilarious Muppet-related stories that can stand on their own. The Muppets are variety show veterans, after all, so there's plenty of precedent for them being able to work wonderfully in short bursts.

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