The Muppets Turn 50 This Year But They Nearly Didn't Get Made at All:
'It Was a Real Study in Perseverance'
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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."



<https://variety.com/2026/tv/global/disney-muppets-anniversay-jim-henson-1236909540/>






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