The Muppets Turn 50 This Year, Yet Were Almost Never Made: "This Is a True Study in Perseverance"

Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, and the rest of the Muppets have achieved iconic status in pop culture since their show first aired in 1976, as the four Emmy Awards received last month for the Disney+ special "The Muppet Show" with Sabrina Carpenter demonstrate. This is an achievement that […]

Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy and the rest of the Muppets have achieved iconic status in pop culture since their series premiered in 1976, as evidenced by the four Emmys he won last month for Disney+'s "The Muppet Show" starring Sabrina Carpenter. It's an achievement that's all the more impressive given how close to obscurity they've come.

Lisa Henson, daughter of Muppet creator Jim Henson and CEO of The Jim Henson Company, said: "It was a tough road to make 'The Muppet Show.' Popular in diversity stories, Mubi CEO Efe Cockrell hails Primetime's "amazing" opening weekend: Mubi's "bold storytelling is here to stay" in Los Javis' "La Mesías" and Rodrigo Sorogin's "riot cop" in Movistar Plus World Rolls (HiLUC).

After creating puppets for "Sesame Street" and "Saturday Night Live" in the early 1970s, Henson was eager to create his own show. But after two failed "Muppet Show" pilots for ABC and a few more development jobs for CBS that went nowhere, he was stuck — until a British TV producer named Lew Grade came along. "It was a real study in perseverance," says Henson biographer Brian J. Jones.

Grid, the founder of the production company ITC, had a background in vaudeville and an empty studio outside London. He saw potential in Henson and his troupe of merry Muppets and offered $125,000 for a 30-minute episode, which in 1976 was, in Jones's words, "an impressive amount of money", provided that Henson and his team produced the show in Britain.

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. "[Grid] really believed in Jim Henson as some kind of genius who could be trusted to do what he wanted to do," 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 aired in the U.S., each local station picked its own air date for the fall of that year). It was making waves before its launch. As Variety's Feb. 76 edition of the NATPE teleconference in San Francisco, titled "Muppet Mops Up," reported, "The Muppet Show" was sold to 60 markets before NATPE opened. "The cream status of its product was confirmed by those who had it and those who did not."

Gold joined the series in Season 2, just as the Muppet craze was really taking off. Literally Henson's right-hand man (he played right-handed for a number of his puppets while he played right-handed), Gold describes him as the funniest, hardest-working, most generous and craziest boss imaginable."

Henson died in 1990. His puppets are alive. Lisa Henson attributes their longevity to their depth of character. "None of them are perfect. None of them are evil," she says. "They're all multi-dimensional, fallible, funny characters."