You know how sometimes you'll be listening to a brand-new song for the first time, and you're just not sure about it at first? The intro is maybe a little slow and different from the band's usual sound. But then the electric guitar kicks in, the band drops a killer chorus, and, by the end of it, you're tapping your feet and humming along. That's basically the situation with The Muppets Mayhem — the new Disney+ series that focuses on Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, the felted house band that has both rocked and rolled through a variety of Muppets productions since being introduced on The Muppet Show way back in 1975.
The show starts off a little iffy — an immediate concern for any demographic old enough to consider Animal, Zoot, and the rest of the gang absolute icons — but it continuously picks up steam as it goes along. It starts getting weird. It takes a few more chances. It devotes an entire episode to spoofing The Beatles: Get Back, Peter Jackson's beloved 2021 documentary. The show's incredibly catchy theme song starts to become permanently lodged in your brain. By the 10th and final episode, those early concerns have mostly faded, and you find yourself happy that Disney is able to find a way to put good, new Muppets stories out in the world. Completely recapturing the magic from the Jim Henson era seems like a fool's errand at this point, but the Electric Mayhem still unequivocally rock on.
The setup for The Muppets Mayhem is a fairly simple one. Junior music executive Nora (Lilly Singh), the show's lead human character, dreams of becoming a big player in her industry, but the small record label she works for, a relic of the '70s, is about to close up shop. Its grumpy owner, a new Muppet character named Penny Waxman (Leslie Carrrara-Rudolph) who once dated Crosby, Stills, and Nash ("Young was too old."), feels like they can't compete in the modern age. However, Nora makes a discovery that she thinks can put them back on the map. It turns out that, 50 years ago, the label signed Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem to a record deal for a single album, but the band never delivered it. Nora sets out to convince the Mayhem, who have amassed a legion of fans through decades of touring and various Muppets-related projects, to finally finish that album — their first. The group pretty quickly agrees, but it turns out getting the band to focus long enough to actually complete the album is a Herculean task. After all, they're Muppets, and chaos of all varieties soon ensues.
As expected, the Muppets are the true stars of the show here. Though their performers may have changed slightly over the years, all six members of the Mayhem continue to be their wild and entertaining selves. Dr. Teeth (Bill Barretta) is the group's soulful and loquacious leader. Never mind that some of the words he drops when he's busy philosophizing can't be found in any dictionary. Floyd Pepper (Matt Vogel) remains his affable right-hand man. Janice (David Rudman) takes her laid-back, Valley Girl energy and uses it to try to make everyone's life around her better. Zoot (original Muppet Show performer Dave Goelz) doesn't even know where he is half the time. Lips (Peter Linz) could have something interesting to say ... if the viewer was ever able to understand him. And Animal (Eric Jacobson) remains pure id — a barely-controllable wild man who has no choice but to shout out his every impulse. And play drums. And love bunnies. These are great Muppets characters, and The Muppets Mayhem gives them the showcase they deserve.
Less entertaining are the human characters, who take up more screen time than you might hope and have their own storylines that feel ripped from a lower-rung network sitcom. In addition to Nora, who's just looking for a piece of success she can hold onto, the show also features her sister, Hannah (Saara Chaudry), a successful influencer who introduces the Mayhem to the age of social media with predictably disastrous results; Moog (Tahj Mowry), a Mayhem superfan who follows the band around on tour but dreams of being a music producer; and J.J. (Anders Holm) a tech bro and former flame of Nora's who's maneuvering to buy out Penny's label but really might not be too bad of a guy. Nora, Moog, and J.J. end up being the three points of a love triangle that ... okay, yeah, it's boring, and there's no point even getting into it.
Like I said, things start out shaky. These pesky humans are, at best, serviceable. There's certainly no Charles Grodin, Tim Curry, or Michael Caine here to rise to the occasion of sharing the screen with a glorious cast of Muppets. The show feels set in the "real world" more so than a lot of other Muppet productions. There's a weird gag early on that involves some heavy Fritos product placement that's totally out of place. Yet, slowly but surely, that wonderful Muppets lunacy starts breaking through. Zoot apparently has psychokinetic powers. At one point, Animal quits the band to try out a bunch of different ill-fitting jobs. There's an entire episode where the group goes on a giant, hallucinatory drug trip. (Okay, they ate stale marshmallows, but — come on — we know what's going on.) That half-hour devoted to riffing on Get Back shows up, bringing both Kevin Smith and Jackson himself with it. Janice ends up inadvertently starting a cult via Instagram. As The Muppets Mayhem hits the homestretch, the laughs become more and more frequent.
The show was developed by Barretta, The Goldbergs creator Adam F. Goldberg, and Jeff Yorkes, and the trio has made a number of smart decisions when putting together it together. The series wisely keeps the focus on the Mayhem and resists the urge to expand it too much to the Muppet universe at large. You're not going to see any cameos from any famous non-Mayhem Muppets until the very last episode, though the show does drop a couple of Easter eggs that will make long-time fans smile. (Keep your eyes peeled for a certain valuable jewel and your ears listening for a quick reference to another notable Henson-created Muppet band.) It also does a good job of selling the Mayhem's legacy through the way other characters react to them, along with careful placement of clips from the original Muppet Show.
Then there's the music itself. This is a show about a rock band after all, and the original music the show offers up is so good you wish there was more of it. "Rock On," the show's theme song, is a world-class banger, and you should prepare to have it stuck in your head on repeat for weeks. (Hot tip: There's an extended version on the soundtrack that really should have been used in full on the show at some point.) There are a couple of other original tunes sprinkled throughout that are quite good as well, as well as a reprise of "Can You Picture That?" the band's song from 1979's The Muppet Movie. But the series still wraps up way too many episodes by having the Mayhem cover an existing classic rock tune. I'd have taken more originals over a Mayhem version of Cyndi Lauper's "True Colors," a cover song that highlights one of the weird dichotomies of the show: It often tries to present a more youthful spirit — don't forget, Singh started her career as a successful YouTube vlogger — but the musical references mostly veer old school. Meanwhile, the Mayhem themselves are presented as timeless, despite retaining their shaggy, '70s-rock personas. This is another Muppets project that wants to please the original fans while still trying to pick up new ones, and I'm not sure those two forces ever totally sync up here. The show's many human cameos range from Cheech & Chong to "Weird Al" Yankovic to Kesha to Lil Nas X!
Still, the Muppets are all about disorder, so maybe a little demographic chaos isn't a problem. The show wraps up neatly by its final episode, but there's no reason a second season couldn't take that disorder to greater heights by following the trajectory of Season 1's back half and getting even weirder and wilder. As far as the Mayhem are concerned, life is nothing but a big rock show that never ends. The lyrics to "Rock On" spell that mission statement plainly: "Even though it's been a long road, baby, you're the melody to my song! You and I, we were made for this moment. We're gonna rock on!" And now that the Electric Mayhem are finally rocking again, why in the world would anyone want to stop them?
Rating: B
The Muppets Mayhem debuts Wednesday, May 10 on Disney+.