Your Thoughts: Lady Gaga and The Muppets Holiday Spectacular on ABC

[Drtooth]

I still feel the special was originally just Lady Gaga, but they added the Muppets in to promote the movie. The album didn't do well, the movie didn't. A for effort, but something tells me this special jinxed BOTH.

Plus, they could have done a much better job if they put some thought into it. It was a concert special with Muppet segments added in. Missed opportunities abound, but it's STILL better than that Liberace episode of their old show. He hijacked their own TV show for his own schtick. When he appeared on Batman, at least Batman got to do batman stuff.

 

[Muppet Master]

It's getting really annoying of everyone pointing out that the muppets can't do well on a primetime network. Hello people, JHH was not a real muppet show, it was Kermit and some random new muppets that were not relevant to auidence back then and have been long forgotten, and the other half-hour had literally nothing to do with the muppets at all!! I can just imagine someone tuning in to the first half and asking themselves where Piggy, Fozzie, Gonzo, Animal, or Scooter are, and just Kermit with random new characters cannot make a muppet show. Ya, Gonzo and Link and others eventually appeared but they were not main characters, and I can imagine someone tuning in to the last half and asking themselves "isn't this when the new muppet show is on?". Also NBC didn't exactly help with the timeslot or marketing the show, so that = failure. Muppets Tonight now was a whole different story. That show got cancelled, because it was a time when the muppets were becoming less popular, and also there were people who tuned out, because "Kermit wasn't the host.", and "It wasn't a good show." Nevernthless 2 seasons and 22 episodes was good enough for me. With a new muppet show is Disney really going to make those mistakes? The muppets are popular again so X that out, Disney goes crazy with promotion so X, and Disney will make it close to the origanal TMS, considering how they made the movies like the classic ones, so X again, finally ABC will give it a good timeslot, because they have a partnership, X and now don't you think a new TMS would succed?

 

[Drtooth]

You realize that even at the beginning, The Muppets had no place on prime time television. They got 2 pilots on ABC, but they refused to pick them up as a TV series. And I'm talking THE Muppet Show, here. If it wasn't for syndication, we wouldn't even have had the show in the first place.

And it's true that JHH's weird format kept NBC and viewers too confused to know what to do with it. But what's MT's excuse? It wasn't getting Boy Meets World ratings and was banished from Friday to Sunday Nights where it died against 60 Minutes.

The only way the Muppets would succeed in prime time is if the audience and network commitment was there. Not saying it could be, but unless you pull in high ratings right off the bat, cost peanuts to produce, or be the pet project of the network head, a show can't get the room it needs to succeed. Everyone in the biz is too impatient to let a Seinfeld like situation of a show with low ratings at the start flourishing ever again. Instead we get stuff that starts out strong and Peters out in less than 2 or 3 seasons.

 

[JonnyBMuppetMan]

Kristen Bell was really good on this too, her bit with Bobo was absolutely hysterical.

This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion, but am I the only one who thought Kristen Bell's chemistry with Gonzo was just nervous and awkward? A lot of people have noted her as one of the highlights of the special, and I'd be lying if I said I could obviously see why.