What I’m Watching: The Muppets

The Muppets: Season 1, Episode 10 “Single All the Way” (B+)

This was a fun holiday episode to send this show off for the holidays on a hiatus through the beginning of February. Every time I mention to friends that I’m enjoying this show, they look at me quizzically and note just how much they don’t like it. In fact, the showrunner has even been replaced, ready to overhaul this show creatively. I don’t see what’s so wrong with its current state and why that’s so necessary - I’m having a great time watching it week after week. This episode’s celebrity guest star, Mindy Kaling, was perfectly tied into the plot, not trying to upstage Piggy with her singing but rather trying to shatter everyone’s eardrums with her hopelessly off-key singing. I’m glad that it wasn’t so bad to be truly awful since that would have been unnecessarily excessive, and I like that she loved the idea of being part of a sketch but still mistakenly insisted that everyone was tuning in to watch her sing and not to do comedy. The entire crew singing was the perfect solution to that particular problem. Yolanda giving everyone her name as their Secret Santa because she had been left out of the game the year before was funny, and it was nice to see everyone still give her gifts once they figured it out and felt bad for having unintentionally excluded her. The best part of the episode was Fozzie reassuring himself with an altogether different message than Piggy was giving him when he and Becky broke up, and now it seems that there may be some sexual tension between none other than Piggy and Kermit, which should prove interesting in the episodes to come.