Muppets Tonight


Muppets Tonight is an American live-action/puppet family-oriented television series created by Jim Henson Productions and featuring The Muppets. Much like the "MuppeTelevision" segment of The Jim Henson Hour, the show was a continuation of The Muppet Show, set in a television studio rather than a theater.
It first ran on ABC from March 8 to July 14, 1996, with reruns on Disney Channel from 1997 to 2000.

Format

The premise of Muppets Tonight was that Clifford was the host of a variety/talk show on KMUP. The show stuck closely to The Muppet Show format of various skits interspersed with some sort of crisis occurring backstage.

Characters

Returning Muppets

Some of these introduced in Muppets Tonight went on to appear in later Muppet productions, particularly Pepe the Prawn, who has become a regular.
Among the regular sketches are:
The show ran from 1996 to 1998. There were 22 episodes produced in two batches. 13 episodes were ordered by ABC, though only ten of them were run in the 1995–96 TV season. The program was then purchased by the Disney Channel, which led a further 8 episodes and aired these along with the three episodes ABC did not air, in the 1997–98 season. One of the nine newly produced episodes was a clip show compilation culled from the earlier episodes.
In the United Kingdom thirteen episodes of the show were transmitted at 7pm on Friday evenings on BBC1 from September – December 1996. The remaining nine episodes have not been shown in the UK.
In Ireland the show was broadcast on TG4, eventually being dubbed into Irish Gaelic.
In Canada, the show originally aired on CBC, and later moved to Family Channel in conjunction with Disney Channel's airings.

Guest stars

Unlike the original Muppet Show, most episodes of Muppets Tonight featured multiple guest stars. Typically, there would be one principal guest, but other celebrities would make small walk-on appearances. For example, the Garth Brooks episode features a cameo from Leonard Nimoy.

List of guest stars

Season 1 (1996)

Season 2 (1997–98)

Muppet performers

The reception from critics was mixed. Among the staff at other TGIF shows, reception was negative; Jaleel White, star of Family Matters, blamed Muppets Tonight for Family Matters' own cancellation: "omewhere along the line, Winnie the Pooh and the Muppets started emerging around us and it became kids' night. And we lost a lot of credibility."