The Muppets at 50: How a British Backer Saved Kermit From Oblivion

By Tom Whitfield

The Muppets collected four Emmys last month for Disney+'s "The Muppet Show" special with Sabrina Carpenter — fifty years after the franchise nearly died in American network development hell. "It was such a hard road to get 'The Muppet Show' made," says Lisa Henson, daughter of creator Jim Henson and CEO of The Jim Henson Company.

What nearly killed the show?

Jim Henson had built his reputation making puppets for "Sesame Street" and "Saturday Night Live" in the early 1970s, and he wanted a show of his own. ABC passed on two "Muppet Show" pilots. Further development work for CBS went nowhere. By the mid-1970s Henson was stuck.

The rescue came from an unlikely corner: Lew Grade, a British television producer and founder of the production company ITC, with a vaudeville background and an empty studio outside London.

"It was a real study in perseverance," says Henson's biographer Brian Jay Jones.

What did the deal look like?

Grade offered $125,000 per 30-minute episode — what Jones calls a "spectacular amount of money" for 1976 — on one condition: Henson and his team would have to make the show in the U.K. Henson agreed. He ended up living, aptly, on a London road called Frognal Gardens.

The partnership between the two men — one a British lord, the other a Mississippi-born "big kid," in the words of puppeteer Louise Gold — formed quickly.

"[Grade] really believed in Jim Henson as kind of a genius who should be trusted to do what he wanted," Lisa Henson says.

Did the bet pay off?

Grade's trust — and his money — paid off. "The Muppet Show" premiered in the U.K. on Sept. 5, 1976. Because the series was syndicated in the United States, each local American station chose its own premiere date that fall.

The show was selling before it aired. A February 1976 edition of Variety, reporting from the NATPE television conference in San Francisco under the headline "Muppet Mops Up," noted that "The Muppet Show" had sold to 60 markets before NATPE even opened. "Its cream-of-crop status was being attested to by those who had it and those who did not," the report stated.

Louise Gold joined in Season 2, just as Muppet mania was accelerating. She was literally Henson's right-hand woman — she operated the right hand of a number of his puppets while he played the left. She describes him as "the most fun, hardworking, generous, crazy boss you could possibly imagine."

Why do the characters still work?

Henson died in 1990. The Muppets outlived him, and Lisa Henson credits their durability to the depth of their personalities. "None of none of them are perfect. None of them are evil," she says. "They're all multi-dimensional, fallible, funny characters."

There is a caveat worth stating plainly: the anniversary narrative leans on the people with the strongest stake in it — the family company's CEO, the authorized biographer, a longtime cast member. None of them disputes the essential fact, though: without one British backer's cash and patience, Kermit would have stayed a development deal that never closed.

What does that change for the audience? It reframes last month's four Emmys not as an inevitability of an institution, but as the unlikely afterlife of a show two American networks declined to make.