Forcing The A.V. Club to confront a new, terrifying reality where we actually kind of agree with One Million Moms on something, The Daily Dot brings word that the mom-jeans-and-sensible-shoes-clad offshoot of the American Family Association has launched a petition expressing its displeasure with ABC’s new “adult” Muppets series.
But while The A.V. Club objects to this aspect of The Muppets because we refuse to report on the tabloid relationship drama between two pieces of felt, One Million Moms apparently doesn’t want to have to explain to its 1.87 million kids (14.6 million, adjusted for Duggars) what a double entendre is:
1MM suspects there are going to be a lot of shocked moms and dads when they discover that the family-friendly Muppets of the 1970s are no more. It appears that no subject is off limits. ABC’s new Muppet Show, airing on Tuesday evenings at 8:00 pm ET/7:00 pm CT, is not what Jim Henson imagined and created. The new show is aimed at a mature, modern audience and addresses subjects not suitable for family viewing.
“It’s sort of an adult Muppet show,” Kermit the Frog said during a promotional video for the show. One ad read, “Finally, a network TV show with full frontal nudity.” Technically, the advertisement is correct – seeing how Kermit doesn’t wear pants.
The mature version of “The Muppets” will cover a range of topics from sex to drugs. Miss Piggy came out as a pro-choice feminist during an MSNBC interview. The puppet characters loved by kids in the 1970s and 1980s and beyond are now weighing in on abortion and promiscuity.
ABC hopes children watch the show and predict they would enjoy some of the humor, but 1MM would disagree. It is not the show it once was. ABC has ruined “The Muppets.” How many parents want to explain the punchline of sexually charged jokes to young children?
Many parents unknowingly will let their children watch an episode only to find out its perverted nature too late, unless they are alerted ahead of time. 1MM and others need to get the word out to families to avoid this program at all costs. Please forward this to everyone you know!
At least One Million Moms is consistent in its objections to interspecies relationships. Fozzie Bear has a human girlfriend in the new show, an ungodly act expressly forbidden in Characterizations 26:13-16, which reads, “for lo, inserting relationship humor where the plot does not organically call is the refuge of the cynical, and he who leans on it shalt be driven from the citadel and stoned as a hack.” (One Million Moms also takes credit for WE tv’s hasty cancelation of Sex Box—because boxes are for tithing, mister—hopefully presaging a bloody war between the group and the Parents Television Council.)
Jim Henson would also presumably have taken issue with a fundamentalist group using his memory to further its “family values” agenda. One of the two pilots Henson originally created for The Muppet Show was called “Sex And Violence,”and parodied the ubiquity of same on TV: