Still not easy being green? The Muppets return to TV for mockumentary series

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/may/08/the-muppets-return-to-tv-documentary-abc

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Following big-screen adventures that have taken them from Dickensian London to outer space and back, The Muppets are returning to the medium they started out on: television.

US network ABC has commissioned a new documentary-style series following Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear et al, and their everyday travails rather than the globe-trotting, song-and-dance adventures that have characterised their film outings. The Muppets’ innermost desires, as well as their romances, tiffs, successes and disappointments in life will all be raked over, in what is being described as a slightly more grown-up look at the felt menagerie.

Related: Miss Piggy was originally meant to be 'delicate and lovely'

It’s being helmed by Bill Prady, producer of the hugely successful sitcom The Big Bang Theory, and Bob Kushell, who has written for The Simpsons and Anger Management. Prady has form with the Muppets, having produced the one-off TV specials The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson and Miss Piggy’s Hollywood back in the early 90s.

The Muppets – a band of fantastical talking beasts led by Kermit the Frog – first emerged on television in the 1950s, graduating through variety shows and Sesame Street to their own Muppet Show in 1976, where they would create exuberant musical numbers and comic turns alongside famous Homo sapiens. Shepherded by puppeteer Jim Henson, they went on to star in a number of films in the 80s and 90s.

After a hiatus, they triumphantly returned in 2011 with The Muppets, a film with Oscar-winning songs from Flight of the Conchords’ Bret Mackenzie. Muppets Most Wanted, featuring a villainous Kermit doppelganger and an equally evil Ricky Gervais, followed in 2014.

Elsewhere on ABC’s new slate, Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal showrunner Shonda Rhimes will launch The Catch, focusing on an accountant exposing fraud, while Rhimes’ Shondaland production house will also make the Joan Allen drama The Family, about a young man returning from the dead.

ABC also greenlit the sitcom Dr Ken, starring Ken Jeong, known for his comic roles in The Hangover and Community. Jeong, who worked as a doctor before switching to acting, will play a brilliant but insensitive doc juggling work and family life.