No more Mr. Nice Frog.
Casual Muppet enjoyers and dedicated Muppet fan accounts alike are waging war on the new movie Saturday Night, which dramatizes the 90 minutes leading up to the premiere of SNL in 1975. Specifically, they are up in arms about the film’s portrayal of Jim Henson, who is played by Nicholas Braun in the film as a sort of squeaky-clean, clueless dork who is never in on the joke. The grumblings began when a September 12 Slate article titled, “What Does the SNL Biopic Have Against the Muppets?” was shared in the r/Muppets sub-Reddit, bringing fans’ attention to the film’s “dismissive treatment” of Henson as “a hapless, gangly intruder.” But the conversation didn’t turn into a full-on angry Mupprising until Cracked covered the brewing sub-Reddit discourse on September 17.
In the Cracked piece, the author shares their impressions of the film from its Toronto International Film Festival screening, noting that Saturday Night’s “take on Jim Henson may have been the most irksome element of the entire film for me. Henson really only exists as a punchline in the film. His over-the-top cartoonish squareness, in comparison to the hip, freewheeling SNL gang, is repeatedly played for laughs.” The day after the Cracked piece was published, the Twitter account for “Kermitment - A Muppets Podcast” (incredible name) tweeted a screenshot of this part of the article, sparking the backlash.
Some backstory: In SNL’s first season, when it was still experimenting with its own format, Henson and his Muppets crew (including Frank Oz, Richard Hunt, Jerry Nelson, Fran Brill, and Alice Tweedie) had a recurring segment called “The Land of Gorch,” featuring a new cast of (admittedly kind of ugly and off-putting) Muppets doing more adult material. As Studio 8H lore would have it, the SNL writers thought they were better than the Muppets (how very dare!) and didn’t want to write for them, and the “Gorch” material they did write caused creative tensions between SNL and Henson.
Since September 18, the snippet from the Cracked piece has been quote-tweeted to hell and back by Muppet-heads who are furious at the reported portrayal of one of American history’s greatest popular artists. They are firing shots at the film, at Braun, and at SNL itself. Many are coming for Lorne Michaels himself, comparing Michaels’s legacy to Henson’s, and ominously cursing director Jason Reitman.
And some Lew Zealand–level threats have been called in.
A few brave Lorne-cucks are defending the film, taking a “Well, I don’t know what you were expecting” approach to the portrayal.
As a Muppet fan who has had the chance to see the film, I can confirm that Henson is, indeed, portrayed like sort of an out-of-touch loser, more akin to the network-censor character than any of the other creatives working on the show. He pops up periodically throughout the film to meekly tell Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) about the ways the writers are mistreating him, leaving his Muppets in suggestive and violent poses, and refusing to write his script. Worst of all, Frank Oz is frequently shown near him in the backgrounds of scenes, the two of them appearing like fish out of water with their Muppet-rig headbands, but he isn’t given a single word to say throughout the film.
Still, I think Henson’s portrayal can be interpreted in the eye of the beholder. In one defiant moment in an elevator at 30 Rock, Henson speaks up for himself and tells Michaels that he believes there’s a place on television for grown-up Muppet-based comedy. He says this so earnestly, and with such conviction, that maybe other audience members more inclined to vibe with Chevy Chase and Michael O’Donoghue’s smarm took it as laughable. But I saw it as a triumphant hero moment for Henson. Because at the end of the day, no matter how the movie framed SNL as a never-before-seen revolution, it wasn’t something that radically new. Televised sketch comedy already existed in 1975. Risky comedy existed. You know what didn’t exist yet in 1975? Recurring grown-up Muppet-based comedy on late-night television. And you know what aired its pilot episode, subtitled “Sex and Violence,” in 1975? The motherfucking Muppet Show.
Forty-nine years later, as SNL enters a milestone season, many members of that season-one cast depicted in the film have died, receded from the spotlight, pivoted to spirit distilling, or are Chevy Chase. Lorne Michaels is the out-of-touch one, and Jim Henson is essentially sainted. And you know who hasn’t aged a day? Those “little hairy facecloths.” #TeamJim.