''I've never shot anything this fast in my life - I'm terrified,'' says Mr. Henson of the one-a-week schedule. He nevertheless wears an air of calmness as if it were a glove-puppet as second nature as Kermit, the Mickey Mouse-like patriarch of the empire. After all these years, Mr. Henson still remains the faithful voice-and-hand soul of Kermit, despite the availability of a highly gifted troupe of staff performers he has gathered over the years. Their art, in which they stand just below camera range as a crowd of separately miked acting tyros who watch TV monitors and raise their busy, puppeted arms as if in hallelujah, can be dazzling.

In some ways, their dazzle would contradict the goal of ''The Storyteller'' series, for a viewer's imagination can feel inhibited, not freed, in the midst of subtle storytelling on television where pictures tyrannize the senses. How could there ever be a better scrim for purely imagining a story than the irrational pattern of shadow and flame of the storyteller's ancient campfire? Even the dull fabric of the 1940's radio receiver can be preferred for this task to television's ever-more manipulated electronic canvas.

Typically, Mr. Henson's answer is to go in two directions, backward and forward, at the same time. First, he is trying to exploit television's busiest, crassest innovation, music video, for graphic, not musical, techniques that might advance the art of clear and clever narrative. More and more of those loud videos depict stories, for better or worse, and Mr. Henson has hired one of the new British masters of this form, Steve Barron, as a principal adviser.

Better yet, perhaps, for reactionaries young and old, Mr. Henson also has reintroduced an actual storyteller to speak and be seen speaking the tale all the way through. But he is not quite the talking head that modern folklore says will guarantee the wrath of the ratings gods.

This character is played by John Hurt, the English actor whose gifts as the sordid Caligula in television's landmark ''I, Claudius'' are not entirely wasted on the Henson set as Mr. Hurt ranges far from the avuncular to variously somber, visionary, ironic, romantic precincts of the heart, sometimes assuming a Pirandello-like role within his tale. There is occasionally a puppet dog to be seen at his feet, moodily following the story and interrupting from time to time with gripes and canny elisions. This subservient creature will presumably reassure Muppet fanatics, yet not alienate the folktale purists who previously found Miss Piggy a taste difficult to acquire.

Mr. Hurt appears on and off across much of each plot's spiral. His voice alone seems worth the witnessing, as he projects beyond his crusty makeup each story's carefully crafted words of scary, beguiling, contradictory ideas culled and adapted from imperishable tales of tradition. For this, Mr. Henson and the series producer, Duncan Kenworthy, speak reverentially of Anthony Minghella, an English playwright and former literature professor who has been researching basic folk and fairy tales and composing the scripts.