Shepherding the Muppets through a post-Henson world must be such a high-wire act. In retrospect, what Jim Henson achieved in his time was little short of alchemy. He managed to be anarchic and sincere, postmodern and moral, smart and dumb, all at the same time, without so much as breaking a sweat.

This, one might suspect, is why the last 25 years of Muppetry have been so patchy. With the notable exceptions of The Muppet Christmas Carol, Muppets Tonight and Jason Segel’s 2011 movie, every new Muppet project has struggled to capture the right tone. They’ve either been too cute (The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz), too knowing (Muppets Most Wanted) or too bizarrely in thrall to whatever the zeitgeist happens to be (Lady Gaga and the Muppets’ Holiday Spectacular) to work.

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Sadly, on the basis of its first two episodes, new series The Muppets is yet another misstep. It’s a spoof documentary full of cutaway character interviews, which would have been a sophisticated touch had this been made in 2005, but now just comes off as grimly rote. The biggest crime that The Muppets commits, however, is what it’s done with the Muppets themselves.

Keeping with the grand backstage tradition of all the best televised Muppets shows, The Muppets takes place behind the scenes of a late-night talkshow called Up Late with Miss Piggy. This immediately makes it a weird cousin of The Larry Sanders Show, where Miss Piggy is Garry Shandling, Kermit is Rip Torn, Fozzie is Jeffrey Tambor and Gonzo is Jeremy Piven (back when people still liked him).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An early look at the show.

It desperately wants to be Larry Sanders, too. Episodes are full of clawing and backbiting and Hollywood egotism and godawful musical performances by real-life bands that exist as nothing other than flabby filler. The whole thing so desperately wants to mimic the edginess of Sanders, but this is achieved at the cost of everything you ever loved about the Muppets.

What were previously sly winks to a grownup audience are now grotesque full-body grimaces, delivered with depressing sledgehammer brutality. In one scene, Animal laments his consequence-free promiscuity. In another, Zoot from The Electric Mayhem is outed as an alcoholic. And then, most heartbreakingly of all, there’s Kermit.

This version of Kermit is absolutely unrecognisable from anything that’s ever come before. This Kermit badmouths fellow celebrities, openly discusses his sex life and, at one point, describes his life as “a living hell”. That’s not who Kermit is. Kermit is the perennial wide-eyed optimist, the figure who grounds the chaos around him in sincerity. Kermit is the dreamer who believes in the power of people. He’s the one who sings The Rainbow Connection. He is most definitely not the stress-eating, coffee-drinking executive that The Muppets paints him as. It physically hurts to see what ABC have done to him.

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The Muppets isn’t a total write-off. A handful of asides manage to capture the spirit of old, and Laurence Fishburne pops up in a second-episode cameo so unstoppably game it manages to single-handedly overshadow everything that came before it. And we need to remember that it’s still early days; given time, The Muppets might eventually nail the proper Henson tone.

But for now, there’s nowhere near enough emotion. At their best, the Muppets tended to peddle the sort of all-encompassing Technicolor joy that made your eyes prickle with tears. That’s nowhere to be seen here. This is a cynic’s version of The Muppets, plain and simple. If it makes you cry at all, it’s because it broke your heart.