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Atlantic
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
How Kids' TV Turned Into ‘Preschool Tinder'
Julia, a Muppet on Sesame Street, is a 4-year-old girl with bright-orange hair who likes singing, painting, and playing with her stuffed bunny, 'Fluffster.' She's also autistic—which means, as the show made clear during the character's TV debut, in 2017, that Julia expresses herself in a manner some might not understand. When Big Bird worries that Julia's silence means she doesn't like him, his fellow Muppet Abby explains that Julia does things 'in a Julia sort of way.' By the end of the episode, Big Bird and Julia are friends, even harmonizing in song. Neurodivergence is rarely portrayed authentically on-screen, let alone in a way children can grasp. But Julia, who went on to become a regular presence on the show, is the result of a collaboration between Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit company behind Sesame Street, and a team of researchers who study child development and autism. And her introduction did more than demonstrate what neurodivergence can look like; the show emphasized that she has an identity of her own and is as worthy of friendship as anyone else. Those are complex concepts, carefully constructed for young viewers to comprehend. In the years ahead, such meticulous work may be harder to accomplish. In May, President Donald Trump's executive order pulling federal dollars from public networks such as PBS and PBS Kids led to the abrupt termination of Ready to Learn, a grant designed in part to financially provide for the development of children's shows. Last month, Congress approved the Trump administration's rescission package, revoking $1.1 billion previously allocated to public radio and television. Canceling such funding, PBS Kids' senior vice president and general manager Sara DeWitt told me recently, 'really puts a lot of our future planning in jeopardy'—planning that involves ensuring that their children's shows are in line with the 'high quality' educational TV established by Sesame Street. Not helping matters is the fact that, despite being arguably the most consequential children's show in history, Sesame Street has spent this past year being passed around like a hot potato by different streaming partners. The series' turbulent journey to stay on the air reflects, in some ways, how precarious and expansive the children's-TV landscape has become. Before the streaming boom, parents could depend on a handful of publicly funded or dedicated networks for well-curated, enriching children's programming. But as newer media platforms have become more prevalent, kids' television has become more sprawling—and more difficult for families to navigate. Streamers such as Netflix now offer kids' programming, with their own siloed-off sections and parental controls; YouTube, too, is packed with content creators making children's videos. Koyalee Chanda, a creative executive at Lion Forge Entertainment, a production company geared toward family-friendly projects, describes the current multiplatform landscape as 'preschool Tinder,' a realm in which young viewers can swipe endlessly through videos, seeking a match without always knowing the difference between one show's intentions and another's—and in which it's harder for show creators to make their work stand out. 'Essentially,' Chanda told me, 'you only are as valuable as your thumbnail.' As such, children's television has become a diffuse field. Linda Simensky, a former executive for Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon who helped create shows such as Dexter's Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls, told me she fears that the genre has ballooned out of control. The industry's changing priorities and shaky quality assurance have left her disenchanted by the business. 'I spent more than 30 years building this industry,' she said, 'and I feel like it's just all falling apart now.' Think of a beloved character from your childhood—a Teletubby, maybe, or Thomas the Tank Engine. What comes to mind? Nostalgia, probably. But according to a study by UCLA's Center for Scholars & Storytellers that was published earlier this year, a toddler's favorite characters can also promote the development of lifelong behaviors and skills. Take Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, the animated spin-off of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood that began airing in 2012. The show has consulted childhood-development experts to ensure that the 4-year-old Daniel behaves like many of the preschoolers who watch him: If he gets mad, he expresses his anger; if he is disappointed, he makes that clear. Afterward, he sings a 'strategy song,' teaching his audience social-emotional skills while simultaneously relating to them. The UCLA survey reported that 21 percent of teenagers who had grown up watching Daniel were still making use of the skills they'd learned years earlier. The goal for many of those working in children's entertainment, DeWitt explained, is to make shows that help viewers retain a variety of skills, emotional and otherwise. That's certainly the approach behind Sesame Street: 'Our guiding principle has been to center the preschooler in our storytelling, always,' Halcyon Person, the head writer for the show's upcoming season, told me over email. She explained that by observing kids' needs, 'we know not only that we're making something that will teach them, but something that will stick with them as they grow.' Doing this has become harder, however, as the industry becomes more fragmented. In the past, child-development experts were often included in the making of kids' television, DeWitt said, but now 'a lot of the new content that's being created for kids is being created by anyone and is uploaded into a space that isn't heavily regulated and also doesn't have curation tied to it.' Plus, children themselves have become content creators, even small-screen stars. A preschooler can learn their ABCs from Elmo in one video, then watch another made by someone their own age, encouraging them to like and subscribe. The proportion of self-produced work to network-commissioned programming started to change as soon as YouTube became a significant player in the entertainment industry, in the 2010s. The company is reportedly on track to outpace even Disney in revenue, as a majority of younger consumers find creator-driven, social-media efforts more relevant than traditional media. 'There are stars, characters, and IP on YouTube that have bigger and deeper fan bases than what we're seeing on linear television,' Chris Williams, the founder and CEO of PocketWatch, a studio that harnesses the popularity of internet-driven talent, told me. His company partners with channels and creators that have major followings, such as Ryan Kaji, the now-teenage host of Ryan's World, and builds upon the content they've already developed. 'We kind of curate it, enrich it, package it,' Williams said of PocketWatch's aim. 'We basically turn it into TV.' That strategy is similar to what's deployed at Moonbug, the company that acquired and distributes Blippi and CoComelon. The latter show—a juggernaut on YouTube, attracting billions of views with its bobble-headed animated characters and earworm-y nursery songs—often came up as an example for, as one parent put it to me, the 'brain rot' their family encounters on YouTube. When I told Moonbug's chief creative officer Richard Hickey that some parents are wary of CoComelon, he sounded dismayed. He told me that Moonbug is a 'creative first' company, cultivating its shows with what he refers to as a 'story trust' that's concerned with finding storytelling elements that will resonate with their audience. 'Of course, yes, we are a business,' he said. 'We're looking for successful properties that we can then build on and try and create franchises from—but really, at the heart of it, how does that content connect with our viewers?' Williams pointed out that, in some ways, companies such as PocketWatch are simply trying to expand the reach of content that's already popular and considered good for kids, therefore streamlining the painstaking process of choosing what to watch. 'Parents have been media-shamed about YouTube for a really long time, like, Everything on YouTube's bad, right? ' Williams said. '99.99 percent of everything on YouTube for kids is bad, but we're mining for the .01 percent.' Making sure that children's videos on YouTube are better than the majority of what's available is a task that Katie Kurtz, the managing director and global head of youth and learning at YouTube, tackles for a living. She told me that when a creator marks a video or channel as age-appropriate on the YouTube platform, an algorithm—fine-tuned by machine learning and, at times, by human moderators—studies whether it follows the company's ' quality principles,' which educators and developmental psychologists helped establish in 2021. (Not all content labeled this way ends up on YouTube Kids. YouTube occasionally marks videos as 'Made for kids' based on its own algorithmic findings, although creators can appeal the label if they believe it's inaccurate.) The platform then recommends videos that promote the outlined principles, such as self-care, learning, and creativity, while burying submissions that don't meet these standards. YouTube also invites experts to host workshops that train creators on how to refine their videos in accordance with quality expectations. 'For us, it's really not enough to be a safe experience,' Kurtz said. 'We want it to be an enriching experience as well.' One of those experts is Yalda Uhls, the founder and CEO of the Center of Scholars & Storytellers at UCLA. Although she helps shape the direction of YouTube's content standards and has praised their impact, she has doubts about whether what's being produced will always enrich children. 'Companies are focused on money and engagement and the most eyeballs,' she told me. 'To continuously try to come up with a mechanism to get them to want to work with you on supporting their audience's well-being, it's just hard.' She recalled a meeting years ago in which a YouTube executive in charge of a former division making children's content asked experts which programs creators should draw inspiration from—only to bristle when they suggested Mister Rogers. (YouTube declined to comment.) ''I would never make a show like that, because it's too slow,'' she recalled the executive saying. 'And we were all like, What?! ' Of course, the children's-television genre today isn't devoid of series like Mister Rogers; Uhls herself pointed to Ms. Rachel, the popular YouTuber who specializes in toddler-friendly music, as a worthy successor. Yet young viewers have fewer sources directing them toward shows of this nature. The defunding of public networks has made the decentralization of kids' TV more stark, while individual companies and studios differ on what's considered worthwhile programming. 'We're trying to make the most nourishing content we can,' Hickey, the Moonbug executive, said. But in the end, caregivers should take charge, he argued: 'I don't think there's any shortcut.' Even creating guidelines for a single household, though, can get complicated quickly. Tetyana Korchynskyy, one of the parents I spoke with, told me that when her son began watching television just before his first birthday, she set ground rules for what he could view. There'd be no horror, no violence, and nothing meant for grown-ups. Screen time would not happen first thing in the morning or right before bed. She'd aim to allow up to three hours of daily viewing while also making sure he played outside, ideally with other kids. Korchynskyy's son is now 3, and maintaining those guardrails has often felt like a job in and of itself. Even though she tries to control the apps he can access and monitor which shows leave him glued to the screen, his media consumption can be 'very difficult to really control,' she told me. His preferences, too, can complicate the task; after liking Ms. Rachel for a while, he suddenly began rejecting her videos. This abandonment of Ms. Rachel —poor Ms. Rachel!—reminded me of something Simensky, who helped develop series such as The Ren & Stimpy Show and Rocko's Modern Life, observed about her work as a former creative executive. She'd know something was resonating if she saw children playing pretend with the characters. She called it 'the yard platform'—as in, were the kids putting the show on in the yard? If so, that meant they were passionate enough about what they were watching to become active participants rather than just passive viewers. In other words, children's interests and tastes can help greatly in the design of kids' shows—if not in the studio, then in focus groups and research studies. Chanda, the Lion Forge executive, recalled her early days of directing Blue's Clues, when she learned that the show followed a specific rhythm—one that could feel slow for adults. Children, studies indicate, seem to struggle to perform tasks after watching fast-paced content. Conventional wisdom may dictate that not much is required to hold a preschooler's attention—'There's always been an attitude of 'Kids will watch whatever you give them,'' Simensky said—but Blue's Clues aimed to also enrich its young viewers' minds. The history of the genre is one of constant disruption: Kids grow up quickly, the tech industry innovates rapidly, financial support fluctuates often, and societal norms are always changing. Lately, the combined disruption has become more acute—the funding more sharply slashed, the landscape more difficult to navigate—which, in turn, is threatening the quality control that children's programming needs. But key to finding a way forward through the uncertainty, Chanda pointed out, is understanding that a clear constant exists amid all the shakiness. 'Everyone who works in kids' TV knows who their boss really is,' she said. 'Their boss is that kid.'
Yahoo
04-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Grief Counseling With Kermit
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Jim Henson's Creature Shop has sat, for the past 16 years, on the fourth floor of an office building in Long Island City, New York, behind a metal door that looks like any other. When I opened it one gray morning after the holidays, I was greeted by a plastic Christmas tree hung with fake fish skeletons and desiccated banana peels, Oscar leering nearby from his can, and a brown, fuzzy blob sitting on a table. At first I thought it might be a complete Muppet, until I saw, a few yards beyond, a matching brown, fuzzy, headless body. As the archivist Karen Falk began to lead me on a tour of the workshop—drawers of googly eyes, noses, and 'special facial hair'; filing cabinets for 'fur' and 'slippery sleezy'; a stack of banker's boxes, one marked 'Grover,' another 'Boober'—I looked back, briefly, to catch the bulbous nose and round eyes of Junior Gorg from Fraggle Rock staring at me, or perhaps at his own body, waiting to be reunited. 'There are only three Snuffleupagi in the world,' Falk told me, gesturing toward a puppet near the entrance that she said was kind of an extra, deployed when Snuffleupagus needs a family member on set next to him. I reached out to give Snuffy's relation a little pet—his soft brown fur, curly and dense like a poodle's, was overlain with orange feathers—and scribbled a note: 'remarkably lifelike.' For a what? I later asked myself. For a giant woolly mammoth cum anteater puppet? But the space made it easy to slip across the human-Muppet divide and into Henson's world, where the realness of the puppets is sacrosanct. When I asked to take a picture of the decapitated Junior Gorg, just for my notes, Falk looked at me as if I'd asked to check under Miss Piggy's dress. 'We don't allow photos of things like that, Muppets without heads,' she tutted, and ushered me to another part of the workshop, where a handful of archival boxes had been set aside for me. After a great loss, some people find themselves communing with nature, at the seaside or deep in a forest. Others turn to spirituality, toward a temple or church. Me? I'd come to grieve with the Muppets. My father, Marshall, amassed many accolades over the course of his career—a gold record for playing bluegrass banjo on the Deliverance soundtrack; an Oscar for co-writing the script of Annie Hall; a Tony nomination for Best Book for the musical Jersey Boys, which won Best Musical in 2006 (and an Olivier Award, too)—but way cooler to me, as a kid, was the fact that for a brief stint, long before I was born, he'd been part of Henson's crew. For much of my life, I knew little about the specifics. I do remember one time being feverish and crying for a Kermit doll after a doctor's appointment, even though, despite Dad's involvement in the show, I can't remember ever watching any Muppets, or even Sesame Street, at home. The local toy store was all sold out, so Dad called in a favor, and we headed to the old Muppet offices on the Upper East Side to pick one up. While we were waiting, I watched, slack-jawed, as puppet makers working on a new creation pulled googly eyes out of thin drawers, one after another, a fever dream come to life and branded in my memory like a surrealist madeleine. After that, the Muppets all but receded from my life. [Read: The secret life of grief] That changed after my father got sick last year, when my daily life became not just a logistical mire—managing therapy appointments, speaking with doctors—but also one of constant dread: about which Dad I'd find when I walked into his room each day, his personality somehow refracted, as if I were looking at it through a prism; about whether a middle-of-the-night phone call might signify an Earth-tilting inflection point; about how devastating it was going to be to navigate the world without the beloved father I'd always looked up to. At the end of each day, like any well-adjusted individual faced with looming, profound change, I chose to run screaming as far away from reality as I could, which is how I ended up in the arms of the 1970s Muppets. I had no grand plan. I simply gravitated toward their fluffiness and goofiness as an antidote to grief. I sensed—rightly, it turned out—that they'd help keep me afloat. Dad and Henson first connected through Al Gottesman, Henson's longtime lawyer. Their mutual affinity makes total sense to me, even a generation later. They were born three years apart and grew up delighting in Kukla, Fran and Ollie, and Walt Kelly's Pogo comic strip. They shared an off-kilter sense of humor and a reverence for the silly. Although I can't remember ever seeing Dad with a puppet on his hand, when I was growing up he would put on elaborate bedtime shows for my sister and me, starring our menagerie of stuffed animals. Using a pair of needle-nose pliers from his tool case—a bulky, black-leather valise full of primary-colored screwdrivers I liked to play with, a relic from his days attending Brooklyn Technical High School to appease his practical immigrant father—he made pince-nez out of a paper clip for my plush dachshund, Ollirina, a feisty Southern grande dame who propelled herself around by farting (my contribution); he then had her perform miraculous acts of levitation. Dad's tried-and-true finale: shooting my Ping-Pong-ball-sized plush hedgehog through a toilet-paper-roll cannon as I drumrolled on my lap. Looking back on this now that I'm a parent of three young children, I marvel that he could summon this level of creativity after dinnertime. For a few months in the mid-'70s, Dad helped Henson write a failed Broadway Muppets revue, and what would become the pilot of The Muppet Show, called 'Sex and Violence With the Muppets'—Henson's attempt to establish the Muppets as not just for kids. Dad is listed as head writer on the script, in which Nigel, Sam the Eagle, and a few other Muppets put together a 'Seven Deadly Sins' pageant to determine which sin is the most deadly. Although the final show evolved from the pilot—Kermit replaced Nigel as the emcee; a human guest star was added—you can see from the script that its style was already developed, as was its tone: equal parts outlandish and sophisticated, countercultural, never talking down to the audience. Sloth arrives, of course, during the closing credits, too late to participate. One stage direction reads, simply, 'Chaos in progress.' The script established the framework with which Henson would go on to parody a vaudeville show from all angles—the divas (Piggy), the technical malfunctions (Crazy Harry, blowing up sets left and right), the well-meaning guy trying to hold the whole ball of crazy together (Kermit). My father's contributions are impossible to disentangle from the general Muppetness of the script—collaborations work, he always told me, because they are collaborative—save for one: Despite being Brooklyn born and bred, with not a Nordic bone in his body, he is, by many accounts, the source of the Swedish Chef's accent and nonsense lexicon, the one typified by 'Hurdy, gurdy, gurdy, bork bork bork!' The character had originated with Henson in the '60s. Back then, he'd been German. For reasons lost to Muppetdom, at some point the character moved northwest, to a place with more centralized health care. And he needed an accent to match. I loved listening to Dad parody foreign languages. He liked to throw off telemarketers by answering the phone as a hard-of-hearing woman from some indeterminate Latin American country, or as an eccentric Central European man, characterized by a sibilant, Peter Sellers–as–Strangelove delivery that would typically escalate into a shriek and send the person on the other end skedaddling to their next call. So I was not surprised to learn that, decades earlier, Dad had apparently reduced the Henson puppeteer Frank Oz to tears by mimicking languages during brainstorming sessions. He later made an ersatz-Swedish tape for Henson to listen to on his commute into the city from his home in Bedford. 'He would drive to work trying to make a chicken sandwich in mock Swedish or make a turkey casserole in mock Swedish,' Henson's son Brian told Jim's biographer, remembering having heard my dad's tape. 'It was the most ridiculous thing you had ever seen, and people at traffic lights used to stop and sort of look at him a little crazy.' All of this I learned from books, from interviews with Muppet staffers, and by emailing Falk, the Henson archivist. But the bulk of my embedding in Muppetdom over the past year involved watching The Muppet Show with my husband and three kids on weekend evenings, our world cocooned between the real, live present and a completely nonsensical 1970s. I'd slice up some apples and we'd cackle together as Rita Moreno flung a noodly Muppet man around set in a particularly violent tango; as Zero Mostel, only mildly indignant that a Muppet was eating him during his cold open, helped wash down his own arm with a little water; as Gene Kelly taught Kermit to tap-dance on the piano. [Read: The father-daughter routine that transformed our family life] Given what I'd learned, was it a cosmic sign that my youngest, just 3 years old, started to develop an obsession with the Swedish Chef? He took to running around the apartment, crowing his bastardized version of the Chef's already bastardized Swedish and then, mimicking his new Nordic hero, flinging into the air whatever he had handy. Sometimes it was a stuffed animal; other times it was hard objects, which would necessitate a stern lecture (after my husband and I had taken cover) about the dangers of throwing things up, because they tend to come down, even if the Chef's flapjacks do not. After my son got a Swedish Chef action-figure set that included a small chicken and a handful of cooking tools, he would sit on the ground, brow furrowed in concentration, making the cleaver-wielding chef hop after the chicken—or sometimes, in keeping with Muppet sensibility, vice versa. My daughters became obsessed with 'Pigs in Space,' a recurring Muppet sketch parodying Star Trek and other space operas of the 1960s and '70s. They erupted in cheers whenever the USS Swinetrek flew across the screen, indicating that the sketch was back again. The setup is that three pigs are flying through the cosmos—Captain Link Hogthrob, Dr. Julius Strangepork, and Miss Piggy as first mate—and … nothing really happens. John Cleese shows up as a pirate and tries to make a call from a payphone on the ship, while his parrot, who is in love with him, gripes that Cleese is neglecting her and should take her to dinner with all his doubloons. The ship is invaded by two alien beings, who turn out to be the Swedish Chef and his chicken, and after they leave, the pigs get bored. When the USS Swinetrek nears the end of the universe, where its crew will finally discover the meaning and purpose of life, the dinner bell rings, and the pigs get sidetracked. Miss Piggy is routinely degraded, asked by the boars to do the laundry or make more swill, though the audience understands that she's smarter and tougher than her male co-stars. According to Oz, Miss Piggy's puppeteer, her toughness was hard-won. In multiple interviews, he has spoken about his need to understand the complete biographies of the characters he portrayed, even if viewers don't share that need. In Oz's mind, Miss Piggy was born on a farm, loved her father very much, and was grief-stricken when he died in a tractor accident. As her mother's subsequent suitors turned their attention to Miss Piggy, a single path forward emerged: to leave. She was later forced to do some things she wasn't proud of as she clawed her way to diva-dom, including appearing in a bacon commercial. Does any of that come through the screen as she floats around in outer space? I suppose that, for some viewers, it does—that having a deep understanding of Miss Piggy's character somehow enabled Oz and the other puppeteers to present her simulated world as real enough that the audience would jump into it with her, feetfirst, willingly suspending disbelief. Or maybe that's not why it works. 'It's just so weird,' my third grader said to me one night, with a snort. 'Like, why are there even pigs in space?' I didn't experience what others warned me I might, after the months of decline that led to Dad's death late last year: picking up the phone to call him and forgetting that there would be no one on the other end, looking up from the sidewalk at the window where he worked for decades, expecting to see the light on and being knocked sideways that it was dark. I never forgot. I never expected the light to be on. But occasionally, I'd find myself dropping from one reality straight through to another, something most likely aided by my living just eight blocks from where I grew up. My neighborhood is saturated with memories spanning my whole life. Passing a street corner, I would suddenly reverse-age four decades and see Dad's belt buckle sliding along my tricycle's handlebars, because I was so hot and sweaty and tired that I simply couldn't pedal one more inch, and he was pulling me around that corner, home. I'd be running the Lower Loop in Central Park, where we used to take our daily afternoon walks, and I'd pass a busker playing the fiddle and have to stop, hands on knees, to catch my breath, remembering the Flatt and Scruggs Dad played through his computer speakers. These temporal shifts through eras were uncontrolled, unexpected, all-encompassing. My scrim between reality and memory, truth and simulation, had become porous, faulty. Like the Swedish Chef, who starts making a turtle soup only to find that the turtle has woken up and is trying to escape, my reality was pitched, slightly, on its axis. The first time one of these temporal shifts through eras, one of these free falls from today back to childhood, happened was a few nights after the burial. My husband, kids, and I gathered, the children freshly showered and damp-haired, and put on the Muppets, as we'd done, at that point, for months. The episode featured Señor Wences, the ventriloquist whose main act involved Johnny, a boy made from Wences's hand, on which he stuck two googly eyes, and on top of which he draped a ridiculous orange wig. His other star performers were a bespectacled chicken named Cecilia (Wences: 'Second name?'; Cecilia: 'Chicken') and Pedro, a surly talking head (literally just a head, not an MSNBC type) who, after a train accident that decapitated the poor puppet, spent his life, disembodied, in a box. The episode's conceit was that Kermit has decided to do something new: a puppet show! 'It's a complete change of pace, folks,' he said to cheers. 'Yes, it's a real first!' Toward the end, Wences held up an egg and asked Cecilia Chicken to identify it. As she replied, softly and directly, 'My son' (rhymes with moan), a memory of childhood weekend breakfasts welled up from deep in my subconscious, collapsing time just as the puppets on-screen were collapsing their simulation. I saw the kitchen table, the oval wooden one my father had waxed by hand until it shone. I felt its slight stickiness beneath my hands. And by the stove was Dad, apron halved and tied around his waist, holding up an egg reverently, sighing, lovingly pronouncing it 'my son!' in Salamancan-inflected English, then cracking it, with a flourish, into a cast-iron skillet. He used to do that with eggs. I'd completely forgotten. For a moment, I stayed there at the kitchen table, giggling. I stayed with the feeling of being closer to my children's age than middle age; closer to those evenings spent cross-legged and damp-haired myself, watching my dad turn stuffed animals into performers; closer still to a moment years before my birth, when, across town at the Henson studios, in a healthy body with long legs kicked up on the desk in front of him, my dad held a bulky tape recorder to his mouth, paused, then started up for the first time in ersatz Swedish, the beginning of a thread that would reach out, decades later, and tether him to me. Article originally published at The Atlantic Solve the daily Crossword
Atlantic
04-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
How the Muppets Helped Me Grieve
Jim Henson's Creature Shop has sat, for the past 16 years, on the fourth floor of an office building in Long Island City, New York, behind a metal door that looks like any other. When I opened it one gray morning after the holidays, I was greeted by a plastic Christmas tree hung with fake fish skeletons and desiccated banana peels, Oscar leering nearby from his can, and a brown, fuzzy blob sitting on a table. At first I thought it might be a complete Muppet, until I saw, a few yards beyond, a matching brown, fuzzy, headless body. As the archivist Karen Falk began to lead me on a tour of the workshop—drawers of googly eyes, noses, and 'special facial hair'; filing cabinets for 'fur' and 'slippery sleezy'; a stack of banker's boxes, one marked 'Grover,' another 'Boober'—I looked back, briefly, to catch the bulbous nose and round eyes of Junior Gorg from Fraggle Rock staring at me, or perhaps at his own body, waiting to be reunited. 'There are only three Snuffleupagi in the world,' Falk told me, gesturing toward a puppet near the entrance that she said was kind of an extra, deployed when Snuffleupagus needs a family member on set next to him. I reached out to give Snuffy's relation a little pet—his soft brown fur, curly and dense like a poodle's, was overlain with orange feathers—and scribbled a note: 'remarkably lifelike.' For a what? I later asked myself. For a giant woolly mammoth cum anteater puppet? But the space made it easy to slip across the human-Muppet divide and into Henson's world, where the realness of the puppets is sacrosanct. When I asked to take a picture of the decapitated Junior Gorg, just for my notes, Falk looked at me as if I'd asked to check under Miss Piggy's dress. 'We don't allow photos of things like that, Muppets without heads,' she tutted, and ushered me to another part of the workshop, where a handful of archival boxes had been set aside for me. After a great loss, some people find themselves communing with nature, at the seaside or deep in a forest. Others turn to spirituality, toward a temple or church. Me? I'd come to grieve with the Muppets. My father, Marshall, amassed many accolades over the course of his career—a gold record for playing bluegrass banjo on the Deliverance soundtrack; an Oscar for co-writing the script of Annie Hall; a Tony nomination for Best Book for the musical Jersey Boys, which won Best Musical in 2006 (and an Olivier Award, too)—but way cooler to me, as a kid, was the fact that for a brief stint, long before I was born, he'd been part of Henson's crew. For much of my life, I knew little about the specifics. I do remember one time being feverish and crying for a Kermit doll after a doctor's appointment, even though, despite Dad's involvement in the show, I can't remember ever watching any Muppets, or even Sesame Street, at home. The local toy store was all sold out, so Dad called in a favor, and we headed to the old Muppet offices on the Upper East Side to pick one up. While we were waiting, I watched, slack-jawed, as puppet makers working on a new creation pulled googly eyes out of thin drawers, one after another, a fever dream come to life and branded in my memory like a surrealist madeleine. After that, the Muppets all but receded from my life. That changed after my father got sick last year, when my daily life became not just a logistical mire—managing therapy appointments, speaking with doctors—but also one of constant dread: about which Dad I'd find when I walked into his room each day, his personality somehow refracted, as if I were looking at it through a prism; about whether a middle-of-the-night phone call might signify an Earth-tilting inflection point; about how devastating it was going to be to navigate the world without the beloved father I'd always looked up to. At the end of each day, like any well-adjusted individual faced with looming, profound change, I chose to run screaming as far away from reality as I could, which is how I ended up in the arms of the 1970s Muppets. I had no grand plan. I simply gravitated toward their fluffiness and goofiness as an antidote to grief. I sensed—rightly, it turned out—that they'd help keep me afloat. Dad and Henson first connected through Al Gottesman, Henson's longtime lawyer. Their mutual affinity makes total sense to me, even a generation later. They were born three years apart and grew up delighting in Kukla, Fran and Ollie, and Walt Kelly's Pogo comic strip. They shared an off-kilter sense of humor and a reverence for the silly. Although I can't remember ever seeing Dad with a puppet on his hand, when I was growing up he would put on elaborate bedtime shows for my sister and me, starring our menagerie of stuffed animals. Using a pair of needle-nose pliers from his tool case—a bulky, black-leather valise full of primary-colored screwdrivers I liked to play with, a relic from his days attending Brooklyn Technical High School to appease his practical immigrant father—he made pince-nez out of a paper clip for my plush dachshund, Ollirina, a feisty Southern grande dame who propelled herself around by farting (my contribution); he then had her perform miraculous acts of levitation. Dad's tried-and-true finale: shooting my Ping-Pong-ball-sized plush hedgehog through a toilet-paper-roll cannon as I drumrolled on my lap. Looking back on this now that I'm a parent of three young children, I marvel that he could summon this level of creativity after dinnertime. For a few months in the mid-'70s, Dad helped Henson write a failed Broadway Muppets revue, and what would become the pilot of The Muppet Show, called 'Sex and Violence With the Muppets'—Henson's attempt to establish the Muppets as not just for kids. Dad is listed as head writer on the script, in which Nigel, Sam the Eagle, and a few other Muppets put together a 'Seven Deadly Sins' pageant to determine which sin is the most deadly. Although the final show evolved from the pilot—Kermit replaced Nigel as the emcee; a human guest star was added—you can see from the script that its style was already developed, as was its tone: equal parts outlandish and sophisticated, countercultural, never talking down to the audience. Sloth arrives, of course, during the closing credits, too late to participate. One stage direction reads, simply, 'Chaos in progress.' The script established the framework with which Henson would go on to parody a vaudeville show from all angles—the divas (Piggy), the technical malfunctions (Crazy Harry, blowing up sets left and right), the well-meaning guy trying to hold the whole ball of crazy together (Kermit). My father's contributions are impossible to disentangle from the general Muppetness of the script—collaborations work, he always told me, because they are collaborative—save for one: Despite being Brooklyn born and bred, with not a Nordic bone in his body, he is, by many accounts, the source of the Swedish Chef's accent and nonsense lexicon, the one typified by 'Hurdy, gurdy, gurdy, bork bork bork!' The character had originated with Henson in the '60s. Back then, he'd been German. For reasons lost to Muppetdom, at some point the character moved northwest, to a place with more centralized health care. And he needed an accent to match. I loved listening to Dad parody foreign languages. He liked to throw off telemarketers by answering the phone as a hard-of-hearing woman from some indeterminate Latin American country, or as an eccentric Central European man, characterized by a sibilant, Peter Sellers–as–Strangelove delivery that would typically escalate into a shriek and send the person on the other end skedaddling to their next call. So I was not surprised to learn that, decades earlier, Dad had apparently reduced the Henson puppeteer Frank Oz to tears by mimicking languages during brainstorming sessions. He later made an ersatz-Swedish tape for Henson to listen to on his commute into the city from his home in Bedford. 'He would drive to work trying to make a chicken sandwich in mock Swedish or make a turkey casserole in mock Swedish,' Henson's son Brian told Jim's biographer, remembering having heard my dad's tape. 'It was the most ridiculous thing you had ever seen, and people at traffic lights used to stop and sort of look at him a little crazy.' All of this I learned from books, from interviews with Muppet staffers, and by emailing Falk, the Henson archivist. But the bulk of my embedding in Muppetdom over the past year involved watching The Muppet Show with my husband and three kids on weekend evenings, our world cocooned between the real, live present and a completely nonsensical 1970s. I'd slice up some apples and we'd cackle together as Rita Moreno flung a noodly Muppet man around set in a particularly violent tango; as Zero Mostel, only mildly indignant that a Muppet was eating him during his cold open, helped wash down his own arm with a little water; as Gene Kelly taught Kermit to tap-dance on the piano. Given what I'd learned, was it a cosmic sign that my youngest, just 3 years old, started to develop an obsession with the Swedish Chef? He took to running around the apartment, crowing his bastardized version of the Chef's already bastardized Swedish and then, mimicking his new Nordic hero, flinging into the air whatever he had handy. Sometimes it was a stuffed animal; other times it was hard objects, which would necessitate a stern lecture (after my husband and I had taken cover) about the dangers of throwing things up, because they tend to come down, even if the Chef's flapjacks do not. After my son got a Swedish Chef action-figure set that included a small chicken and a handful of cooking tools, he would sit on the ground, brow furrowed in concentration, making the cleaver-wielding chef hop after the chicken—or sometimes, in keeping with Muppet sensibility, vice versa. My daughters became obsessed with 'Pigs in Space,' a recurring Muppet sketch parodying Star Trek and other space operas of the 1960s and '70s. They erupted in cheers whenever the USS Swinetrek flew across the screen, indicating that the sketch was back again. The setup is that three pigs are flying through the cosmos—Captain Link Hogthrob, Dr. Julius Strangepork, and Miss Piggy as first mate—and … nothing really happens. John Cleese shows up as a pirate and tries to make a call from a payphone on the ship, while his parrot, who is in love with him, gripes that Cleese is neglecting her and should take her to dinner with all his doubloons. The ship is invaded by two alien beings, who turn out to be the Swedish Chef and his chicken, and after they leave, the pigs get bored. When the USS Swinetrek nears the end of the universe, where its crew will finally discover the meaning and purpose of life, the dinner bell rings, and the pigs get sidetracked. Miss Piggy is routinely degraded, asked by the boars to do the laundry or make more swill, though the audience understands that she's smarter and tougher than her male co-stars. According to Oz, Miss Piggy's puppeteer, her toughness was hard-won. In multiple interviews, he has spoken about his need to understand the complete biographies of the characters he portrayed, even if viewers don't share that need. In Oz's mind, Miss Piggy was born on a farm, loved her father very much, and was grief-stricken when he died in a tractor accident. As her mother's subsequent suitors turned their attention to Miss Piggy, a single path forward emerged: to leave. She was later forced to do some things she wasn't proud of as she clawed her way to diva-dom, including appearing in a bacon commercial. Does any of that come through the screen as she floats around in outer space? I suppose that, for some viewers, it does—that having a deep understanding of Miss Piggy's character somehow enabled Oz and the other puppeteers to present her simulated world as real enough that the audience would jump into it with her, feetfirst, willingly suspending disbelief. Or maybe that's not why it works. 'It's just so weird,' my third grader said to me one night, with a snort. 'Like, why are there even pigs in space?' I didn't experience what others warned me I might, after the months of decline that led to Dad's death late last year: picking up the phone to call him and forgetting that there would be no one on the other end, looking up from the sidewalk at the window where he worked for decades, expecting to see the light on and being knocked sideways that it was dark. I never forgot. I never expected the light to be on. But occasionally, I'd find myself dropping from one reality straight through to another, something most likely aided by my living just eight blocks from where I grew up. My neighborhood is saturated with memories spanning my whole life. Passing a street corner, I would suddenly reverse-age four decades and see Dad's belt buckle sliding along my tricycle's handlebars, because I was so hot and sweaty and tired that I simply couldn't pedal one more inch, and he was pulling me around that corner, home. I'd be running the Lower Loop in Central Park, where we used to take our daily afternoon walks, and I'd pass a busker playing the fiddle and have to stop, hands on knees, to catch my breath, remembering the Flatt and Scruggs Dad played through his computer speakers. These temporal shifts through eras were uncontrolled, unexpected, all-encompassing. My scrim between reality and memory, truth and simulation, had become porous, faulty. Like the Swedish Chef, who starts making a turtle soup only to find that the turtle has woken up and is trying to escape, my reality was pitched, slightly, on its axis. The first time one of these temporal shifts through eras, one of these free falls from today back to childhood, happened was a few nights after the burial. My husband, kids, and I gathered, the children freshly showered and damp-haired, and put on the Muppets, as we'd done, at that point, for months. The episode featured Señor Wences, the ventriloquist whose main act involved Johnny, a boy made from Wences's hand, on which he stuck two googly eyes, and on top of which he draped a ridiculous orange wig. His other star performers were a bespectacled chicken named Cecilia (Wences: 'Second name?'; Cecilia: 'Chicken') and Pedro, a surly talking head (literally just a head, not an MSNBC type) who, after a train accident that decapitated the poor puppet, spent his life, disembodied, in a box. The episode's conceit was that Kermit has decided to do something new: a puppet show! 'It's a complete change of pace, folks,' he said to cheers. 'Yes, it's a real first!' Toward the end, Wences held up an egg and asked Cecilia Chicken to identify it. As she replied, softly and directly, 'My son' (rhymes with moan), a memory of childhood weekend breakfasts welled up from deep in my subconscious, collapsing time just as the puppets on-screen were collapsing their simulation. I saw the kitchen table, the oval wooden one my father had waxed by hand until it shone. I felt its slight stickiness beneath my hands. And by the stove was Dad, apron halved and tied around his waist, holding up an egg reverently, sighing, lovingly pronouncing it 'my son!' in Salamancan-inflected English, then cracking it, with a flourish, into a cast-iron skillet. He used to do that with eggs. I'd completely forgotten. For a moment, I stayed there at the kitchen table, giggling. I stayed with the feeling of being closer to my children's age than middle age; closer to those evenings spent cross-legged and damp-haired myself, watching my dad turn stuffed animals into performers; closer still to a moment years before my birth, when, across town at the Henson studios, in a healthy body with long legs kicked up on the desk in front of him, my dad held a bulky tape recorder to his mouth, paused, then started up for the first time in ersatz Swedish, the beginning of a thread that would reach out, decades later, and tether him to me.
USA Today
04-08-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Connections hints, clues and answers on Monday, August 4 2025
WARNING: THERE ARE CONNECTIONS SPOILERS AHEAD! DO NOT READ FURTHER IF YOU DON'T WANT THE AUGUST 4, 2025 NYT CONNECTIONS ANSWER SPOILED FOR YOU. Ready? OK! Have you been playing Connections, the super fun word game from the New York Times that has people sharing those multi-colored squares on social media like they did with Wordle? It's pretty fun and sometimes very challenging, so we're here to help you out with some clues and the answer for the four categories that you need to know: 1. Bugs. 2. Think about what a famous Muppet sings. 3. Think bark. 4. Think alphabet, sort of. The answers are below this photo: 1. Arthropods 2. [Letter] (is) for ____ 3. Trees 4. Words that sound like two letters Play more word games Looking for more word games?
The Herald Scotland
21-07-2025
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
Epstein backlash is souring Trump's winning streak
Answer: Jeffrey Epstein. After continuing to amass unprecedented power in the White House, steamrolling a compliant Congress and being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by world leaders more eager to flatter than confront him, Trump finds himself flummoxed by the case of a disgraced financier who died in a jail cell six years ago. Epstein's ghost is beginning to haunt the White House. The very tools that helped win Trump two terms - the openness to conspiracy, the distrust of elites, the eruption of a viral moment - have now turned to bedevil him. In this case, the assertion this month by the Justice Department and the FBI that the Epstein case was over and done with was met by derision and disbelief among some of the president's most loyal supporters. After all, such influential MAGA voices as Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon had been insisting for years that Epstein's suicide was suspicious and his powerful associates hidden. A week ago, Trump told his supporters to "not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about." He followed up by denouncing his supporters who were upset with the case as "weaklings" who had "bought into this bulls***, hook, line and sinker." Those instructions didn't sway many in his political base. Then he directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to release the investigation's grand-jury testimony, a step that can only be ordered by a judge. Now Trump has filed a lawsuit for libel and slander against the Wall Street Journal, its publisher, two of its reporters, and News Corp founder and former friend Rupert Murdoch. At issue is its story that Trump sent a "bawdy" 50th-birthday letter to Epstein in 2003, decorated with a crude drawing of a woman's naked body that used his distinctive signature to suggest pubic hair. More: Trump: Epstein grand jury records unlikely to satisfy critics "Happy Birthday - and may every day be another wonderful secret," it reportedly said. Trump called the article "false" and demanded damages "not to be less than $10 billion." But he acknowledged on the social-media platform Truth Social that the release of grand-jury testimony isn't likely to settle things. [N]othing will be good enough for the troublemakers and radical left lunatics making the request," he railed. "It will always be more, more, more. MAGA!" A furor that swamps Medicaid cuts and Elmo's future A purported "Epstein client list" and the dark suspicion that powerful people are being protected has created a political firestorm stronger than the prospect of cutting an estimated 12 million people off Medicaid or the proposal to end federal funding for Elmo. The cuts in health care for the poor were part of the "Big Beautiful Bill" that Congress passed July 3 -, extending Trump's first-term tax cuts, increasing spending on border security and slashing funds for Medicaid, food stamps and green energy. On Friday, July 18, Congress approved $9 billion in spending cuts in foreign aid and public broadcasting, Muppets included. The so-called recission package deleted funding Congress had previously approved and reflected the Capitol's voluntary retreat from its constitutional power to decide how tax money should be spent. In the past, the tactic has rarely succeeded. In the future, the White House budget office said more such cuts would be on their way. But that consequential debate got less ink and fueled less furor than the Epstein saga. Trump's attempt to convince Americans that there is nothing to see here is likely to be an uphill battle. In a Reuters/Ipsos Poll, 69% of Americans said they thought the federal government was hiding details about Epstein's clients. Only 6% said information wasn't being hidden. The rest weren't sure. The poll, taken July 15-16, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3% for all adults and 6% for subgroups. Those who see a conspiracy afoot included a 55% majority of Republicans. Only about a third of those in the GOP, 35%, approved of how Trump is handling the issue. Overall, just 17% approved, his lowest rating on any issue. The long lifespans of conspiracy theories One lesson of Trump's political career is this: Once you've persuaded people there's fire behind the smoke, it's hard to convince them that the air has been cleared. When Barack Obama ran for the White House in 2008, Trump repeated debunked allegations that the Illinois senator had been born in Kenya and wasn't eligible to be elected president. After Obama had served two terms in the White House, a Morning Consult poll found a third of Republicans still believed that falsehood. Since the 2020 election that Trump lost, he has repeated disproven allegations that the election was rigged against him. When the 2024 campaign was getting underway, a CNN poll found that 69% of Republicans and those who "leaned" to the GOP believed Joe Biden's win wasn't legitimate, that the election had been stolen. And Epstein? Welcome or not, he may be sticking around for a while.
