I think he was mostly just busy directing other shows. He directed most of Party Down as well as a bunch of Modern Family, 2 Broke Girls and Garfunkel and Oates episodes and one or two episodes on about a dozen other shows. He seems to have a pretty nice second career being a go-to guy for directing sitcoms.

The corny procedural parody stuff is kind of easy, but there were a couple of small, really well observed bits that, along with the joke Molly mentioned ("Couldn't sleep." "It's 8:30.") give me hope that this could be a really fun show.

The best is when a movie decides to make someone an illustrator or painter and they're only ever shown kind of slightly touching up a 99% finished drawing

Don't even get me started on Rounders!

It seems like they could easily fix it with a single line of ADR saying that the he's simply too far away from any liquid water to make getting some a possibility.

As Erik Adams said in his series review, the Denise puppet is "upsettingly inexpressive," which is a good way to put it I think. Her face doesn't really emote at all.

Bobo the Bear is the floor producer, making him Scott Adsit (or "Pete Hornberger").

True, and previously there was almost always an extra layer of meta-detachment from the violence. In The Muppet Show it was generally part of a theatrical performance. In The Muppet Movie, the characters are watching themselves perform in a movie. In The Great Muppet Caper and Muppet Christmas Carol, they again…

True. Although I'd say it's non-canon in that it's basically just a series of Christmas carol singalongs strung together with the barest possible plot. And Gonzo's barely in it.

Yeah, I agree. It would have been more interesting if it was a female frog or maybe a human actress. The Denise character is so unlikable (she refers to herself in the third person, for fuck's sake) that it's kind of a foregone conclusion what the outcome of the "triangle" will be.

I think the answer is that Kermit is/was Jim Henson. Kermit played the same roll the we imagine Henson played, corralling all these creative weirdos into actually producing something entertaining.

Gonzo is the best. I have a theory that all the best Muppets stuff uses the characterization of Gonzo as a pretentious daredevil performance artist, while the weaker stuff uses him as a straight man. Here's hoping this show proves to be the exception! (Or they quickly change the way he's used.)

As a longtime Muppet fan, I was pretty pleasantly surprised. There were a couple sour notes, as the review mentioned, and I wouldn't mind if we just never see Denise again, but overall it seems to be about the best version of a 2015 Muppets TV series that we could realistically expect.

Yeah, I think the people that hate Skylar are the ones who wanted to see Walt as just a super cool badass and didn't like it when the show stayed somewhat tethered to reality in that his involvement with manufacturing drugs broke up his family instead of them just being complicit in it.

It's right up there with "I LIKE TO MASTURBATE WHILE PEOPLE ARE WAITING FOR PIE TO COOL!"

What part of Netflix putting a video on Youtube with the date in it makes it an "exclusive" for the A.V. Club?

Yeah, I mean, isn't there a scene in the "Better Call Saul" episode of Breaking Bad where Jesse informs Walter of who Saul is? In my memory it's pretty explicit that Walt doesn't know Saul before that.

I feel like saying "I'll see you later" or "I love you" is fair enough, but yeah there's a huge number of instances of movie phone calls that end super abruptly, which always take me out of the movie.

Not at all in my experience, it's strictly a weird idiosyncrasy of movies and TV that people never use greetings or closings.

Yeah, they're there, but the game doesn't actually track whether you've gotten them or not. In the GBA version it does, and they added dragon coins to the fortresses and various other levels that didn't have them in the original SNES version.