EW Shares First Look At New Series "The Muppets Mayhem"

We are learning more about the upcoming new series, The Muppets Mayhem, which pushes Kermit and the usual gang aside in favor of a focus on the house band, Dr. Teeth and The Electric Mayhem, thanks to a first look over at EW.

What’s Happening:

The Muppets Mayhem is set to debut on Disney+ later this year, pushing Kermit, Miss Piggy, and the rest of the usual more familiar Muppet characters aside for a new series based on Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, the house band of the Muppets.
Thanks to EW, we are getting more information about the new series, created by Muppets veteran Bill Barretta, Jeff Yorkes, and Adam F. Goldberg, who previously wrote The Muppets Wizard of Oz.
The Muppets Mayhem centers on Nora (Lilly Singh), an aspiring record producer, who with the help of her social media influencer sister, Hannah (Saara Chaudry), and Electric Mayhem super-fan, Gary "Moog" Moogowski (Tahj Mowry), embark on helping the band record their first-ever album.

Bill Baretta shares that the series was inspired by a set played at The Outside Lands music festival in 2016, developing the idea for a show about the band because in terms of the Muppets storytelling, we don’t know that much about them. Coincidentally, Goldberg and Yorkes had been thinking about a show about the band for years prior, since The Electric Mayhem are typically relegated to side performers, and the ability to tell a small story about them in lieu of more common Muppet fare which features hundreds of characters retelling familiar stories, like A Christmas Carol or Treasure Island.
The series also focuses on music, channeling the late, great, creator of the Muppets, Jim Henson. Reportedly, audiences can expect a lot of clashing of styles of today and the ‘70s jam band vibes of Dr. Teeth and The Electric Mayhem.

Yorkes told EW, “They're definitely from a different era. The conceit of the show is bringing this old school band to the modern age and way of making music. That's the comedy of it. They're a group of characters that have no real goals or ambitions. Whatever you want to do, they roll with it. So, when you have a character that's really determined to get them to do something, that's also the comedy of the show. It's Type A wrestling with Type, I would even say, C."
As such, the show will feature “an epic soundtrack,” with covers of songs populating the first half of the 10 episode season.
Like any Muppets project, cameos are promised, but don’t expect a full Muppet onslaught. Goldberg tells EW, “We are telling a regular story in the real world with Muppets. So we tried to ground everything and keep it realistic as opposed to all of a sudden there's talking fruit in your fridge." Beretta adds, "It's not Muppet-heavy and it's not human-heavy, which is a difficult thing to do with the Muppets. You want to keep everybody interested. The Muppets have fun little beats and punchlines and good comedy and sight gags, but the storytelling [is key]. What's really helped is to have some humans who are truly connected and have real conflict with them — conflicts that they experience together and separately and with each other."
The series will also find heart when it dives into the family history and complicated relationship between Nora and her sister, Hannah.
The group promises that The Muppets Mayhem won’t look like any Muppet story that has come before, but no official premiere date or further details are available at this time.