Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter:

I’m not going to tell you that this Muppet Show, with a 30-minute running time sans commercials, is my Muppet Show platonic ideal. Too many of the punchlines feel like first-draft jokes in desperate need of refinement, but I can fully buy that the Muppets (whom I’m treating as real people for purposes of this review) might be comedically rusty after having not participated in the variety format since the ’90s offshoot Muppets Tonight, which was basically The Muppet Show with a different name.

This is not The Muppet Show at its best, but it’s a return to what the Muppets do best.

Like every variety show, some acts are great, some go amusingly off the rails, and some leave you befuddled. This special had all three, but was still undeniably The Muppet Show as I remember it.

On Sabrina Carpenter:

For the special, the producers have landed a perfect host in Sabrina Carpenter, a multi-hyphenate talent who checks all of the boxes established for one version of an exemplary Muppet companion. She can sing and dance, and she generates a comic sensibility that’s at once childlike and wise. That means she’s capable of interacting with the Muppets as a peer, embracing their zaniness with appreciative wonder, and as a more mature adult with a different definition of “kink” from what Kermit expects.

Fienberg concludes:

The important thing is that The Muppet Show feels generally right — including in its demographic-spanning comic aim, with enough double entendre and insinuation for the grown-ups and mayhem for the kids. It could all be refined and adjusted and expanded, and I would be somewhat disappointed if this turned out to be the show’s top gear, but it proves conclusively that what worked in the ’70s and a bit in the ’90s can absolutely still work today.

I hope it worked well enough for Disney, because we could all use some zany, madcap relief. To quote my friend Tim: “Need this every week. Forever.”