Why can’t The Walt Disney Company make the Muppets work? Like, really work? Why do we keep getting TV shows and specials that fail to find an audience? Sporadic nostalgia plays that never quite hit the mark?

These are funny questions to ask when the solution has been staring Disney in the face since before the company even acquired the Muppets characters in 2004. It’s a Disney-produced Muppet movie made after Jim Henson’s death, and it returns every year like clockwork, as the Muppets of the past hold up a complete template for how to revive the franchise.

We need to ask ourselves: Why haven’t we already made half a dozen more movies like The Muppet Christmas Carol?

It’s worth saying that Disney’s not dumb, exactly, for not being able to figure out the Muppets. They’re simply a really weird concept, as filmmaking goes.

For one thing, puppetry both has a bunch of really specific demands and logistics, which is easy to miss, because the art form also involves hiding all those logistics. A Muppet production requires a set of performers, crafters, and staff that can handle all the typical needs of a soundstage production, plus bespoke costuming, and all of it is on a movable stage resting 4 feet off the ground. Not to mention the custom props, the trick camera work, and everything else that goes into, say, a talking frog playing a banjo on a log surrounded by water. The classic Muppet movies were a blockbuster special effects flick effort to make an all-ages musical resting on a brand that hasn’t ever really been a four-quadrant success.

Disney’s current strategy shows a pattern of taking the characters to smaller, frugal television productions — and intermittent ones at that. The classic Muppet films of the ’80s and ’90s were built on the collective talent of a close-knit group of screenwriters, songwriters, performers, and production crew that had already been producing TV puppeteering in the Muppet fashion for nearly a decade before tackling their first feature-length film.

So the first thing Disney needs to do is rebuild that talent pool, supporting the old guard while allowing fresh blood to get notches on their belts. It needs to give those folks consistent work, which means it needs to give them successful work. In order to get around what’s difficult about the Muppets, Disney needs to solve for what it finds most difficult: earnest and honest self-awareness.

The Disney brand is not built to make media that earnestly reflects on media — especially media that metatextually reflects on itself. The Disney Princesses can be on a lunchbox together, but god forbid they make eye contact. And the Muppets are nothing without metatextuality. Miss Piggy is a character, sure. But she’s also an actor who — in The Muppet Christmas Carol, for example — is playing the part of Mrs. Cratchit, when she’s not looking directly into the camera and mugging.

In fact, she’s actually a puppeteer pretending to be a talking pig who is pretending to be a character. The kayfabe of the........

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