Something is brewing over at the Jim Henson company, and Norman Reedus is involved. The Walking Dead star has been hired by the company to make a new adventure series! This news comes to us from Variety.
This will be a different approach for Reedus. While the actor has a history of acting with, against, and fleeing from monsters, this time he’s teaming up to create them! Also in the creative seats, he’s teaming up with none other than Brian and Wendy Froud. The duo have history working with Henson Studios, going back as far as the 80s when they helped develop The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. They’ve since teamed up again to bring The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance to life. This new show, however, will take place in an entirely new world. Halle Stanford, president of TV at The Jim Henson Company, had this to say with Variety.
“Norman Reedus, the Frouds and the Jim Henson Company coming together to create a show is the mashup of my dreams! Norman is an artist, and when I suggested to him, what if we create a series with the Frouds together that explores his love of magical creatures, he was so excited.”
It’s always a treat to see Henson bringing puppets back to television. The company, along with the Frouds, brought us back to Thra in 2019 with Netflix’s The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. The show earned high ratings from critics and fans alike, as well as snagging the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Children’s Program. Sadly, the series was canceled after only one season. Despite that, Henson is still keeping their hopes up for that franchise, as Stanford had this to say.
“We are nimble, we are resilient. We are ready to jump. The minute anyone would like to jump back into Thra [“The Dark Crystal” planet setting], it is a world that we will continue to build on and think about.”
In January of this year, Henson also premiered Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock on Apple TV+. The show served as a reboot of the original 80s fantasy musical series. The season currently holds a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and was praised by fans new and old.
“I just definitely felt the world needed more Fraggles. We needed more hope right now in the world. We did a lot of talking to kids and teachers and parents, and we came up with a lot of topics that you can see them in the show. A lot having to do with science, and talking about sustainability, social justice and repairing problems that we create. We have a lot of conversation about identity. We discovered there’s a lot of anxiety in children.”
The Norman Reedus, Jim Henson Company Team-Up Will Put the 'Punk' Back in 'Hope Punk'
Stanford went on to tell Variety that Henson is very excited to branch into more family-oriented primetime projects that dwell in the realms of fantasy and science fiction. Stanford describes the direction as “hope punk”, and uses it to describe the Reedus project.
“We want to make hope cool! it is an urban fantasy. It will be a magical world. But I feel like Norman is going to help us bring the ‘punk’ back in ‘hope punk.’ I also think that people kind of like that punk in Henson’s legacy. The Muppets were the underdogs, our [‘Labyrinth’] Goblin King with David Bowie was so cool… When you say ‘Jim Henson,’ it invokes something in people. So I’m hoping those that felt inspired by him, like Norman Reedus, will look to us as a new home to create these types of stories that are transformative and entertaining, and having something to say, but also wanting to kind of push the medium of television.”
It's always wonderful to hear such eager and exciting words from a studio with such a legacy behind it. The words bring back thoughts of Henson himself and his desire to push the boundaries of both puppetry as an art form and television as a medium. Even though streaming has taken over the market for TV, there are still plenty of walls to knock down. It’s a delight to hear that the folks behind the company carry on the spirit of its founder. And it seems like Reedus feels that same energy, as he says to Variety about his new team-up with the Frouds.
“[Excited is] an understatement. They are masters in the fantasy world-building space. I mean, a show about goblins, trolls and otherworldly creatures? There’s nobody in the universe better suited for that than the Henson Company.”