[Editor’s note: The following contains some spoilers for The Muppets Mayhem.]The Disney+ series The Muppets Mayhem follows The Electric Mayhem Band – made up of Dr. Teeth, Floyd Pepper, Janice, Zoot, Lips and Animal – on their journey to finally recording their first-ever studio album, with help and guidance from Nora (Lilly Singh), a driven but underappreciated music executive at their record label. Since making their debut as the house band for The Muppet Show, they’ve won over the hearts of adoring fans everywhere, from super fan Moog (Tahj Mowry) to a wide variety of music superstars from every genre, and they will undoubtedly continue to do so, one music track at a time.
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During this interview with Collider, show co-creators Bill Barretta (who also brings Dr. Teeth to life), Adam F. Goldberg and Jeff Yorkes talked about why it was time to explore The Electric Mayhem Band more deeply, why the tone of this series is perfect for the times that we’re living in, how the band backstories evolved, the creation of Zoot’s shoe, why they kept the Muppet cameos to a minimum, developing the human characters, and how the original songs came about.

Collider: Why this show? Why is now the right time to do a TV show about The Electric Mayhem Band? With so many Muppets to choose from, why was now the right time to focus on them?

ADAM F. GOLDBERG: The main reason is Jeff [Yorkes]. I met Jeff in college. We bonded over our love of Muppets. We go way back, just being longtime Muppets super fans. For Jeff and I, they’re iconic. They’re all super cool. There’s no one cooler. They define cool, in the Muppet world. And also, it’s kind of a blank canvas. You don’t know where they’re from. You don’t know how they met. You don’t really know much about them. In the case of Lips, he hasn’t even said much in the Muppet canon. So, for Jeff and I, it was such a simple and organic way for us to dip our toe in what we think is a really important IP. Frankly, I would be intimidated to write for Gonzo and Kermit. This was just the perfect thing for Jeff and I to introduce ourselves into this world because it really is a world. We got to know the performers and we got to see production. It was small in scale, in terms of having a smaller bench of these famous characters, and that was more than enough for our first outing. Bill [Barretta] comes from the performer side, being Dr. Teeth, and he just saw the potential.

BILL BARRETTA: Over the years, as with any of the characters, we’re always messing around in between takes and we’re always finding things with the characters, to see if there’s something new. There was always that feeling with the band, even on the last series. They were in this band shell, and a lot of funny stuff would happen that never makes it on the air. We did find some interesting things with them, a little bit. They had their own space on that show. They had a psychedelic space, but we really didn’t go too far with them. I just always thought that it would be a fun thing to try to do something with them. And then, we did this concert at Outside Lands that was just such a great experience and people showed up for it. I thought, “Well, maybe there’s something there. Maybe we should be exploring these guys further.” And so, I created a pitch for Muppet Studio, but little did I know that Jeff and Adam were creating a similar idea with a different theme to the show, which was much better than what I was thinking. Muppet Studios, who are very smart people, brought us together and we wanted to do more with them.

JEFF YORKES: There’s also something about the times that we’re living in. It’s very divisive, and here you have this group of outcasts, misfits and weirdos, who just fit so well together and just make the most of it and always seem to have a good time. They’re literally a rainbow. They’re just this happy group that wants to bring joy to the world, and that seemed like something that might be nice to have in these times.

I love that this show also gives us the opportunity to get some backstories and some character origins. We learn a lot about the band as individual Muppets. Did some members of the band just more easily lend themselves to expanded mythology while it’s fun to keep others a little bit mysterious? Did you have freedom to figure out how you wanted to explore them and who you wanted to explore?

BARRETTA: Freedom, to the extent that we have the freedom to begin creating and bringing ideas. Ultimately, Muppet Studios has their input and their thoughts about whether we need to be careful, what we’re gonna do, and whether we wanna go in a certain direction. In general, each character comes with a certain attitude that they’ve had, over the years. This was really an amazing opportunity to go further and to try things and to talk through ideas, to see if something would work for a character, or if it was too much. We had to figure out how much we wanted to do with Zoot. He’s always been very limited in speech and comprehension, so it was fun to find that he’s just living in his own surreal bubble, all the time. We explored that even further, to have him with his shoe. Dave Goelz (the puppeteer for Zoot) came to me one day and said, “I have this idea that Zoot has this little character with him.” I was like, “Dave, that might be hard to do, all the time. Is there something else that maybe he has on him?” And he came back with this idea of doing a shoe named Jimmy, and Jimmy is Jim Henson. Dave found photos of Jim’s teeth because he wanted the shoe to be able to smile. Those are Jim’s teeth and he carved them himself. He went home and made this character because he was so dedicated to the surreal aspect of what he wanted to do with Zoot. And everybody brought great ideas and things, but he just went like far and above what we expected

GOLDBERG: For Jeff and I, in the beginning, when we approached doing the show, our first pitch was to Bill. We just presented backstories, and some of those backstories are actually in the show, like the Dr. Teeth backstory. Bill was like, “I don’t know if you know this, but he’s from New Orleans.” So, Bill was able to help us craft our crazy ideas. And then, there were other ones, like we had a whole Zoot backstory, which we still might, but once we started working on that with Bill, we chucked what we had and came up with something entirely new. So, we do have all those backstories. Our first impulse was, with every episode, we should learn a different backstory about each Muppet. Ultimately, we were like, “Let’s just assume we have a couple of seasons.” This season, we focused a little bit on Animal and Dr. Teeth and Floyd, and we hinted a little at Janice. That way, in future seasons, we can go to this well of information that we came up with, for where these Muppets came from, in an organic way, and fold it into future seasons. So, we really do know where all of them came from, but we just focused on specific band members for this season.

BARRETTA: One thing we realized, once we got together and started working on this, was that the band, for a long time, moved as one emotion. They were all on the same page. For whatever they’ve been used in, they were all together in how they felt about something. So, we started to go, “How do they feel separately? Does Floyd really feel the same way that Animal does? No way! Does Dr. Teeth feel like Zoot? No.” And so, we started to then find the individual’s perspective, and not the group’s perspective. That really opened things up for us to have some fun.

Image via Disney+

I noticed that, in this season, you kept the Muppet cameos to a minimum. Was that intentional? Do you want to bring more of them in, in the future?

YORKES: If they work. I got some good advice that was, “Don’t give the audience what they want, give them what they didn’t know they want,” in terms of the cameos. We wanted to make this a show about The Electric Mayhem. It was a conscious effort not to include the other Muppet characters. Even when we started to discuss things like, “Well, they’re stuck at the side of the road. Are they picked up by Kermit and the gang, and brought to the gig?” No, that just felt like betraying our concept. They band had to figure it out. It felt like too much of a focus pull or distraction. But it’s nice when you see them. I don’t think we’ve ruled out anybody appearing in future seasons.

GOLDBERG: Iron Man was the first Marvel movie. That started that cinematic universe. They started small. And then, from there, it branched down and started getting interconnected, and now it’s this giant, massive family web. So, for Jeff, Bill and I, we’re hoping this is the start of specials and movies and other series, where it could all start being interconnected to a Muppet-verse. We just wanted to start small. For Jeff and I, being guests in this world that’s been around for 50 years, small was good. We wanted to focus on the band members and flesh them out, and really have the audience hopefully get engaged in these characters. That way, we could then go back to Disney and say, “This one worked. Now, let’s do this.” So, yeah, it was a conscious choice to really just focus on the band and have the audience fall in love with this band.

YORKES: If we could do that, then we could do it with others.

I’m always good with more Muppets in the world. How did you figure out what kind of humans you wanted to bring in, to interact with The Muppets?

BARRETTA: Something I’ve learned, over the years, is that the more real humans are around The Muppets, the more we buy into the situation, and actually the funnier the humans are because we can put ourselves in their place. When actors are trying to match the level or the fantastical characters that The Muppets are, you’re just laying back and enjoying it. But we wanted people to lean in and want to know who these people are. My thing on set was just to always keep it real. The comedy was there on the page. It’s very funny. But you can’t play the comedy. You just have to be in that moment. That helps a lot with Muppets is, grounding our human characters, and they’re all amazing. Tahj [Mowry], Lilly [Singh] and Saara [Chaudry], are just really great. And Anders [Holm] was hysterical. Every day, I was just blown away by what they brought to the show.

YORKES: From a story point, we have this band who’s just generally just “go with the flow,” so you need a character to want to push them and want to get them to do things, which in this case is to make an album. We just needed that contrast. That was really fun for us, to figure out who was gonna be the one to try to get them to do this thing. That led to our show, essentially.

Image via Disney+

How challenging was it to come up with original music to represent this band? Did you have a specific sound in mind, for how you wanted the original songs to be done?

BARRETTA: It was tricky because we also needed “the Moog sound,” for when Moog starts to produce the band. Before then, the band is like, “Well, maybe that sound isn’t us.” And Nora is going, “You need to be come into the future.” It was always about, “Well, what is the Moog sound, exactly?” It took us a while to find what that was and how that would be applied to original songs. There were several people, including Linda [Perry], involved with writing these originals, and they did an amazing job. It was very collaborative. They were certainly open to us doing notes. Jeff would talk to Linda about lyrics.

YORKES: I co-wrote a song with Linda Perry.

BARRETTA: That was just a great thing, to be able to play with these people. Some people had been writing music for The Muppets for a long time, so they got the flavor already. They knew how the band works and where it feels right. It’s always tricky with originals because we’re not professionals. We’re not really rock ‘n’ roll stars, we’re just faking it. We’re just hoping that we can bring something to the songs.

YORKES: It was definitely a daunting task because you’re making The Electric Mayhem’s first album, and it’s got to be worthy of The Electric Mayhem. You have the sound that’s there, which we always compared to “Can You Picture That,” which is the best Mayhem song. It’s gotta feel like a Mayhem song, but it also has to tell or comment or relate to our story and stand up on its own as a great song. I hope we did that. I like all our songs.

The Muppets Mayhem is available to stream at Disney+.