‘The Muppet Show’ set to return with Seth Rogen and Sabrina Carpenter

Hello there. Welcome to the Friday edition of Popculturology.

Are you reading today’s newsletter on a brand new iPhone? I’m sticking with my iPhone 15 Pro until next year since the potential iPhold intrigues me. (It’s either going to be a fun piece of tech or a great class action lawsuit.) If you’re upgrading this weekend, which iPhone did you go with? Is it also wrong to admit that Liquid Glass has already kind of grown on me?

ABC “indefinitely” taking Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air is a huge, fast-moving story, so I’m going to leave that coverage to other sites for now. Who knows what could happen between when I scheduled this edition of Popculturology on Thursday night and it hitting your inboxes this morning.

Should I drop a hundred bucks on this Darkwing Duck costume? Not for Halloween. Just to wear on a daily basis.

Did the Hot Ones/Popeyes collab make me go full Conan?

Popeyes rolled out its partnership with Hot Ones this week. I have the full rundown of the collaboration over at Snackology. And, yes, the woman who handed me my bag of food warned me about The Last Dab.

Snackology Review: This is Snackology, and you’re eating the ‘Hot Ones’ and Popeyes menu

Are you ready to channel Sean Evans and add The Last Dab to your Chicken Dippers?

The OmnicosmBill Kuchman

Book nook

Here’s what I’ve been reading this week …

• Timeline (Michael Crichton)
• Fugitive Telemetry (Martha Wells)
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)

After reading some fantastic books about time travel this year — Jinwoo Chong’s Flux, Kate Mascarenhas’ The Psychology of Time Travel and Nicholas Binge’s Dissolution — I picked up Michael Crichton’s Timeline assuming I was in for another great book about time travel. Someone should’ve warned me that it’s actually just a book about castles ...

NEWS, NOTES & TRAILERS

Light the lights

It’s wild that we live in a world where the Muppets are a major franchise. There should be movies. TV shows. A hub on Disney+ collecting all of their content. A Muppet Family Christmas should be available on streaming in its full glory instead of existing as a bootleg on YouTube.

While the Muppets became stars thanks to The Muppet Show during its original 1976 to 1981 run, success on TV has been hard to come by in recent years. There were a couple seasons of Muppets Tonight during the late 1980s, the disjointed The Muppets on ABC in the mid-2010s and the already canceled The Muppets Mayhem on Disney+ in 2023.

We’re going to get another shot at putting the Muppets on TV, though, with Seth Rogen serving as an executive producer on a The Muppet Show special set for Disney+ in 2026. Sabrina Carpenter joins Rogen as an executive producer in addition to starring in the special.