After nearly 50 years, “The Muppet Show” returns, “back [says Kermit, your amphibian compere] on the very stage where it all started and then ended and then is maybe starting again depending on how tonight goes.”

Premiering Wednesday on ABC and Disney+, this is apparently that rare thing in 21st century dealmaking and green-lighting, a pilot submitted for your approval. (Though it’s not quite a pilot, either, being the possible start of the series, which originally ran from 1976 to 1981, or its 121st episode.) Pop singer comedienne Sabrina Carpenter is the guest star, a most appropriate choice.

There has been in the interim the question of what to do next with these characters, most of whom (apart from Kermit and Rowlf, the piano-playing dog, who were already celebrities) first saw life in “The Muppet Show.” As a confirmed Muppethead, I greet every new series or film with a weather eye, especially the post-Henson Disney-produced projects, including the 2020 “Muppets Now” and the 2023 “Muppets Mayhem.” But apart from ABC’s misbegotten “The Muppets,” 10 years gone — which attempted to make the crew darker, more adult, more psychological complex — I have been largely satisfied and often delighted. (Muppets may be nuanced, but they aren’t complex. They are eternally simply themselves, grasped in a minute. Nor does time wither them, being made of foam and fleece.)

An episodic arc involves the show being overbooked (many familiar Muppets crowd in backstage, including the “mna mna” monsters), and acts having to be cut. (Among them is Seth Rogen, who will have a grumbling joke about the inclusion of an “armadillo in a tutu … that guy’s not even canon.”) Apart from that, and notwithstanding a few cosmetic alterations — cinematic effects, a wider aspect ratio, music video tropes in the “Blinding Lights” number (performed by Rizzo and other rats), a (mostly) human audience, including Maya Rudolph, doing a bit — it’s an ordinary episode, the familiar backstage variety-show comedy, with its sketches, musical numbers and mayhem in the wings, all to the good.

Miss Piggy is in full diva flight, naturally, soaking up praise from Carpenter in her dressing room while threatening to sue her for stealing her look; grunting “talent walking” as she pushes by the Swedish Chef on the backstage balcony; demanding a Trojan horse and hundreds of Spartans for her “Aphrodite” number. (I must say it was a joy to see that set recreated.) She’ll star in “Pigs in Wigs,” a sort of “Bridgerton” parody, with Pepé the King Prawn scene stealing. We get a Muppet Labs sketch and the Great Gonzo in a stunt gone wrong. (Things going wrong is an essential aspect of “The Muppet Show.”) Statler and Waldorf are back in their box (perhaps they never left), making hacky jokes as insulting commentary. (Waldorf: “Show’s not half bad.” Statler: “Yeah, it’s all bad.”)

Carpenter, who will twice say that being there is a dream come true, performs her own “Manchild” as a waitress in a Western roadhouse (Sam the Eagle behind the bar), dispatching some troublesome monsters and dancing with chickens, and the Dolly Parton-Kenny Rogers “Islands in the Stream” in a swamp among performing fish, alligators and flowers. It begins as a duet with Kermit, playing his left-handed banjo, and ends with Miss Piggy, who muscles her way in, anxious for screen time after her Aphrodite number is cut.

The overbooking conundrum builds to a sentimental speech from Kermit and a feel-good ending set to Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now.” Sentiment is consistent with the Muppets gestalt, but not really part of “The Muppet Show.” But I will excuse it, and hope they return with more.

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'THE MUPPET SHOW'

How to watch: 9 p.m. ET Feb. 4 on ABC (and streaming on Disney+/Hulu)

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