The Jim Henson Company is working on a new adventure series that will team Walking Dead star Norman Reedus with Brian and Wendy Froud. Intended for a family audience, the primetime adventure series, will feature an entirely new universe of creatures created by the Frouds.
“Norman Reedus, the Frouds and the Jim Henson Company coming together to create a show is the mashup of my dreams,” said president of TV at The Jim Henson Company, Halle Stanford. “Norman is an artist, and when I suggested to him, what if we create a series with the Frounds together that explores his love of magical creatures, he was so excited.”
Reedus calls that “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.”
“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,” she adds. “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.”
Stanford also talked to Variety about other Henson projects including Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock, Harriet the Spy, Word Party, and The Dark Crystal: The Age of Resistance.
“I just definitely felt the world needed more Fraggles. We needed more hope right now in the world,” says Stanford, who has clocked nearly 25 years at the company via various stints there. “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.
“It feels so true to Fraggle Rock as it’s made by fans,” she adds. “They were very aware of how we had to transform it for a modern-day audience, not just with the topics we’re talking about, but the sophistication of comedy, the way that it’s filmed, making it exciting.”
Even though Netflix canceled The Dark Crystal: The Age of Resistance, Stanford hasn’t given up on figuring out a new way into that franchise.
“We are nimble, we are resilient. We are ready to jump. The minute anyone would like to jump back into Thra, it is a world that we will continue to build on and think about,” she added that the Henson Company is eager to expand further into family-oriented primetime fare in fantasy and science fiction.
