In April, Apple resurrected The Jim Henson Company’s Fraggle Rock as a series of weekly shorts, with each episode being filmed at the homes of the cast and crew on [unnamed smart phones] as they observe social distancing guidelines (we don’t want to turn this into an ad, so you’ll have to figure out what kind of phones they used for yourself). That new series, subtitled Rock On!, involved the familiar Fraggle characters separated in their individual caves and finding new ways to stay connected, and it seems like it must have been a big hit for Apple’s still relatively new streaming platform because it’s now being expanded into a proper Fraggle Rock revival—with actual new episodes and everything.
A press release from Apple bills this as a “reboot,” but it will have the original main characters (Gobo, Red, Boober, Mokey, Wembley, and Uncle Traveling Matt are specifically named) and will have “the same spirit as the classic.” The Jim Henson Company is involved, of course, with New Girl and American Dad vets Matt Fusfeld and Alex Cuthbertson serving as showrunners and writers. Dave Goelz and Karen Prell, who played some of the characters on the original version of the show, are “also attached,” but the press release doesn’t specifically say what they’ll be doing. Seeing as how this is a more traditional take on the project that wouldn’t necessarily require everyone to film at home on [unnamed smart phones], we’d guess that this won’t properly go into production until it’s safer to make normal TV again. The press release doesn’t say, though, so maybe they’ll find a way to make it work sooner than that.