Fraggle Rock is back as Apple TV+ quarantine fodder—so here’s our fan-fiction

Enlarge / They're back! (credit: Apple TV+ / The Jim Henson Company)

You may have noticed news of delays, cancellations, and general scrambling from most major TV and film production companies over the past few months. Today, Apple TV+ showed up with a surprise bit of good pandemic-timed news: a classic Muppet series' return, built from the ground up to function within the constraints of stay-in-place orders across the world.

Fraggle Rock, a Jim Henson TV series that ran on HBO in the United States through the 1980s, has returned as a Muppets-in-Zoom concept. The new series, titled Fraggle Rock: Rock On!, will premiere a new five-minute "mini-sode" every Tuesday for the foreseeable future, and it sees familiar characters like Red, Gobo, and Mokey teleconference with each other. In the Fraggle universe, this is enabled by the series' Doozer characters creating a series of "Doozertubes" to connect citizens in their natural, underground habitat.

How the first episode of Fraggle Rock: Rock On! looks in action. (credit: Apple TV+ / The Jim Henson Company)

In real life, meanwhile, Apple is advertising the fact that every Muppeteer and contributor is filming their sequences with iPhone 11 handsets while abiding by stay-in-place orders across the globe, though Apple hasn't clarified anything else about the series' production pipeline (not even a mention of Final Cut Pro). The first attempt is a sweet-and-chipper statement of purpose, complete with the distant-but-connected Fraggles joining together to sing a song (something that's not necessarily easy to coordinate via shared Internet video feeds).

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