Earth to Ned is going to be, quite honestly, another attempt at making good on a puppet show that will double as a talk show that is meant to give Disney+ and the Jim Henson Company another crack at bringing something that might delight children and even reach out to adults. Ned is a blue-skinned alien that came to earth ahead of an invasion but fell in love with pop culture and in order to do his own thing went underground so to speak and started hosting a show on which live celebrities will be appearing. It does have a sense of being kind of unique though it still feels as though it clings to many familiar elements that we might have seen before. In a way it almost sound as though it took a note from Space Ghost Coast to Coast and molded that in with the regular talk show experience to make things a little more convincing. Since the Muppets revival kind of went belly up this show as Joey Paur of GeekTyrant reminds us this seems like another chance for Disney+ to make use of the Jim Henson Company and give people a little something to be amused by. It’s definitely new, that much is obvious, but we’ll have to wait and see just how accepted it will be by the viewers.
I’ll say this for the show thus far, it does have the benefit of being something new and not entirely recycled, so there’s a chance that it could be accepted as something different and unique by the people that have been wanting to see innovation being used in a forward manner. It is kind of a silly idea in a way but it also has at least some charm since if you look past the whole alien hosting a talk show idea you get the feeling of an individual trying to break off from what’s expected of him and attempting to do what he feels is his calling instead. That might seem a little deep for what’s bound to be more of a kid and family-friendly show but it does seem to be, in part, what the show is about. And honestly it is forward-thinking even if it’s inviting something so new in a character no one has seen before. In fact that might be the one thing that kills it or keeps people from really connecting with it at first if at all, since the known and formulaic material that Disney is going to be parading onto their streaming network. People have become comfortable with various shows and movies that follow what Disney has been pushing for a while now, and when anything new comes along it runs the risk of being pushed to the side simply because it doesn’t follow what they’ve already known or is a little too far out of their experience and is therefore seen as a bit too strange.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that this show WON’T do well, it’s simply a reality that has to be faced and overcome. From a personal standpoint this show looks like an oddball idea but it also seems as though it might be willing to challenge people just enough to get them to open their minds to something different and possibly give it a chance. The new streaming network is going to have to have a wide array of shows and movies just to survive the streaming wars after all and anything and everything that can be paraded out needs to be given the kind of exposure that it requires to get to as many viewers as possible. Disney, for all that I and many others will continue to criticize it, has been a money-making machine for quite some time and has come up with more successes than failures, so thinking that this show will just go by the wayside would be folly since quite honestly it could become something that might gain the attention of a lot of people and therefore become another puppet sensation that might do just fine. Disney has made good use of such props in the past and it could be that this will be one show among the many that people will enjoy.
It will be kind of interesting to see if the show will be given enough back story or perhaps a segment to show Ned’s development, how he came to earth, and so on and so forth to really flesh it out for people instead of just showing a big blue alien behind a desk waiting on his guests to arrive and talking about pop culture. It would almost seem necessary to add this in since otherwise people might not feel quite as comfortable tuning in. But we’ll have to wait and see what comes, eleven days and counting. Ethan Anderton of SlashFilm has more to say on this matter.
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