Why Do Puppets Matter?

By the time Shari Lewis charmed a generation with Lamb Chop’s Play-Along in the 1990s, her career had already spanned four decades, three network cycles, and an entire shift in what TV thought it was supposed to be. And yet, the new documentary Shari & Lamb Chop behaves as if it’s enough to stitch together vintage clips and shout “She was great!” without ever explaining how she got there, whether she mattered, or why puppets were ever of significance.

It’s not that Lewis doesn’t deserve a glowing retrospective. She was a television pioneer, a gifted ventriloquist (back when ventriloquism was still a viable showbiz path), and a relentless performer who could juggle comedy, song, choreography, and character work — often all at once. But Shari & Lamb Chop treats her legacy as self-evident, leaning hard on hagiography while skating over the much weirder, more interesting question: Why was a woman talking to a sock puppet such a compelling figure in 20th-century American television?

This new film from Lisa D’Apolito (Emmy-nominated producer and director of Love, Gilda) offers no historical context for why puppetry boomed in the early days of TV — or why it faded. When Lewis began her career in the 1950s, TV was so new that there was no concept of “children’s programming.” Puppetry, imported from vaudeville and live theater, was a default family-friendly solution. And before editing tech made ventriloquism optional, learning to throw your voice was still considered a necessary skill. These are crucial insights if you want to understand why someone like Shari Lewis existed. Shari & Lamb Chop offers only: “Her dad taught her puppets.”

Meanwhile, the documentary spends far too much time on Lewis’s personal life — including her husband’s late stage New Age infidelities — and far too little on the institutional and technological changes that shaped her career. Her testimony before Congress in the 1980s, during the fight to keep PBS funded, is reduced to a novelty clip. The film doesn’t ask why PBS was suddenly a battleground, or what it meant that puppets were now defending public television’s value.

This is especially raw in the season that the Republicans are not only defunding Lamb Chop and Elmo but are gouging back money that the U.S. people have already promised to the beloved puppets.

Lewis, for her part, was a showbiz survivor. When Hollywood decided it didn’t want puppets anymore, she adapted — dancing with full-sized ones, producing her own specials, doing whatever it took. That resilience gets some screen time here, but the film still frames her as a curious eccentric, rather than a versatile artist navigating (and embodying) TV’s shifting priorities.

Crucially, Lewis doesn’t make sense to us. She didn’t have a brand in the modern sense. She didn’t stand for an idea — she did things. Her celebrity was rooted in performance, not personality — she was an adult comic for a while! That’s part of what makes Lamb Chop’s Play-Along such a strange and fascinating artifact. Made in the early ’90s for PBS, it arrived just before children’s television became a domain of global branding. The show wasn’t passive or soothing. It was active, interactive, a loop of call-and-response and soft chaos. Lewis didn’t want kids to sit still. She wanted them to sing along.

The documentary only brushes against this — the shift from participatory media like Lamb Chop to the branded sedation of Teletubbies, which premiered just after Lewis’s death. Puppets as Lewis (and Jim Henson) knew them, weren’t just cute. They were a complicated, analog technology for getting kids to pay attention and think. They were a way of sneaking something human into the screen.

In the realm of nostalgia docs, Shari & Lamb Chop lands well below entries like Butterfly in the Sky, which understood that the concept behind Reading Rainbow was what made it revolutionary — not just the charisma of LeVar Burton. With Lewis, the doc never quite asks: Why bring back a Captain Kangaroo-style show in the 1990s? What cultural void was she filling? Why did we stop making space for that kind of slow, craft-driven children’s media?

To its credit, the film has deep archival gems and a few Muppet-world interviewees who recognize Lewis’s legacy. But when it brings in someone like Ken Levine (yes, of M*A*S*H) for commentary, it’s hard not to feel like even the documentary is unsure what kind of legacy it’s curating.

There’s a missed opportunity here — to treat Shari Lewis not just as a nostalgic footnote, but as a prism through which we could examine how media for children got here, and what it lost along the way. Because when The Song That Never Ends loops, it’s not just a joke. It’s a subtle lesson in rhythm, structure, and attention span — the kind of thing that matters when your medium is more than a brand.

Instead, Shari & Lamb Chop leaves us with a scrapbook and a highlight reel. Sweet, sure. But the story deserves more.