Kelly Lyon has loved The Muppets since her formative days. Now, her work on their return to television may net her a second Emmy award.

Lyon, a Portland-based film editor, has been nominated for Outstanding Picture Editing for Variety Programming for her work on “The Muppet Show,” an ABC special which aired in February of this year starring Sabrina Carpenter, Seth Rogen and Maya Rudolph alongside Jim Henson’s legendary cast of puppet characters. This marks Lyon’s fourth career nomination and her third year in a row being nominated for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ flagship award.

Lyon was recruited to the job by director Alex Timbers, with whom she had previously worked on a pair of comedian John Mulaney’s stand-up specials.

“We have a great working relationship. I’m like his go-to editor,” Lyon said of Timbers. “I’ve loved the Muppet Show since I was basically a baby, I was also terrified and nervous because it’s such a beloved franchise. The classic Muppet Show was so meaningful to me, like growing up, and helped shape my understanding of what comedy is.”

That fear almost kept her off the project, along with a scheduling conflict. Timbers, however, was determined.

“I’m just gonna send you the script. Don’t tell anyone. I want you to read it and then make your decision,” Lyon recalled Timbers telling her. “When I read the script, I started crying. I was like so moved, and it was so funny. It was so good.”

Lyon has been editing film since her high school days at TV10 in Farmington Hills, Mich., a public access station with a rare-for-its-time advanced editing suite.

“I just fell in love with it,” she said. “My teacher was very encouraging. I was like, ‘This is fun. That’s not like a real job.’ He said, ‘No, editor is a real job, and not a lot of women do it. You should go out to Hollywood and show them what you can do.’”

Lyon studied film editing at the University of Michigan, interning at MTV, but ended up bypassing Hollywood for New York and a job at “Saturday Night Live.” She later moved across the country to the Portland area, where she lives with her husband.

Comedy comes naturally to Lyon.

“My family is funny. My dad is always telling jokes. We always connected through comedy. We watched silly stuff growing up, like “Pee Wee’s Playhouse” and Weird Al,” Lyon said. “I interned at MTV, and I thought I wanted to edit music videos and make things that were cool and stylish. Comedy wasn’t necessarily my original goal, but it was something that I inadvertently had been naturally training for my whole life by living in the house of funny people and constantly connecting with others through humor.”

Thus, she knows a good script when she reads it – which is exactly what she had in her hands when Timbers sent her the script to “The Muppet Show.”

“Something like this could easily just feel stale or rehashing or like there’s nothing fresh about it, and the script felt like they had modernized the show in the perfect way, where the where the changes were almost invisible,” Lyon said. “It just felt like a natural continuation of where these characters would be 50 years later. So, I felt, as the editor, that it was my job to not get in the way of that of that beautiful script that was that was written, and to just be able to deliver the comedy in its strongest form to the audience.”

Though none of Henson’s cast of characters are outwardly Jewish, Lyon said there’s an essence of Yiddishkeit in the troop.

The Muppets have sort of that vaudeville sensibility that I think is inherent in the history of Jewish comedy. My great grandparents performed on the Yiddish stage and were involved in vaudeville acts in Cincinnati,” she said. “I think Jews and being funny kind of go hand in hand over time, and the Muppets do feel like that old school vaudeville sensibility in a way.”

Lyon won an Emmy award in 2024 for Netflix’s “John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in L.A.;” she was also nominated that year for Amazon’s “Tig Notaro: Hello Again.” She was nominated again in 2025 for “Bill Burr: Drop Dead Years,” which aired on Hulu.

“The Muppet Show” received five other Emmy nominations for Outstanding Variety Special (Pre-Recorded), Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance, Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special, Outstanding Production Design for a Variety Special and Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Variety Series of Special.

The Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards will be presented Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 5-6, at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles.

PHOTO: Courtesy Kelly Lyon