Remote Hog

The Soup
7:30 tonight
E!

This is one of those shows you automatically discount because . . . well, first of all, you automatically discount it because it is on E!, and you automatically discount anything on E! (How could they let Joan and Melissa get away! And then Tara! You beasts!) Next, you automatically discount The Soup because its predecessor, called Talk Soup, degraded so much over the years, it became the programming equivalent of a tea bag that's been dipped in hot water 1,368 times. And, let's be honest, during its Greg Kinnear heyday, it wasn't that funny anyway. Oh, sure, it'd elicit a random chuckle, a nasally guffaw, but that act eventually got so old so fast that the host had to up and leave to, uh, what's Kinnear doing now? Selling homeowners insurance? Right. And so we now have The Soup, and it was fixin' to be royally ignored here, but then some folks reported it's a hoot, and then I heard host Joel McHale on a radio show and his deadpan delivery cracked me up. (His bio calls him “one of the whitest and most depressed television hosts around.”) One thing the The Soup does is go beyond showing you clips from all those wretched TV talk shows, essentially winking at the audience while saying, “ain't those inbreds funny.” No, no, The Soup now goes after the wretched hosts—something unheard of in the ol' Talk Soup days. For instance, Tyra Banks comes in for regular bitch slappings because, Christ, have you seen her show? She's a trainwreck, hot as hell, but a trainwreck. (If she becomes female Gen Y's Oprah, God take pity on the bastards who marry those chicks.) The other thing The Soup does is expand beyond talk shows to all that wretched reality crap and wretched bad TV movies and wretched everything else that causes you and your friends to hurl stale popcorn at the flat screen. Just consider Joel the Joel to your Servo and Crow and mock away crazy diamonds.

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