The Soup has become one of those nifty little pleasures of cable TV for me recently. To say that it's a guilty pleasure might be a little hard to say, as it is basically just a summary of all of the weird, crazy, delirious, whatever-you-call-it, and plain bad and near offensive TV of the past week. So to say it's a guilty pleasure would mean that it's sort of wrong on a level to watch the show, hard to admit. But the whole program is like a full-on pop culture version with a little more goofiness of what the Daily Show does in its first eight or nine minutes of reviewing clips. It's satire, though of a fairly low denomination where very cheap graphics, sometimes lame jokes, and lots of tongue placed in as many firm cheeks as possible end up squeezing out jokes. It's hosted by Joel McHale in a very smarmy, sarcastic manner, but he makes it work for what it's worth, and one becomes sort of adjusted to what his shtick is after a while.
Ironically, McHale has his work cut out for him, because the clips are sometimes very funny on their own, without really a word or gesture or gag to add to it. Reality Show clip-time, Chat Stew ("so meaty"), What the Kids Are Watching, and Clip of the Week are among the regulars, and in this dire swamp of pop culture and other TV- sometimes stretching to international lengths with Spanish soap operas and inexplicable Japanese shows- is never-ending. If anything as time goes on, there's almost too much to choose from. There are new categories created each week by McHale and his writers, two of them being funny by themselves in just having no other choice but to make fun of where the Soup itself broadcasts from- the E network (Lets Take Some E! is one new segment, as well as a whole list of those un-Godly tabloid TV shows like E.T. and Access Hollywood). It's basically a fun way to spend half an hour on a Friday night or Saturday morning, and as someone who doesn't really watch much TV and tries, sometimes without success, to avoid bad TV even when it's ironically good or horrific celebrities and people on reality shows I shouldn't give a damn about, it's a great little treat.
