Each episode, McHale presented a variety of clips from the week in bad TV, covering everything from morning news segments to the latest episode of The Bachelor, season -insert number from 5 to 19 here-. The Soup ran for 12 seasons, from 2004 to 2015, and then E! cancelled it, completing their transformation into the fully garbage network they always aspired to be.
If you’re like me, you watched The Soup enough that you can probably still hear the sound bites from the show’s recurring segments in your head (sooooo meaty, etc). Luckily, The Joel McHale Show on Netflix is just like The Soup, except it’s not on network television anymore so Joel and all of his guests can curse as much as they want to. So far, some of the complaints about this show have been that it’s too much of the same (see Paste’s review, ‘The Joel McHale Show Suffers from Its Insistence on Formula’), but I’m here to argue that its willingness to stay the same is exactly what makes it so damn enjoyable.
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