“The Soup,” E!’s weekly clip-and-comment show that rounds up the horrors and highlights of reality television and incisively scorches our celeb-obsessed culture, served its last bowl of snark on Friday night. (“Sooo meaty!”) The network rather abruptly announced “The Soup’s” cancellation in November, after 11 years in its current incarnation with host Joel McHale — and much longer if you trace its beginnings back to the debut of “Talk Soup” in 1991.
The original intent of “Talk Soup” was to make hay (and perhaps some sense) of what seemed at the time to be a surfeit of syndicated TV talk shows. Thanks to Geraldo Rivera, Oprah Winfrey, Morton Downey Jr., Sally Jesse Raphael, Jerry Springer, Judge Wapner and countless, forgotten others, audiences had found new ways to wallow in the mud of other people’s problems, scandals, misdeeds, fringe opinions and outrages.
First hosted by Greg Kinnear (and later by John Henson, Hal Sparks and Aisha Tyler), “Talk Soup” offered a humorous and somewhat satisfying reassurance that someone else — someone as smart or smarter than yourself — had noticed that the talk shows had grown more bellicose and absurd.
