Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Soup’ Is Back On E! With A New Host, But We Miss Joel McHale’s Snark

It’s hard to believe it’s been over four years since E! cancelled The Soup. It had run in various iterations, first as Talk Soup then The Soup, from 1991 to 2015. Joel McHale’s version ran for 11 years. So to bring it back, without McHale’s presence, sounds like it would be a good way for E! to revive its franchise show for a new set of viewers. But is it still relevant, much less funny?

THE SOUP: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: After the standard opening montage of goofy reality show, internet video, and other scenes, the first new episode of The Soup in over 4 years starts with new host Jade Catta-Preta talking about how she watches the hundreds of hours of clips that are boiled down into one episode. “Who needs friends and a life when you’ve got TV, TikTok and a box of wine?”

The Gist: This is more or less the same Soup that ran from 2004-15 with Joel McHale as host. Remember that it was a callback to Talk Soup, which was hosted by Greg Kinnear, John Henson, Hal Sparks and Aisha Tyler, except that the shows McHale made fun of was expanded from daytime talk to reality shows and the burgeoning internet video trend. There was also a studio audience, and McHale and the show’s writers came up with a number of fun recurring characters.

So, this show is in that spirit; Catta-Preta, a stand-up comic and actress, presents clips from various reality shows, YouTube videos, court shows, and a scripted show or two. There’s an audience, who react to the jokes Catta-Preta makes to set up the clip, then the jokes she uses after a funny clip plays. There are categories of clips, and then the Clip Of The Week.

What clips did we see this week? A Real Housewives clip, of course; that’s SOP for this show; a clip from Spy Games, some YouTube clips, a typically crazy rescue setup from 9-1-1: Lone Star (two women get in a fistfight at a strip club), and, of course, a scene from The Bachelor. There’s also a news item about a Florida man (isn’t that always the case?) who was caught with a bag full of drugs that had the words “A Bag Full Of Drugs” printed on it. We also saw a shout-out to McHale, as Catta-Preta calls the show a “reimagining” instead of a “reboot.”

Our Take: We give this critique with the caveat that this is Catta-Preta’s first time hosting The Soup, and we hope she’ll be given some time to perfect a persona, a schitck, and even a few characters. With that being said, though, we detected something in Catta-Preta’s clip set-ups and post-clip jokes that makes this version of The Soup completely different: a complete lack of disdain for what she’s seeing.

That was McHale’s calling card (still is), and his deadpan cracks about the clips had more than enough snarky edge to give you the nod that you’re not the only one who thinks these shows are ridiculous.

Catta-Preta, who in interviews has said that shows like Talk Soup and The Soup helped her learn English when she moved to the U.S. from Brazil when she was 12, has a reverence for the shows that she’s making fun of that takes all the edge out of her jokes. She has mentioned in those interviews that many of the shows’ past hosts “looked down” on the clips, and, as a fan of reality TV and other genres, she wants to “look up.” But the problem is that reverence means she won’t be willing to go to the point where she’ll really eviscerate a show for being fake or promoting families who really don’t deserve the attention or even making fun of the entire “being famous for being famous” culture that has developed over the past 20 years.

Instead, Catta-Preta has no problem doing things like impressions of a Bachelor contestant who will be reality-show-famous for about five minutes. She’s also nudging the audience at home and saying, “We know this stuff is the phoniest stuff, but isn’t it fun to watch?” That’s a way to go, of course, but when the clips are funnier than the set-ups and post-clip jokes, that’s a problem. We don’t want to tune into The Soup for lame jokes about the host’s dating life or jokes with butter-knife edges. The show is about funny clips and the even funnier host. Let’s hope that Catta-Preta and the show’s writers find the sweet spot that makes her comments as or more funny than the clips while keeping her desire to be less “salty” than previous hosts.

Sex and Skin: Besides a YouTube clip where the host’s father (or could be grandfather) reads a card that asks if he’s done any “butt stuff,” and a clip from Sistas where a guys says he likes to have his prostate tickled… wait, that’s actually plenty of Sex and Skin.

Parting Shot: The Clip Of The Week is from “the 75th season of Grey’s Anatomy,” one of the few lines that actually made us smile.

Sleeper Star: We like Catta-Preta, don’t get us wrong. She just needs to take a few more chances.

Most Pilot-y Line: Here’s an example of a clip being funnier than the joke afterwards: From the Australian version of Love At First Sight, a woman talks about how her husband had a “terrible accident,” then there’s a pregnant pause, and she says “he tripped and fell into my co-worker’s vagina, and he’s been stuck there ever since.” Funny, right? So then why go lame and respond with “Someone go get him! He must be running out of oxygen by now!” Catta-Preta and the show’s writers should have a rule that if what you come up with isn’t as clever as what we see in the clip then just move on to something else.

Our Call: STREAM IT if you like watching reality and internet clips and making fun of them with a wink and a nod. SKIP IT if you’re expecting the same kind of snark you saw during Joel McHale’s run.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream The Soup At EOnline.com