Pop culture today is bursting with
so many guilty pleasure possibilities that it’s impossible to indulge in as
many as you’d like without abandoning your job and other responsibilities, like
showering. It’s necessary for the serious pop culture observer to keep up,
however, not just with the Kardashians but with the whole fascinating, lurid
tapestry of it, partly for fun and partly to gauge just how quickly that
handbasket with civilization in it is going to Hell. For such aficionados-on-the-go
like myself, I’ve found that the most efficient way to get a weekly recap of
pop culture is to tune in every Wednesday to E! Entertainment’s The Soup
and get a feel for what I’m missing (or not, as the case may be.)
The half-hour show delivers
a loopy roundup of television
highlights (lowlights, actually) of
the past week – the most outrageous, ludicrous moments from the lowest
common denominator of pop entertainment, from the unreality of reality shows,
to the bombast of Mexican telenovelas,
to the manufactured melodrama of singing competitions. Host/comedian Joel McHale adds his (mostly)
scripted, snarky commentary
to the clips, and a small (and very likely loaded) live audience laughs and hoots
along.
I’ve been a fan from the show’s
humble beginnings in the early ‘90s when it was known as Talk Soup, hosted at the time by Greg Kinnear, who has since gone
on to be an Oscar-nominated actor. Talk
Soup gave subsequent hosts a career launch as well, such as Hal Sparks, who moved on to star
in Showtimes’s Queer as Folk, and Aisha Tyler, now the voice of
curvy superspy Lana Caine in the raunchy, animated series Archer.
Talk Soup ended in 2002 and
reappeared in 2004 as the revamped The
Soup, hosted by McHale, whose own career has taken off in TV and film.
Perhaps the biggest appeal of The Soup, apart from the laughs it
provides and the diversion from the weighty problems of the world, is the same simple
appeal offered by the very shows it ridicules: after wading through this
collection of the dregs of pop culture each week, it’s just a relief and a
comfort to have one’s normalcy confirmed. At least my family’s not like Honey
Boo Boo’s, you can tell yourself. At least my life isn’t a circus like
Lindsay Lohan’s. It’s a healthy antidote to the flip side of a pop culture obsession
– celebrity-worship and the yearning for fame.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 11/23/12)
