Once, it seemed like “The Soup” (E!, 10 p.m.) would be ever-flowing.
“With the expansion of cable and the number of channels available, as far as reality goes it’s a cornucopia,” 11 year host Joel McHale once told me. “It never stops. It’s a river. As far as pop-culture stories, that will never stop, it’s one of those things. Some weeks are better than others, but there is always one or two dynamite clips.”
And yet, the snarkfest comes to an end tonight, with a special one hour episode.
The show that had its roots as “Talk Soup” with Greg Kinnear, has been a model for modern TV clip shows, in which a host makes fun of the crazier things that have happened on TV that week. McHale has been host for a dozen years, fitting it in while playing five seasons of “Community” and appearances in various movies. It’s a surprise, if anything, that McHale has lasted as long as he has, considering his success in other fields.
But instead of passing the show off to someone else, E! has chosen to close it down (making one think McHale had done one too many jokes on the Kardashians, the network’s overstuffed golden geese).
But, he told me in that interview in 2010, “Nobody from a reality show that we’ve ever had on has been upset with me. Anybody I’ve ever run into with a reality show has said, ‘Keep going, I would like to be on the show.’ Kind of like: Any press is good press.”
The show ends tonight ends with a look at its favorite bits, including the spagettii-eating cat, the mankini, and with any luck, the woman on “Maury” who railed against a girlfriend who lured away her man with chicken tetrazzini.
The official list of guests on tonight’s send-off is a long one, with Adam Scott, Danny Pudi, Donald Faison, Eric Idle, Gillian Jacobs, Haley Joel Osment, James Van Der Beek, Jim Rash, Jon Cryer, Kate Flannery, Ken Jeong, Larry King, Lou Diamond Phillips, Nathan Fillion, Paul Feig, Rich Sommer, Rob Huebel, Rob Riggle, Seth Green, Timothy Omundson, Wendi McLendon-Covey, and more.
But does the end of “The Soup” mean the end of snark? Hardly.