Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
In today’s content-obsessed climate, everyone gets their own talk show and every old TV series is awarded a reboot. Check your card, TV fans. If you have Murphy Brown, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Roswell, Magnum PI, and MacGyver, then you just secured REBOOT Bingo! Your prize? You get to revive ABC’s Step by Step, which I’m sure will be fantastic because you’ll be putting it together for the second tiiiiime around.
Timely Step by Step theme song references aside, the staggering amount of incoming pop culture content can be overwhelming. You can’t watch everything, which is why Netflix’s new pop culture week in review series The Joel McHale Show with Joel McHale is the perfect talk show for the Peak TV era. If you have yet to stream the premiere episode of this weekly gem, it’s kinda similar to Joel McHale’s old E! series The Soup in that it is exactly like Joel McHale’s old E! series The Soup, which is a good thing.
After cult favorite Talk Soup presented its final Clip of the Week in 2002 (John Henson-4-ever), McHale’s iteration of the series, rebranded The Soup, debuted in 2004. The show delighted in skewing the pop culture insanity of the week with a fun mix of acerbic gusto and self-deprecating charm. The perfect combination of snark and affability, Joel McHale was the ideal person to lead this irreverent brand of caustic comedy. But after more than a decade of Kathie Lee Gifford jokes, the series ended in 2015, which was unfortunate.
By my math, there were somewhere between 55-65 TV shows in 2015. In 2018, that number has ballooned to over 7 billion.* Simply put, we need The Soup, err… I mean Netflix’s Joel McHale Show, more than ever.
*numbers not approximate
As Sean L. McCarthy notes in his review of the series, McHale’s not only reunited with his old Soup production team, but comedy virtuoso Paul Feig makes an appearance in front of and behind the camera during Episode 1. Featuring a hodgepodge of celebrity guests (Kevin Hart, a few of Joel’s former Community castmates, everyone who’s ever appeared on a Netflix series), the series is a necessary timesaver for pop culture obsessives.
Poking fun at shows you love (The Bachelor), programs you had no idea existed (Picker & Ben), and viral clips too bananas not to mock, McHale provides viewers with a comical CliffsNotes of the week that was with a trenchant wit and relatable “what the fuck is going on here?” exasperation.
Plus, sometimes Jason Priestley pops by to plug his Canadian TV series Private Eyes, an actual show in which he portrays an ex-hockey player turned P.I. named Matt Shade.
Once again, his character’s name is Matt Shade.
Let me save you the trip to Google:
Jason Priestley height in feet: 5’8″
Joel McHale’s height: 6’4″
Call the show whatever you’d like. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and if you put Joel McHale in front of a green screen next to a clip of The Bachelor, I’m going to watch the hell out of it.
Nobody has the time to consume heaps of garbage television anymore. Thankfully, the literal heroes behind the scenes of The Joel McHale Non-Soup Show are back to deliver an immensely enjoyable half-hour of television that recaps all the absurdity you missed while binging the latest reboot de jour.
