It's hard not to like Joel McHale. The towering actor/comedian is incredibly articulate yet doesn't take himself seriously, so after only a few minutes with him, you find yourself fascinated by his thoughts, even if those thoughts revolve around Hollywood socialite Kim Kardashian.
"Kim Kardashian doesn't like it when you mention that she has a sex tape. And that's why she’s famous in the first place!” says McHale during a meal at Toronto's Azure restaurant. "It's like, you filmed yourself having sex. It wasn't like this was a stolen tape or that this was something done behind your back. Well, OK, literally, it kinda was behind her back for a little of it...”
This, of course, is what makes McHale the perfect host of The Soup, the E! network's pop culture response to The Daily Show. Each episode features McHale in front of a green screen, tearing into the week's most ridiculous pop culture moments, culled from the hard drives of 14 different TiVos. With a staff of 12 ("There's a girl on staff who just watches all of the Today show," McHale says), almost nothing and nobody escapes The Soup's snark, from over-the-top celebrity news shows to bizarre scenes from telenovelas.
"I think, for whatever horrible reason, almost every English-speaking person in every other country follows gossip, and we try to make fun of it. We try to cover the coverage," the 36-year-old explains. "We will show clips from Entertainment Tonight or Access Hollywood or The Insider and then make fun of their coverage."
Not all celebrities mocked on The Soup are appreciative of the attention ("Tyra Banks hates us," McHale admits), but everyone featured is on there for a reason.
"Our mantra is that you have to be doing something to call attention to yourself to merit us making fun of you. We don't just go, 'That Daniel Day-Lewis! He is so messed up!'" McHale says. "He doesn't call attention to himself. He does his movies, he's awesome and then he goes back to his life. But if you're Lindsay Lohan and you get in your SUV and you run down your assistant in a parking lot, then we're going to make fun of you."
And so we get segments like "Oprah's Va-Jay-Jay," clips of Ernest Borgnine's wife shilling perfume on the Home Shopping Network and even an occasional rant from McHale, like when Audrina Patridge, star of MTV's The Hills, did an appearance at a bowling alley and would only answer questions about bowling.
"That's what our viewers tune it to see: a talentless, flash-in-the-pan hack restrict an on-camera conversation to bowling," McHale said, before unleashing a delightful tirade about Patridge's audacity to stipulate the terms of the interview.
Even with the guilty pleasure aspect to the show, The Soup has become one of E!'s most popular programs and has even attracted attention from high-calibre sources. After MSNBC anchor Keith Olberman did a guest appearance on the show (crying that the results of a reality show were "more rigged than the 2004 election"), he later aired the clip on his own news show, Countdown with Keith Olberman. In retaliation, McHale aired that clip of Countdown on the following episode of The Soup, beginning a back-and-forth between the two shows that lasted weeks.
"At one point, I was like, 'Hey, Keith, you have a real news show and you have to cover real events. We have a guy in a bikini top and a Chihuahua. We can do this as long as you like,'" McHale remembers, adding that the correspondence only ended because E! thought the "political mumbo jumbo" didn't appeal to their demographic. "Which is women aged 18 to 34. So that's pretty insulting."
For the most part, though, E! has been very liberal when it comes to giving The Soup creative freedom, allowing many dirty jokes past the censors and mostly staying out of the way when McHale mocks another show on the network. Of course, the host doesn't have free reign in that regard; executives have occasionally stepped in when he has made too many remarks about E! stars such as Kardashian or even Kendra Wilkinson, one of Hugh Hefner's girlfriends on The Girls Next Door. McHale admits to occasionally feeling a twinge of guilt for targeting such easy marks, but the moment is fleeting.
"But then you go, OK, this person put herself in this position and her skin in bright orange and her hair is white," he says, referring to Wilkinson. "Come on. She's some sort of albino carrot."
Despite focusing so much of his energy on television's most repellant subject matter, McHale is surprisingly devoid of pessimism about what goes on the air. He isn't exactly optimistic, either, but he clearly doesn’t think the medium is a lost cause.
"As far as TV goes, 90 per cent of it is bad and 10 per cent of it has never been better. There are some tremendously good shows, like Mad Men, The Wire – and even Deadliest Catch is a great show," he says. "It's the shows that go for the lowest common denominator – and they go really low. Like when Tila Tequila was having the men and women compete for a date with her by eating pig vaginas."
Even with all his star-bashing, McHale admits that he gets more positive feedback than you'd expect from the very people he makes fun of, week after week.
"I've been told by celebrities that I run into that they like the show," he says, exaggerating a big sigh of relief. "And thank God. Somebody watches it!"
The Soup airs Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. on E! Canada.
+ Read more with Joel McHale on TV Casualty
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