No Soup For You: Joel McHale's Show Cancelled

The Soup, in its various forms, has been running for over two decades on the E! Network, and the handsome Joel McHale has helmed the sarcastic, surreal, reality-show-destroying series for 12 of those delightful years. It's all coming to an end, however. The Soup will air its last episode on December 16 of this year, E! announced on Thursday. The news came without much warning and seemingly in conflict with a contract McHale had recently signed that would have had him hosting through 2016.

Let us not mourn the sudden loss of McHale as a charming TV host with as many flat jokes as good ones; let us mourn the fact that we will no longer have The Soup to violently and virulently deconstruct how abjectly terrible reality TV has become. In a media culture where we laud and deify the worst living humans, from teen mom to Kardashian to whatever Bad Girls Club is, The Soup insinuated itself right in enemy territory and tore it apart from the inside like a heroic tapeworm. The Soup fed off of bad TV with such incisive goofiness that E! couldn't even complain that it became a show that focused almost completely on how terrible E! shows are.

Now that we have an ever-growing variety of shows that awkwardly dissect the very worst that TV and the Internet have to offer, McHale is following the trajectory of previous hosts like Greg Kinnear and moving on to focus on his acting career. You'll be able to find McHale as a regular character on the upcoming X-Files miniseries. Meanwhile, previous host John Henson remains the fifth Google result for his own name. Reality TV is fickle.

There's no word yet on why the show has been cancelled, nor if E! plans to replace it with other self-destructive fare, but if this truly is the end, we thank you, The Soup. In a sea of 17 shows about Kardashians, a dozen shows about cosmetic surgeries, and at least one show about a Kardashian having cosmetic surgery, you were a beacon of hope; a sign that there might be a shadow of self-realization buried among piles of amoral garbage. Maybe some dedicated E! fan stumbled upon you once and, with your help, turned their life around. Now, all we have left are shows where Chris Hardwick confuses shouting with being funny, and no one deserves a world that cruel.

[Source : Variety]