TV REVIEW: 'TOSH.0' & 'THE SOUP'
Television That Watches for You
In the distant future, we will no longer have to watch TV or surf the web. TV will do it for us! This distant future is as close as Wednesday, Friday, or your DVR, which itself is pretty future-y, no?
Lately, Comedy Central’s Tosh.0 has been blowin’ up. It’s the best ratings the comedy stop has gotten since the seemingly irreplaceable Chappelle’s Show, in fact. The Wednesday, July 28th show was the most rocking yet, with 2.7 million viewers, and that doesn’t count those using their DVR future machines, like myself. Tosh.0 simply finds the best of the web and has comedian Daniel Tosh riff on it like the funniest possible guy that could ever be forwarding you a clip at your office. Best here, by the way, of course, refers to the vomitiest vomit, the hardest kick to the balls, the most unbelievable dunces, and the cruelest, lewdest tweets. Reading articles from The Huffington Post aloud this is not. But like the Post and other web aggregators, Tosh.0 is all about compiliation and commentary; the format and content aren’t necessarily wholly original.
That takes us back to E!’s The Soup, once Talk Soup, that started this thing before the Internet as we know it was a twinkle in Al Gore’s robot brain. Talk Soup debuted in 1991 and pulled together clips of the day’s talk show chatter, getting in the “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” chants without forcing an audience to sit through an hour of TV. It was kind of like DVR before DVR, and a little brilliant for being so. TV that watched for you. Anything notable you may have missed, it caught and told you around the water cooler of your home. It died in 2002 and was reborn with Joel McHale in 2004 as simply The Soup. A catch-all net for the whole of TV and not just the loopy daytime talk parts. Getting back to the water cooler, The Soup served and serves as the CliffsNotes version of answers anyone looking to pass their pop culture test at the office would need. I’ve never watched a full episode of TV reality plagues like Rock of Love or Ru Paul’s Drag Race or Tool Academy, but Joel McHale will tell me all about it and recognize with me that it’s pretty absurd in his green screen clip show. That’s why The Soup tastes (looks?) so good. It takes out the guilt of a guilty pleasure. I don’t have to watch Jersey Shore now to share or mock the moment; I can catch it on The Soup. In a way, that’s an indictment of myself. I don’t want to be one of “those people” that watches these shows, but I still want to mock them and talk about them, so I sneak over to E! on Friday nights. But it’s that car-wreck spectator side of our culture that McHale so well sends up. People that aren’t really celebrities, like say the C+ level cast of The Hills, McHale will mock for weeks and years on end and will still turn up on the show in a bid to perpetuate their perceived celebrity. We are all Frankensteins making these monsters. McHale chases them from town with a quip instead of a pitchfork, and we trust him enough that we don’t get all offended when he asks us why we’re even watching or making the monsters we do. His excuse? He gets paid for it.
As The Soup took off, it spawned other half-hour aggregation shows like the The Soup for those with the X-chromosome: The Dish on Style, more Soup for those with the Y-chromosome; Sports Soup on Vs.; and those with the Y-chromosome who have trouble with those with the X-chromosome, Web Soup on G4. Just so I don’t keep sounding mean, I’ll lob myself in with the last of them there, even though I never watched Web Soup or the others consistently.
So why is Tosh.0 taking off? Call it traction and exposure. If Daniel Tosh and Chris Hardwick (host of Web Soup and a funny guy in his own right) traded places, I’m guessing “Hard.0″ would still be the more viewed show. In this scenario, Web Soup is the Mom and Pop TV show that mocks web clips because it’s on G4, which you may have never heard of until now, and Tosh.0 is the Wal-Mart over on Comedy Central. But Web Soup could also be called the off-brand of the The Soup. While Tosh.0 still uses the same set-up, it has it’s own voice — a dirty, funny voice which, in a way, makes Tosh and The Soup two different versions of that old joke “the aristocrats,” rather than someone trying to recite someone else’s version of the joke, which is kind of what the other Soups come across as.
The proof lump in the pudding here is illustrated in how Tosh opened his show last Wednesday. He said he heard some show called The Soup was totally ripping off his format and presentation, and that wasn’t cool and totally unoriginal. This kind of honest self-awareness is endearing and, most importantly, funny. Just like you choose The Huffington Post or FoxNews for your headlines at the monitor, Tosh.0 is winning for its point of view (aka Tosh himself, who is goofy and without reservation) and what it chooses to, quite literally, regurgitate to you. It’s the superior pop cheat sheet and, well, it’s just easier to get to.
That’s strangely what we tell ourselves anyway; there’s no difference in typing in a preceding website before .com or or three different digits on the remote, but somehow some sites and some shows feel like work. The point of the pop soup Joel McHale and Daniel Tosh make is that it’s supposed to take the work out if it. It’s comfort food, and who cares or not if it’s good for ya?
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