The Joel McHale Show with Joel McHale is The Soup on Netflix. McHale’s back making jokes about stupid reality shows and bizarre foreign shows. If you were a huge fan of The Soup, you may find this show more appealing than I did.
The world has changed considerably since The Soup went off the air on December 18, 2015. There’s more drama in real life than in the manufactured world of reality TV. It’s no longer entertaining to watch comedians joke about The Bachelor’s shallowness or reality show stars throwing tables. We’ve seen it a million times.
In some ways, it’s actually sad that McHale was able to start The Joel McHale Show with a joke about starting from where he left off and, ignoring the over two year long beat, make the same jokes everyone has been making for the last 10 years. To make things even more disappointing, most of his jokes were low hanging fruit. The worst offender was his joke about a South African show in Afrikaans that had a character say “Hallo kind,” which sounded like “Hello c***” to English speakers.
There were also guest appearances from Paul Reiser, Jody Sweetin, Kevin Hart, Rory Scovel, Alison Brie, Jim Rash, and Jason Priestly. While some of these were funny, it felt unnecessary to have so many guest appearances in the first episode. That may have been the joke, but it fell flat.
The funniest moment of the show was the end credits. That’s not a dig and McHale. The writers came up with a clever way to make them interesting. I actually recommend you watch them. They are self-referential in the same way The Garry Shandling Show’s opening theme is.
Based on the reception The Joel McHale Show with Joel McHale is receiving online, I am the outlier. It’s not that I was looking for a show making Donald Trump jokes because that’s not what McHale does and the world doesn’t need more of those.
The main thing is that I expect more from McHale, who is quite clever and much funnier live. Maybe the show failed because it tried to hard to shoehorn in celebrity cameos from half the people McHale has worked with and focused on that instead of coming up with new material.
Rating: 4 out of 10
