Talk Soup
From TeeVeePedia, the Internet TV Encyclopedia.
Talk Soup made its debut as the only non-religious program on the E! network in 1991. The show's premise was to have several guests over to talk about their favorite kind of soup. The only problem was, the "guests" found they had little else to talk about, so they spent the rest of the show's run showing old clips from old talk shows and shouting, "MAN, those were the days!" at each episode's end.
The Guests
Demise
Remarkably, the show was a hit and stayed on for over ten years. However, perhaps because of the fact that the exact same guests stayed over, the show struggled its last four years. In season 7, producers brought about the comedic stylings of Randolph Mantooth and Mario Van Peebles to the set, yet this seemed to drive viewers away even further. An infamous April 1999 episode, in which Van Peebles brought a bazooka to the set and inadvertently destroyed around 56% of it in a rage, caused ratings to shoot up for the rest of April 1999. However, viewers initially thought this meant Van Peebles would be fired, but since he stayed, ratings continued to drop.
Desperate, producers brought in an unknown Muppet by the name of Señor Sock in December 2001. "The Señor" (as terribly unfunny guest Hal Sparks nicknamed him) would open every episode of the remainder of the show's final season with a love poem written to Suzanne Somers.
However, muppets didn't help the show's ratings, and in August 2002, Talk Soup was canned.
The Remake
In 2004, over-nostalgic E! decided to revamp their greatest (and only) non-religious program, The What The? Awards, into a new version of Talk Soup, The Soup. Starring people who you want to say are Joel McHale and the rest of his navy, the show returned to its original premise -- talking about soup -- and is still on the network to this day.
