Today, a talk show clip of a woman dumped for her twin or “proud to be a b***h” would go viral before you finished this sentence. Decades ago, we had Talk Soup. Debuting Jan. 7, 1991, the irreverent four-day-a-week E! show hard-launched the career of host Greg Kinnear, who, noted The New York Times, seemed “constantly bemused by the oddballs and topics at hand, without ever resorting to bashing or mean-spiritedness.” John Henson succeeded him, plugging in more comedy sketches, followed by Hal Sparks and Aisha Tyler, who reminds Us, “As outrageous as it could be, Talk Soup also had an Emmy!”
Who Was Involved
Kinnear had a couple of hosting gigs under his belt before he blew up on Talk Soup… then decided to pivot to acting. Henson, a club comic in NYC, thought, “If they ever hire a nobody,” he could be great. “Everybody I knew was auditioning,” he tells Us. “[Producers] told me at one point they had interviewed maybe 3,000 people over 18 months in five cities.” Actor Sparks came next but exited after less than a year. “Huge fan” Tyler closed it out after a guest host appearance got fans hyped. Still, she recalls, “Network executives said to my face that they thought young men would not watch with me as host. Happily, they were wrong.”
Why We Remember It
Talk Soup brought the funny and the shocking! The clips — alien assaults, hugging tips, Geraldo Rivera vs. the KKK — stood on their own. Interns scanned about seven to nine hours of TV a day, Henson says of his early days. “Jerry Springer was the Babe Ruth of talk show clips for us, because he was so reliable.” But the comedy bits became increasingly important and defining. And absurd, he says: “We used to do this very serious segment called Profiles in Cable, where we would make, like, a Ken Burns documentary on different staff members.” Tyler says, “We went from just winking at wild clips to having a distinct personality and point of view.” Costumes were a given, and Tyler’s Foxy Chocolat character (think: Pam Grier’s Foxy Brown) attracted fans like Quentin Tarantino, who requested the sketches on VHS. “I plotzed!” Tyler says.
Key Details
From Roseanne Barr to William Shatner to Catherine O’Hara, celebrities were happy to be Soup ingredients. The big get? Dustin Hoffman, who watched and even submitted his own clip! Naturally, the team plotted to get the actor in person — by staging a weeks-long fake hunger strike. “We actually got a scale model of the purple chair I sat in that was bigger to make it look like I was shrinking,” Henson says. It worked! Hoffman phoned and agreed to come on.
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The Aftermath
Talk Soup came to an abrupt end in 2002, but a revamped version dubbed The Soup was waiting in the wings. “We had actually shot two pilots that would throw a wider net across popular culture, pulling material from reality shows and the internet in addition to talk shows,” Tyler explains. But the project didn’t come to fruition until 2004, when it was hosted by Joel McHale and filled with Kardashian klips.
A New Perspective
“Talk Soup was definitely of its time. What felt transgressive then would seem quaint to people now,” Tyler offers. “TikTok is just one never-ending episode of Talk Soup.” Still, she and Henson list some of the shows it influenced: Tosh.0, Ridiculousness, Watch What Happens Live, even The Daily Show.
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Where Are They Now?
Kinnear, 62, recently appeared in Apple TV’s Smoke and, in April, costars in Apple’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles. Henson, 58, has been hosting Food Network’s “superfun” Halloween Baking Championship since 2017. And Tyler, 55, has a line of organic ready-to-drink cocktails (losophe.com), plus a role on Paramount+’s Criminal Minds: Evolution.
