My New Favorite Obsession: Writer's Strike Edition: The Soup

The Daily Show has fallen to pieces. I must admit I'm coming from not an entirely educated standpoint: I haven't been watching it since the first three or so sans-writers episodes aired. But I didn't laugh. I was even kind of bored. I mean, I love The Daily Show. I used to watch it every day it was on. It's, really, more important now than ever because of all the campaigning stuff that's happening. But without writers, the show really feels like... well, like no one's writing it.

Here comes The Soup to the rescue. The E! writers aren't unionized, so the show must go on! The Soup is an E! Show hosted by one Joel McHale, who recaps the week in television through clips and snarky commentary. The mood of the show is basically that Joel & crew all have jobs at E! but they hate all the dumb shit on television. It vacillates between gleeful mockery and pained annoyance that the writers have to watch all this stuff to make the show every week.

The clips you can see on youtube and on their site are pretty great, but if you really want the full experience you should buy them through the iTunes store. You can get the current and next 7 episodes (they air weekly on Friday nights) for $5.99, a super deal considering that archive shows cost $1.99 a piece and you can't get them for free on bittorrent because nobody uploads them. Not current episodes, anyway. Sad!

They come with DRM, so I can't play through them with VLC which burns my ass, but whatever. At least I don't have to watch the commercials.

P.S. I totally support the writers strike, as sad as I may be that The Daily Show suffers so horribly because of it.