'The Soup' vs. 'Best Week Ever'

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I'M PRETTY CONFIDENT that last week was not the best week ever.

Oh, my week was fine, thanks for your concern, but based on Friday's episodes of E!'s "The Soup" and VH1's "Best Week Ever," we should all be a little worried.

Not to frighten you, but apparently the most entertaining things on television last week were a middle aged woman being mauled by the American Gladiators, an elementary-aged girl stomping on her father's crotch on "America's Got Talent" and, perhaps most disturbingly, "I Love Money."

These shows might offer us the purest distillation of exactly what has gone so terribly wrong with American culture. If, like me, you're unwilling to give up TV just to prevent the impending apocalypse, it is possible to minimize your complicity by limiting your direct exposure to one or both of these two half-hour shows. Although the clips are frequently identical, "The Soup" and "Best Week Ever" have some distinguishing characteristics.

» HOSTS: "Best Week Ever" features a changing group of panelists weighing in on the issues of the day — if the Madonna/A-Rod affair and the shocking "Bachelorette" finale can be considered issues. As on all VH1 panel shows, some commentators are funnier than others, but this past week Paul Scheer, Nick Kroll, Melissa Rauch and the duo Frangela had the best material.

Over on "The Soup," Joel McHale occasionally flubbed a line ("marital" turned into something else entirely during a Madonna joke this week), but for the most part his charm compensates. If you disagree, he will shoot you.

» GUEST APPEARANCES: "Best Week Ever" definitely boasts more star power than "The Soup," but the guest stars aren't always well integrated. These appearances usually work best when BWE calls attention to the crassness of the promotional process, as when the actor who played Prince Caspian had to defeat Frangela at fencing in order to screen a clip a few weeks ago. This week's cameo by "Hell's Kitchen" winner Christina Machamer was neither fresh nor funny. Oh, Gordon Ramsay yells a lot? You don't say.

"The Soup" doesn't feature guests on a weekly basis, but recent appearances by George Takei, Tanisha from "Bad Girls Club" and star of tomorrow Nathaniel from "Yo Gabba Gabba!" demonstrate that "The Soup" selects guests solely on their ability to entertain. Adam Carolla, I can't explain.

» CLIPS: There tends to be a lot of overlap in the clips screened on "Best Week Ever" and "The Soup." This week, for example, both shows screened the same moments from "American Gladiators" and "America's Got Talent." While apparently anyone can appreciate the humor in beatdowns administered to the elderly or by small children, "The Soup" delves deeper into the outer reaches of the cable spectrum, dredging up comedy gold from QVC's "Quacker Factory," SciFi channel original movies and, my personal favorite, "Dutch Oven Cooking with Cee Dub."

» SET/GRAPHICS: If you have any degree of attention deficit disorder, "Best Week Ever" was designed with you in mind. Rarely are the commentators allowed more than a sentence or two before being swept away by a neon rainbow or replaced by a frantically paced clip montage.

"The Soup" opts instead for a minimalist approach. McHale stands in front of a green screen "set" next to a "monitor" and tells jokes (quotation marks fortunately not required for his japes).

» POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: Both shows got abundant material out of petite 52-year-old investment banker Yoko Ohigashi's numerous humiliations on last week's "American Gladiators." On "Best Week Ever," Frangela went blue, describing Ohigashi's escape after being submerged in a Chuck E. Cheese-style ball pit thus, "This is not only a victory for Yoko, this is a victory for anybody who's had a lot of balls in their face."

"The Soup" offered the following take on Ohigashi's painful-looking pyramid experience: "I know it looked like Crush was going extra hard on her because she's old. She wasn't. Crush swears it's because she's Asian." "The Soup" rules this category after saying of the oft-mentioned youthful crotch stomper, "Seems creepy, but she's also his wife."

The devolution of American television has turned us all into "Best Week Ever" commentators, mocking celebreality "stars" even as our viewing validates their "career" choices. "Best Week Ever" and "The Soup" offer an alternative to complete trash TV immersion, whether viewers are looking to stay relevant at the water cooler without watching full episodes of reality television or simply feeling too lazy to articulate their own contempt.

Written by Express contributor Meg Zamula