New Host Jade Catta-Preta Is Saving The Soup From Its “Snarky Bro’s Club” Rep

According to a new report from Nielsen, there were 646,152 unique television series available in 2019. I’d say we’ve reached peak TV, but since we’re still waiting for streaming services like Quibi and HBO Max to launch, 2020 seems poised to top it. It is so impossible to keep up with the literal thousands of shows that the word “impossible” doesn’t even do it justice. That said, I will allow one new TV show to exist: E!’s revival of The Soup, which comes right in time to help us make sense of this pop culture overload.

The Soup, which began as Talk Soup in 1991, has been on the air on and off for the past 30 years. It’s helped viewers digest strange talk show moments and wild reality TV antics in a humorous — and often cutting — way. In its most recent iteration, Joel McHale hosted the program from 2004 to 2015, his bordering-on-smarmy attitude towards his subjects contributing to sometimes uncomfortable celebrity run-ins. New host, comedian Jade Catta-Preta, doesn’t want to follow in his footsteps. She has a whole new plan. 

Reality shows, scripted TV, TikTok — if Twitter is talking about it, then Catta-Preta is already planning her own twist. She wants her take on the long-running show to be more “Carol Burnett” than “snarky bro's club,” but that’s not the only revamp she’s giving the series. There’s the fact that she’s the first host from South America. Or that she’s only the second woman to tackle the gig. Or, important to me, personally, that she’s a Love Island fan which means that yes, she might talk about it on the show. 

But while Catta-Preta acknowledges that she’s bringing a whole new perspective to the show, her dreams for its future aren’t defined by that. She hopes her insider perspective — as a genuine fan of pop culture and someone who herself has appeared in a number of TV roles — contributes to a whole new Soup “universe” that people will watch on TV, catch up with on their phones, or turn to when they quickly need to know what line all their friends are quoting from The Bachelor at brunch. 

Jade Catta-Preta: “I've been doing standup for 12 years and so I'm already bringing in a perspective of who I am. A big part of that is I'm a woman, I'm gay, and I'm not from America. I don't want to harp on it too much. I don't want to be like, I'm not a white guy. I'm not a white guy. But I've lived the world differently.”

“It's a little bit of everything. I hate to say it's a soup but it really is. We want to curate it for people that love TV and people who don't know anything about TV. We're including not only reality TV but scripted stuff, daytime talk shows, judge shows, and also TikTok. We want it to be one of those places where you can just come and get a little bit of all of it.”

“In the past they had more of a roast. [It was a] snarky bro's club, a little bit. I'm a fan of the stuff [we cover]. I love it. I look up to it. It doesn't mean I'm not going to make fun of it, but it comes from an insider's perspective versus just looking down on the material. I want it to be all-involving in a way that it never was before — like a Carol Burnett version of it.”

“I had this tension before I met [Joel McHale] where I was like, I want to meet him. I need to have the blessing. I had met Hal Sparks already. I already knew John Henson from comedy and we were on the same show together last week. He shared with me that he was dyslexic and how difficult it was for him to read the teleprompter. He became so much more human to me after that and I felt less pressure. Like, he made his mistakes, and I'll get to make my mistakes. and eventually find my own voice.”

“I'm in the writer's room every day. I got to be really involved in picking my showrunner. I picked Sue Murphy, who was Chelsea Lately's showrunner for 11 years. We have a great head writer, Chris Maguire. Our writers are beasts.”

“We've done a couple of test shows. The first one I was like too big and the second one I was like too small. So it's like that little bear syndrome of like, I got to find the pudding that's just right.”

“We want to create the universe organically. We'd love to maybe have some writers on the show, maybe a couple of reality TV people will show up. There's going to be some crossover.”