Highlights! All the best parts! Isn't that what we all want? Why settle for exposition when you can get climax...after climax...after climax! Your only decision, Mr. or Ms. Media Consumer: Which climax is the best climax? Maybe you'd better see them all again.
That's okay too. They're in the rotation. Have some coffee.
There were always sports highlights. The plays of the day, the plays of the week, the rumblin' stumblin' two-hand backhand slamjam through the fence and somebody won! Then came cable TV and ESPN, and a man named Chris Berman became a superstar because of his ability to narrate highlights while imitating famous sportscasters (Howard Cosell! Keith Jackson! Wait, John Fazenda!) and inventing extremely peculiar nicknames for players, like Jim "Two Silhouettes On" DeShaies and Andre "Bad Moon" Rison.
But highlights had staying power; highlights escaped the bonds of sports. A person named Greg Kinnear invented Talk Soup for E!, the entertainment network (Where Cross Promotion is More Than a Slogan), and suddenly we had a daily highlight reel for talk shows.
Kinnear realized that we actually - in our deepest info-surfing, short-attention-span heart of hearts - did not care about the sociologist who wanted to explain the cultural roots of transvestism or the hip Presbytarian minister who wanted to say that sex was God's loving gift to humankind; we wanted to cut to the chase. We wanted to hear the girl dishing her husband's ex-girlfriend's mother, who jumped out of the cake naked at his birthday party. We wanted to see the mild-mannered accountant from Cleveland put on the bondage mask. We wanted to see the Nazis swinging their fists and knocking over furniture.
Hate speech? Boring! Hate knocking over scenery, hate getting caught in microphone cables, hate with its pants down around its ankles - yes! With crisp editing techniques and smart commentary from Kinnear, we can feel superior to half the human race before the first commercial. If that's not a highlight, I don't know what is.
- Jon Carroll
Talk Soup. Tomorrow on E! we talk to a dentist who impregnated a cat.
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