General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Joel McHale Show with Joel McHale

The Joel McHale Show with Joel McHale is an American weekly half-hour topical comedy series hosted by Joel McHale that premiered on Netflix on February 18, 2018, taking a sharp, absurdist look at pop culture and news from around the world through celebrity guests, comedy sketches, and video clips.¹ Netflix canceled the show in August 2018 after 19 episodes.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Format	Weekly half-hour topical series combining celebrity guests, comedy sketches, and video clips from TV, sports, politics, celebrity culture, and the internet¹
Premiere	February 18, 2018, with new episodes released each Sunday⁴
Host	Joel McHale, who also served as an executive producer⁴
Executive producers	Joel McHale, Paul Feig, K.P. Anderson, Jessie Henderson, Brad Stevens, and Boyd Vico⁴
Episodes	19 episodes in total; the final episode aired July 15, 2018³
Rating	TV-MA; the Netflix setting allowed more adult-oriented material than McHale's earlier series The Soup⁴
Reception	83% average Tomatometer and 70% Popcornmeter on Rotten Tomatoes⁴

Spoilers

Episode and season counts

Sources disagree on how to count the show's run. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic list it as one season of 13 episodes,⁴^•¹⁴ while Netflix catalog trackers list two seasons, Season 1 with 13 episodes and Season 2 with 6, for a total of 19 episodes ending July 15, 2018.³ TheWrap reported that the show was ordered for 10 episodes,² a figure that does not match either episode count. The second half of episodes was released in July 2018.¹⁷

Format and content

Each episode premiered on Sunday and worked as a recap of the week in entertainment, mixing clips from reality shows such as The Bachelor and Love & Hip Hop, Korean TV dramas, and viral videos, with McHale's comedic commentary.⁴^•⁵ Netflix described the show as a fast distillation of everything people were talking about that week, drawing on the worldwide realms of TV, sports, politics, and celebrity culture.¹ McHale himself called it "definitely a clip show, but it's going to be a lot more than that."⁶

The series carried a TV-MA rating, and critics noted that the Netflix platform gave McHale more leeway to be adult-oriented than he had on basic cable.⁴ In an interview with TV Insider, McHale said the format allowed him to run whole sequences of stories on mockable moments in pop culture, celebrity gossip, and reality TV, and joked that the show had at one point been considered under the title Joel McHale's Weekly Dump.⁷

Guests and cameo appearances included Kevin Hart and Jack Black as interview guests, and appearances by Alison Brie, Mike Colter, Paul Reiser, Jodie Sweetin, and Jim Rash.⁸^•⁹ The pilot also featured cameos by Kevin Hart, Jodie Sweetin, and Jason Priestley, among others.⁵

Relationship to The Soup

The show was widely described as a successor to The Soup, the E! clip show McHale hosted from 2004 until its cancellation in 2015.¹⁰ Reviewers treated the Netflix series as a return to that format: TV Guide called it "basically The Soup 2.0,"¹¹ and Rotten Tomatoes' synopsis described the premise as reminiscent of McHale's former project.⁴ The Variety critic Sonia Saraiya wrote that viewers who liked McHale's style or The Soup's brand of snark would find the show a welcome return to form, while the AV Club's Dennis Perkins called it a "winking capper to this streaming simulacrum of The Soup."

Production

The show was produced by Pygmy Wolf Productions, Free Period Productions, Feigco Entertainment, and Lionsgate Television, and was originally broadcast on Netflix.³ McHale announced the series in January 2018, describing a half-hour show combining celebrity guests, pre-taped sketches, and video clips focused on pop culture and news from around the world.¹² Netflix released the series premiere on Sunday, February 18, 2018, at 3:01 a.m. ET.¹³

Cancellation and reception

On August 17, 2018, Netflix canceled both The Joel McHale Show with Joel McHale and The Break with Michelle Wolf, announcing that no more episodes would be ordered after the shows' initial runs.² The two talk shows had been on the air for less than a year, and followed the cancellation of Chelsea Handler's Netflix talk show Chelsea after two seasons.² The final episode aired on July 15, 2018.³

Critical reception was mixed to positive. Season 1 scored 83% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from six reviews, with an audience Popcornmeter score of 70%.⁴ The show holds a 7.1/10 rating on IMDb.³ Negative reviews focused on the writing: the Harvard Crimson's review of the premiere called the video compilation the sole saving grace of an otherwise weak production, criticizing pacing, structure, and what it saw as incessant marketing of other Netflix shows within the pilot.⁵ Variety's Sonia Saraiya gave the season a score of 40, writing that the comedy on offer was "barely elevated vulgarity" and that almost every clip would be funnier if McHale said nothing after airing it.¹⁴ Ken Tucker of Yahoo! TV scored it 30, arguing that McHale's place in the culture had been taken up by Twitter and that he was sorting through "some very meager pickings."¹⁵

A later retrospective on the show's cancellation placed it among a group of Netflix talk shows that failed to find an audience, including Chelsea, The Break with Michelle Wolf, and Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, in a streaming environment where timely topical content faced structural disadvantages.¹⁶

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026