Snarking on pop culture has become a national pastime, and its TV standard-bearer is The Soup (E!, Fridays, 10 p.m.), hosted by comedian Joel McHale. A descendent of Talk Soup, one of E!’s earliest shows, The Soup features an extremely simple setup, with McHale standing in front of a green-screened background introducing clips from various TV shows and then making fun of them. Occasionally some rudimentary skits or comedy segments will pop up, always with the most low-budget production values imaginable and usually starring members of the show’s crew, who also double as the studio audience.

When Talk Soup debuted in 1991, its lo-fi aesthetic was a product of budget limitations that came from being on a marginalized channel; these days E! is much more popular, and The Soup could certainly afford a slicker presentation. But sticking to simplicity has positioned The Soup well for the online age; more than most other TV shows, it seems tailor-made for being chopped into bits, reduced in size and posted on YouTube (where you can find numerous clips).

The Soup’s format is so successful that E!’s parent company, Comcast, has begun franchising it. As Talk Soup proved, the material can work with a variety of hosts, as long as someone is willing to play along with the goofy concept (former Baywatch babe Donna D’Errico was a surprisingly entertaining frequent guest host in Talk Soup’s heyday). Thus we have The Dish (Style, Saturdays, 10 p.m.), which focuses on fashion- and beauty-related elements of pop culture; and Sports Soup (Versus, Tuesdays & Thursdays, 10 p.m.), which is all about sports and sports-related programming. Each show overlaps a bit with the more general-interest Soup, while the specific niches give the writers and hosts a little less room to play around with highlighting oddball shows.

The Dish comes out ahead, thanks, unexpectedly, to host Danielle Fishel, an actress best known for her stint as Ben Savage’s girlfriend on the family sitcom Boy Meets World. Rescued from obscurity, Fishel provides the same anything-goes sunniness that D’Errico brought to her Talk Soup appearances, gamely deflating the pretensions of fashion-world icons like Tyra Banks and Janice Dickinson, while remaining cute and likable. She’s not above mocking her own real-life past relationship with gay boy-bander Lance Bass, but even her harshest barbs have a certain softness to them; she’s just not as inclined to go for the kill as McHale is.

Sports Soup host Matt Iseman has the kind of frat-boy looks and crude sense of humor that you might expect to find in a mainstream sportscaster, and thus Sports is the Soup that struggles most to find its own identity. It’s not that the show is too similar to the original Soup, but rather that at times it resembles a run-of-the-mill sports-bloopers show, or even an episode of SportsCenter. There’s a fine line between mocking sports clips and celebrating them, and people like Craig Kilborn pretty much obliterated it a long time ago. Iseman is more like an extra-sarcastic sportscaster, and Sports Soup’s twice-weekly schedule means it has fewer options to highlight.

Still, one of the reasons that the Soups can occasionally seem overly familiar is that their approach has so thoroughly permeated pop culture. Half the reality shows on TV are being watched purely for snark value, and sarcasm is the default mode for TV hosts in all genres. What sets McHale apart is that his cleverness contains some actual commentary, and where Fishel and Iseman can fall short is in simply making jokes without something of substance to say. Mostly, though, they continue on a proud tradition, one that’s sure to endure as long as mainstream pop culture produces vapid programming worthy of mockery (which is to say, forever).