In the beginning was “Talk Soup” on E! But then, “Talk Soup” went away for a while.

In the interim, VH1 decided to apply the successful “I Love The 70s/80s/90s” format to a weekly show making fun of up-to-the-moment pop culture. That format features a rotating group of comics and celebrities making wiseacre remarks about various pop culture personalities and events of the past week. VH1 called the new show “Best Week Ever,” and I took an immediate liking to it. Of course, the wiseacre comics on “Best Week Ever” were a step down in charisma and name recognition from the comics and actors who appear on “I Love The (Decade).”

Then, E! revived the “Talk Soup” format, now just called “The Soup,” by expanding the format from just talk shows to include pop culture, reality shows, celebrities in trouble and so on — the very same things that “Best Week Ever” was lampooning. Often, the two shows will cover many of the same stories or clips in the same week. “The Soup” is hosted by the very, very funny Joel McHale, and I soon decided it was much, much better than BWE. Part of that is just that McHale is great. That’s not to say there isn’t room for both of them.

But within the past week or two, a couple of things have happened. The producers of “The Soup” on E! have started a twice-weekly spinoff, “Sports Soup,” on the cable channel Versus. It’s hosted by Matt Iseman. The format is nearly identical to “The Soup,” except that all of the clips being lampooned are somehow sports-related. McHale brought Iseman on for a cameo this week, and a special compilation episode, cobbled together from the first few episodes on “Versus,” ran as a one-time special on E!, right after “The Soup.”

Now, this week, “Best Week Ever” underwent a bit of a format change, becoming “Best Week Ever with Paul F. Tompkins,” promoting one of its regular commentators to the role of host and thereby making BWE’s format more similar to … you guessed it … “The Soup.”

Tompkins is funny — you may have also seen him on “Lewis Black’s Root of All Evil” — and the single-host format does seem to work a little better for BWE. They do manage to work in brief appearances by a few of the previous BWE regulars, including Jessica St. Clair, Chuck Nice and Jude Friedlander of “30 Rock.” But “Sports Soup” and “BWE with Paul F. Tompkins” still come across as imitators. Neither Iseman nor Tompkins is anywhere near McHale’s league.

Fortunately, none of the shows compete with each other in their original time slots, so there’s room for everyone.

An un-aired clip produced for “The Soup” which turned up on its official blog:

A summer blockbuster about which you may not have heard:

My column for the Sunday T-G is about being in withdrawal because the strike has cut off my supply of Dave Letterman / Jon Stewart / Stephen Colbert et al.

But I just discovered that at least my Friday night staple, “The Soup,” is still in production. Since the networks will probably increase their production of reality TV, Joel McHale is likely to have even more to joke about during the strike. I have seen reference to the fact that another E! show, “Chelsea Lately,” is non-union, and I don’t know if that’s also how “The Soup” is getting around the strike.

Fans of Seth Green may want to check out one of the umpty-leven repeats of “The Soup” this weekend. I had not seen the weird You Tube clip of the weird, pathetic little guy defending Britney Spears, but even without knowing the source material that well I had to laugh at Seth’s impersonation of it.

You can also see it here.