Ah, the flotsam and jetsam of television.

When it’s bad, it’s really bad. Thankfully, we have The Soup to act as a pop culture strainer, capturing the Very Best of the Very Worst. Of course you’ve seen The Soup, the E! channel’s weekly review of celebrity gaffes and reality-show low points.

But even if you’re not a connoisseur of truly terrible TV, there’s still one terrific reason to tune in: sardonic host Joel McHale, right, a 6′ 3″ vision of hotness served up as the emcee.

At first glance, he could be a stubbly J. Crew catalog model or a Brit Pop frontman or one of those guys who turn up in straight porn as randy plumbers and pizza deliverymen. He is, in fact, the perfect guy, a combo of playful sexiness and a wicked streak of humor.

That a channel like E! would present a wet-dream like this is something of a miracle. E!, after all, is a low-rent netlet whose content consists of a drip, drip, drip of studio press releases, inane celebrity news, fawning star profiles, dopey Hollywood crime documentaries, and staged true life series devoted to bottom-of-the-barrel “personalities.” E! makes FOX look like PBS.

Through various formats and hosts, The Soup has always been the sole reason to tune in and now with the dollsome wise-ass McHale at the helm — starring, writing and producing — the show is better than ever. McHale always appears with his zany crew of backup players: the bikini-clad Mankini, the pocket-sized Lil’ Gay, a scene-stealing chihuahua named Lou, and a gaggle of kooky girls. Ever ready to bite the hand that feeds him — namely the slavish Cult of Celebrity that is E!’s very reason for existing — he cocks his head, flashes a naughty grin and sends up the whole dopey idea of celebrity watching as a guilty pleasure.

Truly, he’s in a class with Stephen Colbert, another breakout star (from The Daily Show to his very own The Colbert Report) and, for my money, another Basic-Cable Babe Supreme.

Compare: both men are wordsmiths. Both men can appear classically handsome or elfishly boyish, depending on the lighting. Each has a deadpan delivery that will occasionally tremble into stifled laughter as they struggle to hold a straight face against the ticklish urge to fall apart before the wackiness they are perpetrating.

Best of all, both men are at the zenith of their Sex Symbolhood. Tall drinks of water, the both of them, each fills out a high-end suit quite nicely. Take off the suit, and …well, McHale’s most rewind-worthy moments are those in which he plays losers in wife-beaters — all the better to display his lithe physique — or just goes all-out shirtless, much to the delight of guy-lovers everywhere. In what may be a new kind of 21st Century sex appeal, Colbert and McHale keep getting hotter and hotter as they blur the line between glint-eyed studliness and self-deprecating dorkiness.

Now compare Joel McHale to E!’s usual robo-hosts: The men are slack-jawed Boy Band rejects; the women, emaciated too-tan bimbos barely able to read a teleprompter; and then somewhere in-between, not quite human, are the Scylla and Charybdis of the Red Carpet, Joan and Melissa Rivers

In such company, McHale is shrewdly out of place. Unlike the wax-like androids around him, McHale plays the class clown who’s too cool for school. He derides the rampant Media Me-ism that the other hosts present so breathlessly. He mocks the spectacular implosions of wayward teen idols, the shamelessness of reality TV players, the sheer ineptitude of the Sci Fi Channel’s Animal Peril movies. Then there are the sacred cows: the C-list celebs who headline the network’s stupefying line-up of vanity projects that The Soup is contractually obligated to promote. But they aren’t safe from McHale’s ridicule either.

The simple fact is McHale is slumming on the E! network, and he — and everyone else — knows it. Who can blame him? This is the channel that legitimized — as much as was possible — the dubious talents of the late Anna Nicole Smith, of Nick and Aaron Carter, of plastic surgeon and closet case Dr. Robert Rey. A channel that plays rapt, empty-headed stenographer to Hugh Hefners’s cavalcade of peroxide Electric Barbarellas, as well as the professional sperm banks known as Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.

McHale’s utter disdain for them is as nothing next to his constant (and hilarious) belittling of that over-employed Oompa Loompa, Ryan Seacrest, who is all of 5′9″ (by his reckoning) and 5′5″ (by everyone else’s — particularly the snarky McHale, who constantly hammers away at the mini-ness of the American Idol emcee.)

Seacrest also co-hosts an E! channel show — a fact that prompts in many of us wicked fly-on-the-wall daydreams. In a series of recent Burger King ads, McHale played the type of arrogant, swaggering boss you might wish would sexually harass you into daily desktop nooners. We can only imagine the glorious spectacle when Joel and Ryan accidentally bump into each other in the men’s room at the E! channel. McHale, a towering alpha male of 6′3″, might just get triggered by the pint-size Seacrest, resulting in an ambush of nuggies, wedgies, and tearful fits.

As with all good things, a dreaded end must come. McHale has been tapped by NBC to star in a stateside version of the British sitcom, The IT Crowd, leading his fans to conclude that his tenure on The Soup is about to pass into TV history. Will The Soup — will we, his male fans — ever recover?

Capturing lightning in a bottle is quite a feat and a built, brainy Thinking Man’s Pin-Up like a Joel McHale just doesn’t strike twice in the same place.