by It’s labeled as an infomercial, but Too Many Cooks is unlike anything else you’d see as paid advertising on your TV at 4 a.m., let alone any of the other parody informercials that Adult Swim previously aired in its late-night programming block on Cartoon Network.
If anything else on Adult Swim, Too Many Cooks is closer in both spirit and content to The Greatest Event in Television History, that trilogy of homages to 1980s TV delivered by Adam Scott and his famous funny friends.
But Too Many Cooks takes that idea and runs with it even past the point where Forrest Gump would have stopped running.
Even though you might not recognize any of the people in Too Many Cooks — the 11-minute masterpiece gives you plenty of chances to learn their names — the opening theme song burrows into your head and then some. And just when you think you’ve got the concept of the show, or even the satire, figured out, the dynamic tilts on its axis and to give you an even more twisted perspective. It’s classic heightening. And it all comes courtesy of Casper Kelly, who also has written and directed Adult Swim’s Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell and Squidbillies. His Twitter bio @heyCasperKelly lists his location as “’80s Sitcom Fever Dream.” After watching this, you’ll know the secret to this and his success was location, location, location.
Got a weird little thing airing @adultswim 4AM EVERY NIGHT (morning?) this week. Watch/DVR(called "Infomercial")silvousplait #toomanycooks
— Casper Kelly (@heyCasperKelly) October 28, 2014
Adult Swim actually aired Too Many Cooks multiple early mornings last week, and after that simple tease/plea from Kelly, you can read his Twitter timeline to get a sense of how it played initially to unsuspecting viewers.
Finally, yesterday, it appeared on YouTube. And now it has more than a million views and counting. They cannot be wrong. They are not wrong.
Join us, won’t you? Roll the clip!
Amazingly, it took a viral hit from a rogue uploader to get Adult Swim to post it themselves:
