Because The Inter­net: the cursed, per­verse real­i­ties of Adult Swim infomercials

It makes sense that the theme song to Too Many Cooks, the viral 2014 short from the Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion chan­nel Adult Swim’s Infomer­cials block – short films and strange, exper­i­men­tal pieces that could nev­er real­ly belong any­where else – is part of what made it rise to online fame. The catchy, ​’70s sit­com refrain of ​“too many cooks/​too many cooks” is impos­si­ble to get out of your head (even typ­ing it out brings the melody back). This theme song, which repeats con­stant­ly through­out the 10-minute short, is essen­tial­ly a meme, loop­ing con­tin­u­al­ly with a few changes as the short changes from an over­ly long gag about old-school sit­coms, to some­thing stranger and more sin­is­ter. That is to say, Too Many Cooks is the kind of thing that we might now call ​“ter­mi­nal­ly online”, a des­ig­na­tion that fits with many of the best-known Adult Swim infomer­cials, because of just how much they grap­ple with the memes, silli­ness, and hor­ror of online culture.

The 2014 short Unedit­ed Footage of a Bear, direct­ed by Ben O’Brien and Alan Resnick, is the kind of thing that couldn’t exist with­out our under­stand­ing of online video shar­ing. From the open­ing 30 sec­onds that offer exact­ly what the title promis­es, to the way it cuts to a seem­ing­ly end­less advert for the fic­tion­al drug Clar­idryl. The video even includes a ​“skip ad” but­ton that’s now inescapable on YouTube, but instead of hav­ing the timer tick down, it goes up and up and up. Like the end­less theme song to Too Many Cooks, Unedit­ed Footage of a Bear also veers into the anti-joke ter­ri­to­ry of online humour; the list of side effects and warn­ings for Clar­idryl also seem to go on for­ev­er, grad­u­al­ly mov­ing from fun­ny to unset­tling, from the caveat that ​“Clar­idryl is not for preg­nant, nurs­ing, expec­tant, wait­ing, bereaved, or sleep­ing moth­ers” to the almost threat­en­ing notice that ​“a per­son or per­sons will result from sus­tained usage of Clar­idryl” – some­thing that becomes a vio­lent real­i­ty for Don­na (Crick­et Arri­son), who is attacked by a woman who may be anoth­er ver­sion of her­self or anoth­er facet of her per­son­al­i­ty that’s brought to the fore by her addic­tion to Claridryl.

What both Too Many Cooks and Unedit­ed Footage of a Bear have in com­mon is a kind of hor­ror and tex­tu­al manip­u­la­tion that feels unique­ly online: the trans­for­ma­tion of some­thing whole­some into the unset­tling or out­right hor­ri­fy­ing. For these shorts, it’s old-school sit­coms and the easy-to-par­o­dy side effects of pre­scrip­tion med­ica­tion – else­where it shows up in every­thing from dark and edgy fan­fic­tion to the strange online lives of Garfield. But what makes them such a com­pelling win­dow into a cer­tain way of being online is the way that they engage with these ideas in increas­ing­ly self-aware ways.

In one of the many riffs and remix­es of the open­ing titles to Too Many Cooks, a young woman breaks out of her sit­com and runs through back­stage cor­ri­dors, mov­ing past two doc­tors as she does so. The two doc­tors are treat­ing a man who lives inside the Too Many Cooks sit­com – his name and char­ac­ter appear across his body in yel­low text – and they can hear the theme song play­ing when they use a stetho­scope on him. As they spend more time exposed to this theme (this meme) it sinks its claws into them and they look out to the cam­era, forced into the faux smile of a sit­com char­ac­ter, as the refrain plays out again and again: ​“too many cooks / too many cooks.”

The infec­tious, trans­for­ma­tive nature of memes takes on the form of a con­ta­gion in Resnick’s 2016 short This House Has Peo­ple in It, in which a fam­i­ly may or may not fall prey to an ill­ness that may or may not exist, framed through the found footage lens of a secu­ri­ty com­pa­ny watch­ing what appears to be a per­fect­ly ordi­nary fam­i­ly. The con­stant expo­sure of being on cam­era, and the way that two increas­ing­ly dis­tressed par­ents yell about their daughter’s social media and who her friends are, cap­tures a very spe­cif­ic online anx­i­ety: what it means to be con­stant­ly seen, whether you want to be or not.

This inter­sec­tion between dig­i­tal cul­ture and hor­ror is tak­en to the nth degree in a 2018 short by Too Many Cooks direc­tor Casper Kel­ly: Final Deploy­ment 4: Queen Bat­tle Walk­through. Final Deploy­ment presents the many expand­ing, con­tort­ing lay­ers of its nar­ra­tive as a series of live streams in which the var­i­ous char­ac­ters, no mat­ter how dire their sit­u­a­tion, are con­stant­ly ask­ing you to ​“like and sub­scribe.” While the nar­ra­tive threads of Final Deploy­ment feel like they’re con­stant­ly in dan­ger of com­ing undone, the short man­ages to cap­ture not only the con­stant stream of ​“like and sub­scribe” that comes with a dig­i­tal life that’s increas­ing­ly paraso­cial in the way that we relate to influ­encers and stream­ers, but that also man­ages to grap­ple with the inti­ma­cy that’s expect­ed of online per­son­al­i­ties. Each of the nar­ra­tors (every­thing from a Gamer Girl cliché ripped from the 2000s to a par­o­dy of Gears of War pro­tag­o­nist Mar­cus Fenix) ends up con­fess­ing their lone­li­ness and uncer­tain­ty to the cam­era and the view­er with an inti­ma­cy that could only real­ly exist through the medi­um of a live stream.

Final Deploy­ment moves from the lay­er­ing of var­i­ous livestreams into what might be the (re)creation of a real­i­ty like ours, pre­sent­ed through the sar­don­ic, self-dep­re­cat­ing view of a god­like fig­ure. This real­i­ty, like an old com­put­er, is sim­ply deal­ing with too much, and crash­es. This aes­thet­ic runs through many of these Adult Swim infomer­cials; Too Many Cooks and Unedit­ed Footage of a Bear also gen­er­ate hor­ror through the aes­thet­ics of a glitch or tech­nol­o­gy break­ing down. What hap­pens to Mad­di­son, the daugh­ter in This House Has Peo­ple In It who falls through the kitchen floor, also feels like a glitch; that strange sen­sa­tion of falling off the edge of the map. In all the films there’s a shared obses­sion with the aes­thet­ics of a bro­ken inter­net and the lurid, seduc­tive appeal of cursed media. This kind of media, and the Adult Swim infomer­cials that grap­ple with their lega­cy for a dig­i­tal gen­er­a­tion, could only ever exist through the prism of the internet.