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 cliche 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.
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