Adult Swim has always been known for its innovative and out-of-left-field programming such as Metalocalypse, The Squidbillies, Robot Chicken, The Venture Brothers, Tim and Eric, among many, many more shows.
For a week at the end of October at 4:00 a.m., Adult Swim aired this 11-minute alleged cheesy homage to 70’s/80s TV shows that soon morphs into something… well, even if you see it, you won’t believe it. On the surface, “Too Many Cooks” sucks the viewer into a friendly vortex of old-school TV nostalgia with seemingly familiar characters and premises but soon thereafter the warm fuzzies are gradually replaced by a deepening dread and general feeling of “What did I just watch?!” that will linger long after watching. (Even longer than the diabolically catchy earworm of a theme song!)
I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t seen it.
If you’re brave, check out the link here:
DON’T SAY I DIDN’T WARN YOU!!!
“Too Many Cooks” is pure genius– pure evil genius– brought to us by its creator, Chris “Casper” Kelly (who also is the creative mind behind the aforementioned “Squidbillies”). He states he just wanted to do something weird– in the vein of his idols David Lynch, Andy Kaufman and fellow Adult Swim alumni Tim and Eric– but never gets into the specifics of “what it means”. Perhaps he himself doesn’t know or even wants to mentally delve into the chaos he has wrought in his audience’s minds.
Perhaps the allure of “Too Many Cooks” is that no one knows what the hell it’s supposed to “mean”.
Well, let me venture a guess (and this is just speculation on my part…)
I believe the “meaning” behind the most bizarre 11-minutes of viewing EVER is an absurd illustration of the gradual and subversive gratuitous violence that has become the norm in Television programming. This incremental and ultimately dominant pernicious presence; constantly in our faces, making us long for the “Golden Era” of TV all the more, while trapping us in its nightmarish landscape of mindless, unadulterated carnage…
…Or I could be completely full of crap.
I’m sure college courses will be dedicated to dissecting this video for entire semesters in order to decipher its true meaning…
By the way, this has been trending on Twitter since FRIDAY as one of the most talked about topics. (As I type this, Too Many Cooks is Number Six of Ten US Trending Topics…)
Cassandra Tiphonie's World 