The Absurd Adult Swim Short That Predicted Our Sloppification

By Robert Scucci
| Published 38 seconds ago

If there’s one piece of media that sums up our current consumption habits, it has to be Adult Swim’s Too Many Cooks. It’s an 11-minute musical short that plays out like a classic family sitcom intro before quickly going off the rails, devolving into sci-fi, crime procedurals, medical dramas, and even slasher territory before it concludes. The song itself is about how when there’s too many cooks in the pot, everybody loses the plot, and then we just kind of have to roll with it.

The segment originally aired on October 28, 2014 during Adult Swim’s Infomercials block, debuting at 4:00 a.m. Having seen this one live in real time, I remember wondering what the hell I ate before bed, and then when I looked it up the next day, it all started to make sense. It wasn’t a fever dream, but it plays like one. When you’re drifting in and out of sleep, it just seems like a bunch of senseless non sequiturs, but the more you unpack it, the more obvious it becomes that this bit, written and directed by Casper Kelly, was more prophetic than it had any right to be.

It’s slop, but it’s satirical slop. Looking back at it now, it feels like a warning shot.

It Takes A Lot To Make A Stew, A Pinch Of Salt And Laughter Too!

Too Many Cooks starts out like any other family sitcom from the ‘70s, ‘80s, or ‘90s. A sickeningly upbeat song plays while the principal characters are introduced. The problem is, the characters never stop being introduced. It just keeps going. First, it’s your typical nuclear family. Then there’s a talking puppet cat. Then we’re introduced to people in the neighborhood. Suddenly, you start to notice that one guy has been lurking in the background the entire time, and he just so happens to be a serial killer on the loose, primed to go on a rampage.

The short runs its audience through every genre imaginable, and the characters keep coming. Even worse, everybody living in Too Many Cooks becomes vaguely aware they’re trapped in a never-ending sitcom intro loop, and there’s no escape. The glowing floating signs that tell us each character’s name are actually real, and they follow the characters around. This becomes especially inconvenient when a damsel in distress hides from the crazed killer in her closet, only for her name sign to illuminate through the slats in the door.

Pushing into increasingly dark territory, the most harrowing sequence in Too Many Cooks involves the girl running through the production lot, the music coming and going depending on where she’s located. It creates a Doppler effect that’s infinitely more unnerving if you’re listening with headphones. It makes everything feel real, as if you’re running for your life while an upbeat song plays from the other room, almost like it’s laughing at you.

Things get truly absurd when Too Many Cooks goes full-on Battlestar Galactica, introducing an entire sci-fi premise where the serial killer is now loose in space, and C.O.O.K.S. stands for Cybernetic Operational Optimized Knights of Science, who defend humanity against the Beast Rebels of the Hellscape, or B.R.o.T.H., boasting the tagline, “When it comes to the future, you can never have too many cooks.”

Too Many Cooks Predicted Conformity Gate

Too Many Cooks is a prime example of what happens when too many people get involved in a single project. Without a hint of irony, it reminds me of Stranger Things Season 5. What started as a simple cosmic horror Netflix series with a tight, ensemble cast playing into our fear of the unknown, suddenly named its primary antagonist Henry and made him a weird tentacle tree monster. The mysterious Upside Down that robbed Hawkins, Indiana of its safety and innocence suddenly had dozens of rules and explanations, and none of it made sense. It just kept barreling forward, becoming increasingly ridiculous, convoluted, and unhinged, completely unaware of the fact that it lost the plot after Season 3.

Suddenly, the ensemble cast featured way too many secondary, tertiary, and ancillary characters taking on more significant roles, leaving little room for the growing staff writers, producers, directors, guest stars, and guest directors to properly housekeep. It got so bad that by the time Stranger Things wrapped for good, half its fanbase had a psychotic break, broke down every continuity error, and used them as “evidence” to suggest there’s actually a secret series finale coming that will somehow make it all better. An embarrassing blip on our screens known as “Conformity Gate.”

That’s the pun. That’s the joke. There were too many cooks in the pot, and what started as one thing became something else entirely. Across 11 minutes, the shift is gradual at first, but then it barrels headfirst into a surreal void of insanity that never lets up or makes any sense. Too Many Cooks is funny as its own standalone bit, but looking at the bigger picture, and how shows are jammed through a slop machine and written by committee today, it certainly feels like one writer’s desperate attempt to warn us about what was coming, and we didn’t listen.

It’s only fitting that Too Many Cooks, which is available to watch on Adult Swim’s YouTube channel, plays out like a show that jumped the shark years ago but doesn’t know how to call it quits. After all, it’s 12 years later, and we’re still getting new episodes of The Simpsons.