That Day The Internet Discovered Adult Swim's 'Too Many Cooks'

It's always funny to me when I see how/why certain things become viral. Watching people suddenly "discover" something that has been around for awhile is a reminder that even very good things can easily be overlooked in this waterhose of content that comes our way every day.

Today's example is the amount of attention that's being given to the Adult Swim project "Too Many Cooks," which aired at 4:00 a.m. several days ago. There have been a raft of pieces written about it over the last 24 hours, many of them along the lines of "Look at what was airing on Adult Swim instead of an infomercial."

But fans of the network already know that Adult Swim has been using this 4:00 a.m. timeslot as a hidden gift and/or dumping ground for a couple of years. While the time-slot is shown in most program listings as an "infomercial," what sometimes airs at that time is some weird, often impossible to describe infomercial parody.

There was the "live" infomercial for an all-purpose broom called the "Broomshakalaka," in which host Denny Boffa finds things go very, very, wrong. Or the odd promo for the "Newbridge Tourism Bureau." To say nothing of tech genius Alan Resnick, who shows viewers how to live forever with their own digital avatar.

While all of those faux infomercials have their charm, "Too Many Cooks" stands out because it's not a commercial parody, but a strange tribute to 1980s sitcoms. It's a subject that's in the sweet spot for TV fans, who are lot more likely to rave about this project than an infomercial about a remote-controlled whoopee cushion named the "Fartcopter."

Here is the "Too Many Cooks" episode, along with a couple of other earlier treats: