4 out of 5

Created by: Casper Kelly

Airing in Adult Swim’s late night / early morning infomercial spot, the 11-minute exercise in oddball creative freedom by Casper Kelly has – thanks to our wonderful internetty age – achieved notoriety in less than 24 after its airing.  These things nowadays tend to come and go, but ‘Cooks’ has enough gusto and outre humor to keep it worth discussing / viewing after the fact.  The bit is a title sequence for an imagined TV called ‘Too Many Cooks,’ which may or may not be a laugh-track sitcom about a family named ‘Cook…’ at first, until the video starts morphing into every possible 70s / 80s / 90s  TV show trope (cop show, outer space show, medical drama, etc.), all while variations on an amusingly annoying themesong continue to burble and the building cast member list mugs to the camera while their name is blazened beneath.  Kelly manages to pace things such that once one joke becomes tired, he roles out a new spin on it, and then when you’re starting to wonder how this thing goes on for 10+ minutes, you realize there’s a creepy dude named Bob who’s hanging around in every scene, and now he’s brandishing a knife…  Let it suffice to say that Kelly doesn’t stick strictly to his initial joke, 4th-walling it a frighteningly amusing way before reeling it back in for the conclusion.

People are clamoring for this to be a series, but that’s a horrible idea: the pleasure of something like this is its one-off, isolated WTF nature.  How do you expand on this without tarnishing the punchline?

From my haughty 4 out of 5 stars perspective, the transition between show parodies is initially handled well as Casper sticks to similar sitcoms, but once he branches out to Law & Order and G.I.Joe, there’s literally no transition, the song just pauses, scene change, and then it’s a different genre.  But it’s still meant to be the same show, as the joined cast-member ‘photo’ at the end seems to suggest.  When ‘Cooks’ makes the jump beyond the 4th wall, it’s done perfectly, so the smooth shift, I think, was possible, and would’ve helped to nail this down into a seamless slab of genius if applied the whole way through; those pauses gave me the breather I needed to laugh, when stuff like this works better when you’re caught in half-wonderment / half-confusion the whole time.