Dazed and confused at 4 a.m. on a Thursday morning, you sit on your couch flipping through channels wondering how and why you’re still awake. You come across an infomercial; the perfect lullaby to free you from your pseudo-lucidity.
The infomercial seems normal enough; a nice fellow is trying to sell you some fancy knives and decorative swords in a QVC-style shopping segment, but something seems off.
Welcome to Adult Swim’s infomercials. Aired at 4 a.m. eastern time, or 3 a.m. central time, every weekday.
Each is a surreal parody of some sort of Billy Mays style product pitch, religious fundraising program, campy 80s sitcom or any other cheesy program you might see playing at your grandmother’s house.
The infomercials all follow a common structure. Each one starts off like a normal infomercial, but soon takes a trip down the rabbit hole, spiraling into a bizarre insanity. “What on earth did I just watch?” will probably be your first thought after watching any of the episodes.
Adult Swim experimented with this sort of programming back in 2009 when it aired the pilot for a show called “Paid Programming” created by comics David Cross (known for his role as Tobias Funke in “Arrested Development”) and H. Jon Benjamin (known for his work as the voice of Archer from “Archer” and Bob from “Bob’s Burgers”).
The show only lasted one episode and was an infomercial about a fictional medicine called Icelandic Ultra Blue. The pilot was aired unannounced by Adult Swim and brought much confusion to the viewers who saw it.
Adult Swim decided to bring back the infomercial parody show concept with its new infomercial series, which first aired Oct. 13, 2014. The pilot was an episode called “The Salad Mixxxer,” which was a 1960’s infomercial advertising an interestingly shaped fictional product used for tossing salads, among other things.
One episode in particular has been generating a lot of buzz around the Internet lately, which is an episode called “Too Many Cooks.” The show is a satire of all those awful, goofy sitcom opening credit sequences from the 80s and 90s. The same opening sequence repeats for most of the episode, each time getting stranger and parodying cliché sitcom tropes. The episode reaches a disturbingly bonkers climax that has to be seen to truly understand.
Conveniently, the episode is available free online on YouTube and Adult Swim’s website, Adultswim.com. In fact, nearly all of the infomercials are available for free online.
This sort of programming is really what makes Adult Swim great. Adult Swim is able to successfully air shows that would never be able to be aired on any other network, and because of that it has become one of the most interesting, and certainly the most unpredictable, networks on television.
