Too Many Cooks – internet outsider art or a glimpse into hell?

The video by Adult Swim  has captivated and confounded the internet since it was thrown up last week.

Casper Kelly, a writer whose other Adult Swim credits include Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell, has flipped the tables on viral videos, which usually slot into the Man Getting Hit By Football category. Too Many Cooks is a sprawling work of surrealism, initially riffing on credit sequences of anodyne 1980s US TV before descending into, well, something.

It begins benignly enough, parodying the “family programming” opening credits that instantly focus on nostalgia and irony. Then a series of repetitions begin, with the initial sweding giving way to more sinister undertones and an uneasy sense of foreboding. As the video flicks through genres – family sitcoms, a cheesy adventure cartoon, a melodrama about rich people, a detective show, a cop show – it descends into a murder bonanza as a serial killer stalks each genre.

Once you start to wonder whether this is in fact Aphex Twin’s pitch for a sitcom, the whole thing becomes both meta and/or inverted, as a hospital scene unfolds, followed by a dying Alf-like cat character. Let the conspiracy theories and Easter egg hunting begin.

Is it a reaction to the news that Twin Peaks is reborn? Proof that Prince will finally play Glastonbury? A CIA reprogramming tool? Or just a brilliant work of contemporary net-based surrealism at a non-internet-friendly 11 minutes? Nothing makes sense, yet everything makes sense. Do we finally have some decent internet outsider art? Answers on a Lars von Trier pie.