What’s Behind Our Obsession With “Too Many Cooks”

[eShirl]

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jacelacob/whats-behind-our-obsession-with-too-many-cooks

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“Too Many Cooks” is, on the surface, initially a parody of 1970s and 1980s sitcoms that once populated the television landscape. These are the types of shows you might recall watching from the couch of your grandparents’ house, shows like The Brady Bunch, Three’s Company, Family Matters, and Perfect Strangers with their familiar theme songs and title sequences, once hallmarks of the sitcom form. They’re insidiously comfortable in a way; it’s often impossible to watch just one of these. Networks wisely capitalized on this, building entire programming blocks around anodyne shows — many of which were family comedies — that were, in their ways, almost identical to one another. There’s a setup, a beat, a punch line. Cue the laugh track and pause. There’s a cheer when a beloved character enters the room, an audible and predictable reaction whenever a character kisses another or when a character gets in trouble or puts another in their place.

This is the communal language of television; we all know and understand these cues instinctively — know when to laugh, when to grimace, when to cheer. On “Too Many Cooks,” it may not be exactly Family Matters or Perfect Strangers that you’re reminded of, but an infinite number of other, similarly structured sitcoms that are recognizable callbacks to a very different time in comedies. It’s a conceptual lure, rather than a specific one, that “Too Many Cooks” casts out, capturing an era before the rise of single-cams and the eradication of theme songs and title sequences. It was still a time where everybody knew your name and, as the song tells us, they were always glad you came. Where the actors would stop what they were doing and look up and smile at the camera, a literal welcome to the viewer, a psychological semaphore waving right at you, the actor’s name emblazoned in yellow beneath their toothy glare. Because it’s part of our pop culture DNA, we know instinctively what this signals and what it represents. It is pure bubble gum nostalgia, saccharine and devoid of calories, and that look of false acknowledgement toward the viewer makes us complicit in what it’s selling.

Which is why it’s interesting that “Too Many Cooks” aired during Adult Swim’s 4 a.m. block, which has hosted a number of fake infomercials, those ubiquitous and vapid marketing exercises that stoners and insomniacs love-hate in their own ways, recalling the very archetypes that Western civilization holds as precious. Highly unnecessary junk is dressed up as something essential and vital as perfect families gather around the dinner table to eat baked potatoes and steak cooked with improbable gadgets. It’s a hairbrush that holds an iPhone. Or a food dehydrator. Or an exercise tool that’s guaranteed to make you lose weight and regain your sexual attractiveness. You need this, they whisper.

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And so “Too Many Cooks” takes this setup — the familiar title sequence, those yellow actor names, the trite adage masquerading as a punny title — and subverts the form and the audience expectations. A family comedy using the title and theme song morphs into a black family comedy into a cop drama into a G.I. Joe cartoon into a cheesy sci-fi space opera (C.O.O.K.S. “defending humanity” against B.R.O.T.H.) into a medical drama ad infinitum, recycling and reusing archetypes we’ve seen a thousand times. But the sketch is more than just playing with these forms; it quickly becomes darker, more surreal (Lars von Trier as “Pie”), and more malevolent. That happy couple now kisses other lovers, that sexy neighbor is now always topless, and that adorable cat is now bleeding as it attempts to crawl, painfully, across the kitchen floor. This, Kelly seems to say, is not what you expected or craved — it is going to take your nostalgia and smash it into a billion pieces.

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