The absurd, strange, and surprisingly violent Adult Swim short Too Many Cooks first hit the air one year ago, at least one full week before the Internet would notice it and catapult the video to instant notoriety. That's not a slight on bloggers—it's a miracle Too Many Cooks even got noticed at all, airing at 4:00 a.m. on October 28, as a part of Adult Swim's Infomercials block of programming, completely unannounced. But it did get noticed, in a pretty big way.

First, let's look back at the video, which, if you haven't come across it in the past twelve months, really deserves to be watched as cold as possible. Seriously, the less you know, the better. Stick around to the end:

A postmodern parody of overlong and saccharine sitcom openings from the '80s and '90s, Too Many Cooks looks like its joke will simply be that it's an excessively long and saccharine sitcom opening for an old sitcom that doesn't exist. Which would have been a pretty funny joke in itself, but then things take a turn. Throughout the credits, there's a serial killer lurking in the background. About four minutes in, the theme song/intro—which never really stops running—starts to turn into a madcap homage to at least three dozen other old TV shows, as the serial killer becomes impossible not to notice. Then he starts killing everyone, and shit gets real weird.

If you saw Too Many Cooks, it was impossible not to talk about. There's just so much bonkers stuff going on! But what got a bit lost in the ridiculousness of it all was the fact that Too Many Cooks did not occur in a vaccuum: It was just the latest installment of Adult Swim's super-weird and utterly brilliant Infomercials "show."

There are just over a dozen installments of Infomercials listed on Adult Swim's website. They are, mostly, styled to look like actual infomercials. But even if they aren't, their titles more or less tell you what to expect for at least the first thirty seconds. Anything after that is open season.

Take, for example Unedited Footage of a Bear. This was the first Infomercial to air after Too Many Cooks, and because of its proximity to a viral phenomenon, some outlets wrote about it, thinking the interest level would be the same. It wasn't though, probably because Unedited Footage of a Bear is arguably the most fucked-up thing that aired on television in all of 2014. Check it out if you want, but be warned it will mess you up.

Most Infomercials are like this: Ostensibly boring, meant to be ignored, so they can sneak the bizarre, absurd, and disturbing past you almost completely unawares. It is arguably where television's most mischievous art-house raconteurs have free reign to do just about anything, and they pretty much do. But for the three years it has been on the air (from 2012 to the present, following an aborted 2009 pilot titled Paid Programming) there hasn't been an Infomercial that went viral in nearly the same way.