On Friday, office workers trying to make it through the last hours before the weekend were given a particularly useful, if unsettling, diversion: “Too Many Cooks,” an eleven-minute video that its creator, Casper Kelly, describes as an “80’s Sitcom Fever Dream.” The video begins as a parody of the musical introductions for family shows like “Eight Is Enough” or “Just the Ten of Us”—with a repetitive theme song that plays on the aphorism that too many cooks can spoil the broth—before turning into a scene of bloody, murderous, cross-genre mayhem. The video had been playing every night that week on television, in the wee morning hours on Adult Swim, before being shared on Reddit and then getting piped out through various social branches to the rest of the Web. The best way to pass the video on was simply to present it without much description: Watch this, it’s weird. Or else: It’s terrifying, genius, amazing, or insane. (And keep an eye out for Smarf, a stuffed puppet that looks like the product of Alf mating with a cat rather than eating one.)

Soon, “Too Many Cooks” had gotten the full Internet treatment. The creators had been located and debriefed. Redditors had complained that the thing they found and promoted had been co-opted and mined for clicks by other sites. It prompted thousands of questions on Twitter: Didn’t the killer in the video look like Slavoj Žižek? Why was Lars von Trier credited with playing a pie? Does Victoria Sun have a boyfriend? Has David Lynch seen it? BuzzFeed provided the “definitive ranking” of its favorite characters in the montage. Fake Twitter handles started appearing for members of its fake cast. What did it all mean? Maybe everything: it was a postmodern satire of television and Web culture, a commentary on the power of nostalgia, a glimpse at the violence that lurks within us all. Perhaps it was a deconstruction on the very idea of virality itself: it’s the Internet that has too many cooks, and all of us, together, with our sharing and repeated clever comments and urge to be the first to share what thousands of others have already shared, have spoiled the broth. Or else it meant nothing, and quit it, you dummies.

I’d never seen anything quite like “Too Many Cooks,” but, as stated above, this was mostly a scheduling issue. The video was an introduction to the wild late-night world of Adult Swim (I’m reliably asleep at 4 A.M. these days), and the so-called “infomercials” that the network occasionally slips into its schedule. Before “Too Many Cooks,” there was “Broomshakalaka,” in which a spokesman attempts to hawk multipurpose brooms in a desperate attempt to bring his dead daughter back to life; and “For-Profit Online University,” which promotes an online college that is menaced by a sentient Web bot named Howard. In another video, “Swords, and Knives, and Very Sharp Objects, and Cutlery,” a QVC-style set is home to acts of cartoonish and gruesome injury.

These and Adult Swim’s other fake infomercials share a similar, demented sensibility: contemporary television entertainment transposed back to the days of carnival grotesques and turned into the stuff of addled nightmares. They take familiar scraps of capitalist culture and reform them into cringe-inducing gross-outs. And, at just over ten minutes, they try your patience, and they might not even be exactly funny at all. Part of the minor social miracle of “Too Many Cooks” is that so many people have sat through the longest opening credits in the history of television, real or otherwise, a laugh turning to a fixed smile and then becoming a grimace. (Did that guy’s head just get chopped off? Why’d they have to incinerate Smarf?) And we’ve been left humming an inane theme song, which, at this point, might as well have belonged to a show that really existed.