• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, November 11, 2014

The answer is: Probably. Once a video like “Too Many Cooks” takes off in popularity, it’s not really possible to blunt the spread of its notoriety by pointing out its flaws.

These things are not like movies or regular TV shows. Reviews of those are so routine that readers of critical content online, in newspapers or in magazines expect to read reviews, in the days leading up to their premieres, of just about every new movie or TV show that comes along. 

But videos like “Too Many Cooks” have this very intriguing way of bypassing critical scrutiny. For one thing, “Too Many Cooks” -- which has suddenly emerged as pop culture’s Video Craze of the Week -- apparently premiered unannounced last month early one morning at 4 a.m. on Turner’s Adult Swim animation channel (part of Cartoon Network). No preview DVD was provided to critics, who then had no opportunity to give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down. (Perhaps it would have been ignored, anyway, since critics these days are often much too deluged with “real” TV shows to devote much time to considering -- and writing about -- a one-off oddball like “Too Many Cooks.”

After that, word of “Too Many Cooks” spread via social media (presumably) and many began looking it up on YouTube. This morning at around 11 (Nov. 11), the tally of views on YouTube was up over 1.6 million and continuing to rise.

What is “Too Many Cooks”? At its heart, it is an 11-minute spoof of several types of TV shows that were prevalent in the 1980s and ’90s -- family sitcoms, cop shows and animated superhero shows of the sort once seen on Saturday morning TV.

“Too Many Cooks” is the title of the fictional family sitcom that forms the basis for the video. “Too Many Cooks” is also the phrase that is most repeated in this video’s theme song -- which is a parody of the sort of sitcom theme songs once heard on sitcoms such as “The Facts of Life,” “Full House” and “Growing Pains.”

The “joke” stems from the way this theme song goes on and on, while an ever-increasing (and ludicrous) number of cast members –- from kids to grandparents -- are introduced. The video soon becomes an opening-title sequence without end, supported by a theme song that eventually wears out its welcome. And yet, you cannot get this tune out of your head after watching this (you’ve been warned).

To a great degree, this video’s length is essential to the way it tells its “joke.” And yet, the joke was more than adequately told after just a few minutes -- which is to say: “Too Many Cooks” is too long. Moreover, it morphs at various times into something other than a spoof of a family sitcom called “Too Many Cooks.” 

You might even go so far as to declare that this video “jumps the shark” (a phrase whose roots go back to the 1970s and another saccharine sitcom, “Happy Days”) at several points. For me, the thread becomes irretrievably lost at about four minutes and 30 seconds into it, when a serial killer appears and then goes about hacking people to death with a machete.  

At 11 minutes, “Too Many Cooks” is so long that you might wonder if most of the people whose views are being counted on YouTube actually stuck around to watch the whole thing (on YouTube, your “view” is counted as soon as you click in, regardless of whether you watch an entire video or not).

During several attempts at watching “Too Many Cooks” in its entirety over the last few days, I found myself looking at my watch and pausing the video many times to undertake other tasks. It wasn’t until this morning that I managed to get through the whole thing in one sitting – and only because I was planning to write about it.

And yet, as I write these final sentences on this blog post, I find that the YouTube views for “Too Many Cooks” have increased by more than 4,000 in the last hour or so. “Too Many Cooks” has gone viral, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.