Adult Swim at 25: Why the ‘Infomercials’ Shorts Define a Quarter-Century of Surreal Innovation

On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark celebrates fringe cinema in the streaming era with midnight movies from across film history.

First, the BAIT: a curious genre selection and the reason we’re exploring its particular niche right now. Then, the BITE: a spoiler-rich answer to the essential question, “Is this cult classic actually worth recommending?”

The Bait: At Least Adult Swim Gave Me My Backstroke

I spend a lot of time hunched over my laptop. In independent film circles, my posture problem is so common it’s sometimes affectionately termed a “programmer’s hunch”—the spinal curvature that develops when every waking hour revolves around screening links and unanswered emails. But long before I was old enough to inflict this particular workplace injury on myself, I developed a different back issue, equally rooted in my love for discovering strange media.

As an underage Adult Swim fan, I spent much of my 2000s childhood sneaking downstairs to watch the late-night Cartoon Network programming block hours after being sent to bed. To avoid waking my family, I kept the volume low and pressed as close to the television as possible.

Lying prone on the carpet with my back arched like a question mark, I was utterly engrossed in what I was watching and physically incapable of relaxing for fear of being caught. Instead, adopting a stress position that produced the S-curve still affecting my structural integrity today, I felt every second of my most formative Adult Swim memories. Naturally, being a weird kid, I loved it: finding joy and even identity in witnessing content I wasn’t “supposed” to see. The discomfort was part of the appeal and, in its own way, made the risk worthwhile.

Earlier this month, my colleague Christian Zilko revived that feeling with his oral history of the cult platform. For Adult Swim’s 25th anniversary, IndieWire traced the scrappy, subversive sensibility that transformed a bold experiment into one of television’s most influential brands and, for people like me, a meaningful ritual. It’s a rollicking read and a rare instance where Hollywood executives sound genuinely cool. But the lineup’s iconic “Infomercials” deserve a special After Dark side quest.

Launched in 2009, when I was a teenager finally permitted to stay up past midnight, the “Infomercials” premise was deceptively simple. At 4 a.m., viewers already accustomed to lengthy advertisements for miracle products and questionable self-help programs encountered “paid” Adult Swim presentations that felt authentic but weren’t.

Innovative filmmakers like Alan Resnick and Casper Kelly exploited the bait-and-switch format to pursue arthouse ambitions and get exceptionally weird on broadcast television.

You likely know “Too Many Cooks,” which begins as an innocuous sitcom opening before endlessly adding credits, characters, and eventually a murderer. There’s also “Unedited Footage of a Bear,” where a pharmaceutical ad curdles into a nightmare. My personal favorite remains “This House Has People in It,” which transforms security footage into a sprawling suburban horror mystery.

Despite my newfound adolescent freedom in the early 2010s, I still remember watching these bizarre segments the same way I did as a child—lying on the carpet, close enough to hear every nonsensical word. Thankfully, most “Infomercials” shorts run only 10 to 12 minutes.

There’s a wonderfully mundane reason for that brevity. Adult Swim’s “Infomercials” were designed to fit a quarter-hour television slot with room left for commercials. Contextually, that’s just enough time to establish what you think you’re watching and then make you regret settling in.

Some “Infomercials” are funnier than others, and plenty show little interest in humor at all. What they share is an uncanny ability to make the machinery of television feel existentially unstable. So, in honor of Adult Swim turning 25, I recommend capping Cartoon Network’s month-long celebration with an “Infomercials” marathon—equal parts nostalgic and unsettling.

Watch a few you’ve never heard of (on YouTube or the official Adult Swim site), and resist the urge to read descriptions first. If your back can take it, get close to the screen, too. I’ll do the same. Probably. —Alison Foreman

The Bite: May the Kids Never Get Back in the Pool

I’ve spent much of September thinking about Adult Swim. It’s the 25th anniversary of an entertainment brand that means more to me than almost any other, and as Ali kindly noted, I wrote several pieces attempting to capture what it’s meant to the people who built it.

There’s so much to discuss—the singular shows, the talent it platformed, the fanbase it cultivated—but it all distills to a simple question: what is Adult Swim? And there’s no better way to answer it than by watching some Infomercials.

Adult Swim isn’t just a programming block, even if it’s been a great one that eventually surpassed the children’s programming it was designed to supplement. It isn’t just a tight-knit creative collective, even if many continue collaborating closely after 25 years of making cartoons in Atlanta together. It’s not just a comedic sensibility, even if “Adult Swim humor” has become a universally recognized cultural shorthand, even when applied to shows produced elsewhere. And calling it a vibe feels like a cop-out, even if that’s the fairest answer I can give.

More than anything, Adult Swim is a celebration of surprise. It shocked viewers who left Cartoon Network on too late and were ushered into maturity by “Family Guy” reruns at too young an age. It shocked animation enthusiasts who never expected to see Shaggy and Scooby tried for marijuana possession or Space Ghost hosting a talk show. And it shocked countless night owls who spent endless hours watching cable in the early morning, never certain what weirdness would air next.

That’s the brilliance of the Infomercials, and why Adult Swim was the perfect platform for visionaries like Alan Resnick and Casper Kelly. Watching a cheesy sitcom opening mutate into a bloody field day for a time-traveling serial killer, or bear footage dissolve into a pharmaceutical nightmare, represents the ultimate expression of that unapologetic commitment to keeping audiences off-balance.

For such a small programming block, Adult Swim exerted a massive, outsized influence on the shared vocabulary we now recognize as “internet humor.” The surrealism, media pastiches, and willingness to put dark spins on familiar nostalgia are immediately legible to anyone chronically online, even if they never watched “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” at 2 a.m. It also raises the question of whether Adult Swim inadvertently helped create a future in which it may have little part.

So much of its brilliance lay in its advantage over the viewer: the ability to show anything while you sat captive. I’m uncertain that feeling can be recreated in an age of infinite content. Perhaps that’s not even undesirable—maybe we need fewer surprises while we catch our breath—but it’s absolutely cause to spend an evening celebrating the extraordinary artistic achievement of Adult Swim’s first quarter-century. Whatever the next iteration looks like, I’ll be watching. —Christian Zilko

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