Twenty-Five Years of Adult Swim, Marathon Edition
Adult Swim turns 25, and IndieWire suggests marking it by watching the block's strangest artifacts online: the late-night programming oddities collected around the 'Infomercials' banner, among them 'Unedited Footage of a Bear' and 'This House Has People in It.' The argument IndieWire makes is that these should outlive the TV format that inspired them. It's a reasonable bet. The pieces work on the logic that a viewer flicks over late at night and can't quite tell what they're looking at — and that logic survives fine on a laptop.
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The infomercial parody is one of the few formats built specifically for the half-asleep viewer. Streaming gives you a menu, an episode title, and a synopsis — most of the ambush is gone.
The ambush was never really the format's point. The joke was the mismatch between a commercial's helpful tone and whatever these things actually are, and that reads the same at 2 a.m. or noon.