The zenith of Adult Swim’s ongoing paid programming parodies delves into the craven madness of prescription drug commercials

“The spectacle is nothing more than an image of happy unification surrounded by desolation and fear at the tranquil center of misery.” — Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

In 1966, Andy Warhol made not one but two films starring the over-the-counter pain medication Bufferin. In Bufferin — a single-reel quasi-portrait of Gerard Malanga — Warhol’s on-again-off-again Superstar reads from his diary but replaces all the names with the eponymous aspirin. Bufferin Commercial, on the other hand, was commissioned by Grey Advertising Agency and filmed in front of a live audience of ad execs and creatives. The film consists of two reels, one silent and one sound, possibly meant to be projected simultaneously, depicting a group of Factory regulars sitting around and casually chatting, mainly about Bufferin, floating some questionable applications and unproven health benefits. Long story short, the corporate overlords behind Bufferin caught wind and balked at this out-there attempt at brand synergy. Strangely enough, the following year, in 1967, a pre-Muppets Jim Henson also created an experimental Bufferin ad, this one sanctioned by the pill pushers at Bristol-Myers. It would take another 30 years for Rx commercials to flood the TV market in earnest, when regulations inevitably relaxed in 1997.

Even in Warhol’s and Henson’s prehistoric medicinal chicanery, there are inklings of a formula emerging. Strip away the “bad filmmaking” affectations of Bufferin Commercial and you have the easy chemistry of a group of smiling friends in a romanticized setting. Squint past the heartache and Dada Mad Libs of Bufferin and you have a relatable personal narrative about the intransigent desire for healing. Plus, bonus, it incidentally predicts the gestalt of hypnotic brand name repetition. Disregard Henson’s migraine-inducing edits, bleached compositions, and far-out vibe and you’re left with a portrait of motherhood shot through with shame and anxiety. These tropes were so ripe for the picking by the end of the century that when Rx TV commercials became omnipresent, it felt as if these pathologically cheerful images had always been with us.

And so, the parodies became commonplace: innocuous, obvious, honey-dipped riffs on the banal evil we agree to tolerate. Drug commercial parodies are safe and comforting in their own way — silly, toothless nuggets that lightly rib the artifice of advertising, the cynicism of marketing at its most mechanical. Shilling absurd products with outrageous side effects, these skits notch up the breezy tableaus just enough to glimpse the undercurrents of desperation and delusion. Yet, no parody can fully account for the destabilizing internal logic of the prescription drug extended universe, where internal medicine dissolves in a never-ending montage of sun-dappled contentment. Attempts to short-circuit the semiotics are ultimately helpless in the face of the genuine article. In this bizarro realm, abominations roam free, disembodied extremities and organs with their own interiority — bipedal digestive tracts, doe-eyed bladders, slovenly mucus globules, cantankerous prostates, destitute fecal inmates, et al. And language as we know it is no longer a rich and varied means for communication and understanding, but rather an empty vessel machine-tooled to inhibit and confuse.¹

Alan Resnick and Ben O’Brien’s Unedited Footage of a Bear, the duo’s second entry in the sporadic late-night Infomercials series on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, comes closest to reverse engineering the craven madness that fuels drug ads. When Infomercials began — the brainchild of H. Jon Benjamin and David Cross, who created the pilot, Icelandic Ultra Blue — the element of surprise, of deviant shorts aired during the dead zone of the early morning under the auspices of so-called paid programming, was the raison d’être. But as the concept evolved, the loose collection of episodes falling under this umbrella became stranger, more steeped in surrealism, bleaker and more self-referential, and more boldly experimental. This unpredictable witching hour time slot became a sandbox for a generation of mercenary, alt-comedy journeymen and video artists to unleash their gnarliest ideas with a budget. Unedited Footage of a Bear is the zenith of the series and a quantum leap from Wham City mates O’Brien and Resnick’s first short, episode 7, Live Forever as You Are Now with Alan Resnick, a more straightforward tech demo gone awry.

Live Forever was already venturing into the Uncanny Valley populated by soulless doppelgängers, but Unedited Footage of a Bear ups the ante considerably. It is a sophisticated Debordian fever dream suffused with Freudian anxiety and pulled through a cathode ray tube, darkly. The brilliance of Unedited Footage of a Bear is that in its unhinged mania it finds resonance in the real world. In this tongue-in-cheek extended ad for the medication Claridryl, the full expression of the chemically-induced side effects crest in a wave of paranoia, mental deterioration, and dissociation. It contaminates this psychedelic world and pits its Claridryl user against a raging avatar of her self-loathing, self-destructiveness, and latent violent impulses. But it also slyly likens the narcotizing effects of TV to the din from a controlled substance — one opiate of the masses for another. TV is designed to reward passive viewing but Unedited Footage of a Bear hijacks your attention for a disorienting 11 minutes. This is as much a tragedy as it is a parody.

Two months before Unedited Footage of a Bear, episode 12 broke Infomercials wide open. To that point, Infomercials largely featured variations on a form: late-night, quarter-hour commercials for hazardous, plainly ridiculous products and services. But Casper Kelly’s glorious, Boschian earworm Too Many Cooks, a viral hit, swerved in a new direction: metastasizing nostalgia in the form of a circa-early-’90s TV intro that never ends. As adventurous as Too Many Cooks was, it still had a coherent comedic formula: an episodic structure, modulated comic escalation, recognizable world-building, an out-of-place slasher villain, and a final, inevitable punchline. But on December 16, 2014 at 4 a.m. EST, Unedited Footage of a Bear, episode 18, dragged Infomercials into the realm of the avant-garde and punctuated phase two of the series. At the same time, it effectively crystallized this hyperspecific era of Adult Swim experimental programming — imbued with both the cable access performance art of the waning Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! YouTube era and the edgelord pranksterism of the ascendant Reddit-fueled Rick and Morty era — and, quite possibly, eulogized TV as a medium.

We begin with serene, shimmering footage of a grizzly bear. Barely audible whispers can be heard from onlookers awestruck by the gentle creature and its adorable ears. Then, a fade to black as we cut to a commercial interruption — because, in the Faustian bargain of TV, even mood-setting, ostensibly pristine footage needs to accommodate a word from the sponsors. An ad for the OTC medication Claridryl cuts in. A mother (Jacqueline Donelli) supervises her kids on the playground while enduring a debilitating constellation of symptoms — headache, congestion, fatigue, shame, inadequacy. The world around her is gloomy, desaturated, and claustrophobic. Even the jungle gym taunts her, spelling out “BAD” and “????” subliminally — one of several flourishes that split the difference between blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gags and expressionist horror. But Claridryl “Acts Immediately, Lasts Indefinitely”™, restoring the vibrant colors of the park and her neighborhood cul-de-sac. For a brief, blissful moment, her daily routine is tolerable once again.

As she drives home in her minivan through her plasticine neighborhood, a soft-spoken narrator starts reading through Claridryl’s fine print, but the voice, and the woman’s drug-assisted relief, slowly fade. She reaches into the glove compartment for another hit, her backseat strewn with empty bottles. A fissure opens in the façade of her safe and secure hometown; she passes an active crime scene on the block. A police officer cries on the front lawn; a raving man is taken into custody, screaming in her direction as she rubbernecks; body bags sit unattended in the driveway; and garbage bags of confounding evidence are carried from the house. Further down the road, she slams on the breaks, gets out of the car, and sees a menacing figure far in the distance — the long street flattening into the shape of a nasal spray cap. Her doppelgänger advances with unnatural speed and overtakes her, beating her bloody in the street then backing her vehicle over her.

In this perfectly manicured, endlessly repeating Baltimore neighborhood, something unspeakable happens, or has happened, at 6506 Clarington Rd. The Replacement (Kerry Donelli) takes over the family’s house, terrorizes the kids, defaces the family portraits, and regresses. Dan Deacon’s score charts the descent into a zonked freakout dance party. She has difficulty acclimating to the physical world, moving awkwardly, unnaturally through space — exaggerated psychomotor effects from Claridryl penetrating the blood-brain barrier. Her aggression is directed at the stressors that pushed her predecessor over the edge — her children, her cookie-cutter suburban house, her neighborhood rival/alter-ego Donna, as well as her crumbling self-worth — culminating in a murderous rampage that is implied but not shown.

Notice how the street name and the medication name collapse together, and how the new suffix evokes both monotony and power tools. It’s not entirely clear what Claridryl has been designed to treat, which is largely in keeping with the nature of pharma commercials. The drug it most resembles in branding, packaging, and name is Claritin,² an antihistamine. But Claridryl adds some intense, Substance D-like psychoactive properties. Drug ads embody a distinctly American brand of advertising that is exceedingly pushy, hyperbolic, melodramatic, and starkly transactional. New Zealand has DTC drug ads, too — the only other industrialized country that allows them — but frankly the promotions Down Under can’t hold a candle to the zeal of U.S. ads. Following suit, Claridryl is an ouroboros oil that seems to target generalized disaffection. This mother’s plight is resonant and achingly relatable: a weary, alienated woman desperate to cope is literally locked in a life-or-death battle with a vicious, feral version of herself. The idea of basing this fake medicine on undefined adverse effects from the environment is a potent one. It effectively equates dander and clinical depression, airborne allergens and diffuse dread.

These commercials in particular thrive on your psychological helplessness, and the spongy state of mind TV abides. The nondescript uplift is meant to linger in your memory just long enough so that you can ask your doctor about the gobbledygook but not so long that you can recall what exactly it is you’re taking. They trust that you will follow their illogic unquestioningly, or at least they can wear down your defenses with tortured catchphrases, legalese, marketing lingo stretched to the brink, grotesque-cutesy mascots, and sterile brand names. At the same time, the undercurrents of body horror are for real; they provide an incessant reminder of how fragile and fallible our bodily functions really are. They relish your budding hypochondria as they depict a world of pestilence — a population beset by high blood-pressure and moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis — while simultaneously spoon-feeding benign, interchangeable images of people playing tennis, laughing amongst friends at generic restaurants, or playing hide-and-seek with suspiciously compliant grandchildren. In the decade since Unedited Footage of a Bear first seeped into the groundwater, the discourse around prescription drugs has intensified considerably. The fallout of the opioid epidemic and widespread toxic skepticism about medical science makes Resnick’s and O’Brien’s gauntlet more relevant and more foreboding. Unedited Footage of a Bear can’t help but play now like Brave New World awkwardly retrofitted for an attention deficient new millennium.

The best entries of Infomercials — additionally, Cool Dad, Gigglefudge, U.S.A., Joe Pera Talks You to Sleep, Check It Out! with Scott Clam, Adult Swim Yule Log — are about succumbing to the labyrinth of pop culture. Their toxicology shows traces of experimental video art, character-based improv, and conceptual sketch comedy. They construct self-contained, unstable, often hostile environments out of warped cultural ephemera. In form and function, they are about being trapped by the media you consume and they are designed to trap you. Unedited Footage of a Bear in particular is suspended over the precipice between the regularly scheduled TV format of yore and the multimedia hybrids of the future. This Ludovico-esque nightmare fuel was unleashed on the porous consciousness of unsuspecting insomniacs at their most vulnerable and then released into the digital wild. In generations past, in lieu of dead air, the early hours wasteland became the domain of charlatans pitching knife sets, dubious self-help philosophies, and redundant CD comps. These days, you’re more likely to wake up to a message asking if you’re still watching.

Unedited Footage of a Bear is right at home as YouTube clickbait, where its misleading title can slip through the algorithm. The official video on Adult Swim’s YouTube channel still has an oversized scar: the unclickable “Skip Ad” burned into the beginning of the Claridryl ad (plus a timer that counts up instead of running down), one more Pavlovian layer in this PSYOP. When the episode was first posted, this phantom button opened a trap door to another level of the Unedited Footage of a Bear experience. The Claridryl website (created with visual artist Dina Kelberman) only lives on now in the Wayback Machine. This site was an intentionally buggy exercise in frustration. If you click at random long enough, it eventually reveals a point-and-click game. In this dead end, you enter and tour the house where Unedited Footage of a Bear reaches its unnerving climax. There are horrors to discover: bodies fused to the vinyl floors (foreshadowing This House Has People in It), fresh graves in the backyard, and lawn chairs arranged for target practice. You’re basically invited to inhabit the perspective of the Replacement. If you let the website sit long enough, it eventually fades to a tiny 8-bit rendering of the mom in the yellow sweater running for her life forever through a gray void.

All this to say that Unedited Footage of a Bear is indeed a comedy — and one of the signature feats of anti-comedy this century at that. The high-wire prank is itself the joke; its punkish sense of humor is devious and pitch black. Unedited Footage of a Bear is functionally the opposite of palliative; it’s a shock to the system, a sneak attack that harshes your mellow. Like so many Rx parodies that came before and after it, Resnick and O’Brien are amused by the morbid side effects that the megacorporations hide in plain sight. They are better attuned to the insidiousness of the double-speak and spin it into their shrewdest running gag: juxtaposing, and arguably undercutting, the cavalcade of horrific images with miniscule but rambling on-screen text that dares you to look away. The Claridryl fine print is magnificently inane and meandering, a bramble of dependent clauses full of contradictions and stone-faced absurdism (“See our ad in Tables and Chairs Magazine,” as the mom drags her broken body across the pavement). What’s clear is that once you start taking this drug, it is difficult, if not impossible, to stop taking it. Withdrawal is a lengthy and precarious proposition that may not be worth the risk.

You can’t fully understand Unedited Footage of a Bear without taking into account the Resnick-helmed projects on either side of it. Episode 19 of Infomercials, This House Has People in It, with concept and direction by Resnick on his own, his last contribution to the series, is arguably even more abstract than Unedited Footage of a Bear, an analog horror found-footage piece that aired a year and a half later in 2016. This House Has People in It is equally legible as a depiction of a family ruined by narcotics use, the lifeless and sinking body of the daughter recalling the sudden panic of dealing with an overdose. But alantutorial, posted to YouTube between 2011 and 2014, is Resnick’s true magnum opus. Across 63 videos, Resnick portrays in detail the annihilation of his alter ego’s already shaky mental stability. What starts as a parody of terminally online DIY how-tos — gaming the search engine to ensnare browsers in completely useless instructionals — descends into a thoroughly upsetting (self)portrait of modern dissociation. By the end, the Alan of alantutorial is being held captive, in a cell covered in bodily and other fluids, by an unknown assailant while continuing to create increasingly inscrutable tutorial videos tinged with violence.

Amidst all the mythology and slapstick, and beyond Unedited Footage of a Bear’s glancing blow at the pharmaceutical industrial complex, Resnick is quite seriously invested in depicting mental illness and self-harm with bracing detail. The earnestness can be hard to see at first but it animates the dark heart of his artistry, and is part of what makes this misshapen trilogy exceptionally uncomfortable to experience. From the primitive uploads of alantutorial to the stylized Pop Art of Unedited Footage of a Bear to the glitchy voyeurism of This House Has People in It, Resnick depicts automatons who act without desire, who speak words disconnected from meaning, and whose once commonplace residences descend into chaos.

Taken together, alantutorial, Unedited Footage of a Bear, and This House Has People in It epitomize Resnick’s postmodern ethos, and his singular take on comedy-horror. They have the purposefully degenerative and uncanny feel of copies of copies of copies, filtered through so many layers of mediation that there is no bottom — future relics in the dustbin of the Digital Dark Age. As Resnick eyes the singularity of the simulacrum, he actually intersects with Warhol again, this time inverting his sarcastic notion of 15 minutes of fame. The future is now and this idea has fully blossomed into an existential threat. This House Has People in It splices sitcoms and reality TV, turning the medium inside out and casting raw surveillance footage, toggled almost at random, as cursed entertainment. Unedited Footage of a Bear infiltrates your comfort zone with a devastating cracked-mirror true crime drama. And alantutorial brings this idea to its inescapable endpoint, where a desperate soul loses all tether to reality while shouting into the digital void for someone, anyone, to like and subscribe. In this trilogy of home invasion horror, the invader is modernity itself.

1.  Upwards of 75 percent of the nonsensical proprietary brand names that the FDA approves each year are crafted by the faintly dystopian sounding corporation the Brand Institute. ↩︎
2.  As it happens, Claritin was at the vanguard of DTC drug advertising, producing commercials in the mid-’90s that were purposely vague and squarely focused on brand awareness. ↩︎

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