David Cross Calls The Head Of Adult Swim A Thief!

In a recent AMA on Reddit, David Cross revealed that the current senior executive vice president of Adult Swim, Mike Lazzo, ripped off the idea for the release of “Too Many Cooks” from him. Cross had pitched the idea to air a ridiculous infomercial show once at four in the morning called “Paid Programming”. This is how Too Many Cooks was rolled out.

According to David Cross, he originally pitched his concept to in 2008. In his Reddit AMA, David Cross was asked about if there was a project he did in the past that he wished more people knew about.

David responded with, “Uh… yeah! Gosh. Yes. Icelandic Ultra-Blue. It was actually called “Paid programming.” adult swim completely and totally ripped off the idea – we did it for adult swim. Jon Benjamin and I did it. It’s really funny. And the idea that I pitched to Lazzo, in his office, standing in front of him, back in 2008? I wanna say? was to do a fake infomercial that would air at 4 in the morning, and it would be called  Paid Programming so that the viewers wouldn’t know it was fake, and it starts out very realistically, and then subtly devolves into this crazy nonsense. But it would really fuck with people’s heads.”

Cross was careful to say he had no beef with the creators of “Too Many Cooks”, his problem is with Mike Lazzo at Adult Swim.

He wrote, “Let me make it clear – I think the people who had the concepts for TOO MANY COOKS didn’t rip us off. I think adult swim was the one who ripped off the idea. And they actually aired it once – it aired at exactly the time I pitched, in that exact way, and they didn’t pick up the show, which I guess makes us a couple years ahead of our time? So fuck Mike Lazzo. He’s a thief.”

Cross invited people to check out his idea now. He said, “But go to Youtube, and see if you can check out either “Icelandic Ultra-Blue” or “Paid Programming” or even Wikipedia it. Because it’s really, really funny. I think you’ll like it.”

You can watch David Cross and H Jon Benjamin’s “Icelandic Ultra Blue” infomercial on AdultSwim.com