‘How To with John Wilson’ Is One of HBO’s Best Shows — So Why Is It Ending?
A few days before the third and final season of “How To with John Wilson” premiered on HBO, its creator and star received an unexpected call. New York City mayor Eric Adams was planning to hold a press conference to discuss the problem of scaffolding looming over sidewalks around town, and Wilson was invited to speak at it. Fans of the Wilson’s droll, unassuming approach, which takes the form of discursive audiovisual essays about the idiosyncracies of New York life, will recall that the second episode of Season 1 from 2020, “How To Put Up Scaffolding,” tackles just that subject, before it catapults into deeper ideas about the personal toll of protective measures on daily life.
The call was proof of the acute way that Wilson’s show has mined profound and poetic truths from seemingly ordinary objects and people lost in their routines. His reaction, however, goes to show how little Wilson — who is seen more than heard on the show as he narrates it in the third person — evades the spotlight. “I declined because I didn’t want to be asked to take a photo with Eric Adams,” Wilson said over lunch in Williamsburg this week. He chuckled, realizing that if he might feel differently if he needed material for a fourth season. “The episode would be called ‘How to Get the Key to City,’” he said. “Even though it’s a semi-satricial show, it’s surreal to see the real-world impact it has had.”
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Among the slew of costly HBO hits in recent years, “How To with John Wilson” has stood out as one of the best offerings in part because its formula leaves room for endless possibilities. Wilson’s ability to navigate from ridiculous to sublime circumstances in under 30 minutes is an unparalleled, cost-effective approach to prestige storytelling that feels like a hidden gem in the era of overhyped must-watch TV.
Meshing a dense collection of B-roll with introspective conversations and philosophical asides, the show continues to reveal its unassuming powers as it moves along. One could imagine the 36-year-old keeping up this routine for decades, and funneling each moment of his life into another illuminating snapshot, not unlike the way the late film diarist Jonas Mekas kept recording New York counterculture on a small camera into his nineties. So why is Wilson throwing in the towel after three short years?
The decision was clear to him as he made his way through Season 2 and fandom for the show grew. “It’s weird,” he said. “I felt like my insides hadn’t really changed, but my external world had. It was just this realization I had. I wasn’t completely sure what I was after anymore.”
The irony of that statement is that every episode of “How To with John Wilson” loses its way by design. Wilson and his small team of writers begin with fairly straightforward titles that can lend themselves to unexpected destinations. The Season 1 finale, “How to Cook the Perfect Risotto,” starts with the title’s goal before transforming into a surprising and powerful meditation on the impact of COVID on New York life. “How to Cover Your Furniture” somehow winds up with a graphic look at a man attempt to stretch his punctured foreskin. Season 2’s “How To Appreciate Wine” takes a surprising detour to his encounter with a sex cult in college, and culminates with an unexpected visit to the mansion of a millionaire charlatan who makes energy drink. “How to Be Spontaneous” takes him on a bizarre detour to Las Vegas. At times it can feel as though watching “How To John Wilson” is akin to a first-person variation on “The Truman Show,” as viewers become immersed in his peculiar and ever-absorbing trajectory.
Yet that itself became more of a challenge for Wilson, he said, as he struggled to immerse himself in the work rather than creating it for preexisting expectations. “I don’t regret anything I’ve ever put in the show,” he said. “But sometimes when I’m making episodes, I have to stop for a second and figure out my personal life to give it a new direction that illuminates some part of it that I couldn’t conceive before.” Listening to him talk through his process, it’s clear that Wilson invested so much intellectual and emotional energy into each episode that starting from scratch to do a new one could only have grown more daunting with time.
The show’s success didn’t make things any easier. “I don’t want to sound like a crybaby,” Wilson said. “It’s been great. I love the platform I’ve had. It’s a dream come true. I just thought it would feel different.” Asked how he thought it would feel, he paused at length. Finally, he said: “I don’t know. Just different. It was just an ambient thought I had after a while: ‘OK, what’s next?”
The answer to that question has yet to materialize. “I hope I’ll be able to make something this ambitious again,” he said. “It’ll be interesting to see if I can surprise people.”
That seems inevitable. Wilson stumbled into his first show from an unlikely direction, after he made an unreleasable 18-minute short film “Los Angeles Plays New York” in 2016, which chronicles the time he and his friends pranked the court TV show “Hot Bench” by getting their madeup lawsuit onto the show. For legal purposes, “Los Angeles Plays New York” can never air — an outcome that Wilson weaves into the episode with his now-familar brand of quotidian insights. Deadpan comic maestro Nathan Fielder saw the short and used it to make the case to HBO to greenlight the series. (Fielder remained an executive producer on the show for its duration.)
Like Fielder, Wilson excels at creating a mysterious tone pitched somewhere between winking at the audience and forcing them to take him at face value. “It’s like that moment you try to stop giggling and get serious,” Wilson said. Wilson also shares Fielder’s enigmatic approach to storytelling, as it’s never entirely clear how much we’re seeing has been set up in advance. “At the end of the day, however it’s constructed, it’s about how it appeals to you,” he said.
Season 3 finds Wilson expanding his tapestry with an even greater confidence and vision than before. A playful look on the dearth of public bathrooms around the city ends with a hilarious comment on The Vessel, New York’s most grotesque tourist attraction. His experience getting his ears cleaned sends him on a road trip to the quietest community in the country. After sneaking a camera into the Emmys, he realizes that no amount of professional success can match his experiences in the field. As usual, he doesn’t mock the eccentrics he comes across as much as he communes with them. An attempt to understand the obsession of sports fanatics leads him to a convention for collectors of vacuum cleaners. “I love those guys so much,” Wilson said with a grin.
The series finale takes more than a few hairpin turns before it arrives at an organ convention — and then, a gathering of people committed to having themselves cryogenically frozen after they die. Singling out one of them, Wilson ends up in a shocking conversation with an elderly man about his tragic, lonely past, before our hero makes his way back to the city where he belongs. It’s a transcendent finale with a surprise kicker. Though each episode ends with Wilson thanking viewers for tuning in, the climax features a tweaked send-off: “Thanks for watching my movies,” he says.
Reflecting on that change, Wilson said, “I feel like we made 18 really incredible movies over the course of the series. They happen to be around 28 minutes long, they happen to air weekly on HBO, but I always thought of it as movies more than TV even though we had the constraints of TV.” And if he’s made 18 movies in three years, who can blame him for taking a break?
In any case, the constraints of “How To with John Wilson” reflect a key aspect of the show’s identity, as it depicts an apparent everyman worming his way through a claustrophobic universe of rules on a never-ending quest for clarity. That struggle is endemic to the New York experience. “A lot of times I see people tweeting about the show as proof that New York is a shithole,” Wilson said. “But I’ve also been approached by a bunch of people who say they’ve moved to New York because of the show. That’s such an intense feeling for me. I hope people are attracted to the right aspects of the city and preserve its identity, rather than contributing to the constant churn of things.”
Wilson might seem just affable enough to coax his audience into believing whatever he puts in front of them, but in person, it’s obvious that he’s genuine. He trails off mid-sentence and clears his throat at awkward intervals, just as he does in his voiceovers, and carries around an old-school miniDV camera so he can surrepetitiously record small details throughout his day regardless of whether he ends up using them. Question his process all you want, but there’s no doubting that on “How To with John Wilson,” John Wilson plays himself. “It’s a weird feeling that people around the world have seen the show,” he said. “My world is very small.”
“How To with John Wilson” Season 3 premieres Friday, July 28 on HBO and is available on Max.
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