19 Thoughts on How To With John Wilson

Photo courtesy of HBO

1. How To With John Wilson is a TV show that, even though a lot of people I know are really into it, is still catching on with most people. So even though it’s a documentary series that I don’t really consider “spoiler-y,” it’s worth mentioning right now that I will be talking about specific scenes and episodes, so if you want to go into this thing fresh (and, I’ll be honest, you probably do), you might want to save this newsletter installment for later.
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3. About nine years or so ago, I Tweeted an observation about “going out” and a shithead rich-kid hipster I grew up with (“Which one?,” anyone who knows where I grew up shouts in unison) immediately hit me up over AIM (or maybe it was text?) to offer an unsolicited observation. “Lol why are you talking about going out,” he said. “All you do is stay at home and watch TV.” Although I replied with some variation of “Hey this is really fucking rude, man, what the fuck,” he wasn’t 100% wrong.
4. At the time, I was living in Bay Ridge with my now-wife and two of our friends to save money, which became especially essential after I was laid off from SPIN a month into moving in. For those who aren’t New York-based, Bay Ridge is deep down in Brooklyn, at least an hour’s train ride away from anything that could be considered a music-focused hipster’s “haunt.” So instead of bumming around at Market Hotel or what the fuck ever, we spent a year and change mostly mainlining countless movies and trying to sleep amidst the noisy fights that would spill out from the nearby firefighter-themed bar, going out maybe once a week at most. No regrets.
5. My wife and I moved to Williamsburg in 2011, and I started going out to concerts and such more often—although having a full-time job that was, at points, grueling enough that I was perpetually sleep-deprived meant that I was still staying in as often as I was going out. The older I got, the more “going out” meant “seeing a movie and a few drinks at a bar afterwards” instead of “four-to-five nights of concertgoing a week.” Again, no regrets.
6. Man, I miss going to the movies so much.
8. I’m recounting this brief history of watching television as an adult because, well, (gestures at everything around us that’s caused us to be inside a lot more). Someone in my family has said to me several times since the pandemic started that “All there is to do anymore is watch TV,” but when staying at home really kicked into high gear the only thing that changed about my viewing habits was the volume. I was always watching a lot of TV and movies—now I just do it even more.
9. My viewing habits in the pandemic have become both more freeform and more organized than ever. From March to May, it was largely a lot of movies. (The first movie I watched in true quarantine was Midsommar. Still bangs.) June to August was a k-hole of Real Housewives franchises that we still enter and exit occasionally, and that’s with the disclaimer that, for the entirety of my adult life, I’ve always been watching tons of reality TV.
10. The last few months, it’s been all about just absolutely crushing various TV series without any discretion. (Again, the differentiation here from pre-pandemic times is that we’d take our time—weeks, months even—to finish a 12-episode season of television. Now it takes two days, tops.) We even watched WHAT/IF, a terrible Reneé Zellweger miniseries that aired on Netflix last year. (We’ve been pretty good about finishing everything we watch regardless of quality, but we couldn’t even make it to the end of that one.)
11. Binging stuff seems easier than ever these days. As I just said, you can drain entire seasons of stuff just to pass the time, and it’s quite effective at doing so, too. But recently I’ve found the pleasure in having TV to look forward to as well—watching the two-a-week drops of the latest season of The Eric Andre Show (brilliant, as usual), moving from terrible-looking pastry to terrible-looking pastry through the worst season of GBBO to date, and giving every second of How To With John Wilson my undivided attention, not even an iota of second (or third, or fourth)-screening.
13. How To With John Wilson is probably the best TV show from 2020 that I’ve watched in 2020. (I May Destroy You is a very close second.) It’s a beautiful, hilarious, thought-provoking, and at times incredibly sad mixture of memoir and documentary, and only The Eric Andre Show has gone further in making me laugh so hard that I have a headache afterwards. I loved every episode, and I hope this show—which seems incredibly painstaking to make but also easier than most productions during a global pandemic—gets another season.
14. More than a few people I follow online were aware that Wilson had made multiple documentary shorts prior to How To that were essentially the seeds for the show’s whole groove; I was not. The only one I’ve watched so far is The Road to Magnasanti, but I plan on watching all of them eventually and you probably should too.
15. https://player.vimeo.com/video/238073511?autoplay=0
16. A common theme that The Road to Magnasanti and How To shares is the documentation of what Wilson (accurately, in my view) sees as the disintegration of New York City’s character through endless development and rebuilding. Things look smoother, shinier, and less interesting all the time, and in both entities Wilson does an incredible job of juxtaposing the more quotidian-y gross aspects of city life (pools of sludge, spilled food, sidewalk meltdowns) with footage of hyper-NYC-referential condo monstrosities and blandly futuristic scaffolding. Watching NYC through Wilson’s perspective is essentially watching something disappear in front of your eyes.
17. A lot of How To is, as a friend described to me, essentially good-hearted—but there’s a negativity, or rather a sense of honesty, to Wilson’s outlook that I appreciate and identify with. Maybe it’s wrong to say it’s negative at all: the bit in the furniture-covering episode about declawing and, in general, trying to control the natural world from altering unnatural things seemed benevolent, in its appreciation of the world around us, even as it radiated a specific dismissiveness about our place in it.
18. I should stress that you don’t have to be enamored with “the character of New York City” or what have you to enjoy How To. There is a universality to what he captures, even if the lens is trained on a very specific place. The frequent outings he takes are proof of this, especially the trip to New Orleans in the scaffolding episode.
20. Also, we can take down the seriousness level for a second: How To With John Wilson is extremely funny. Like, the type of funny that has you gasping while you’re laughing because you quite often can’t believe what you’re seeing, even though it’s just everyday life. In that way, it makes living look like a miracle, which is a good thing to be reminded of these days.
21. Nathan Fielder executive produced How To, and the show shares some DNA with his seminal Nathan For You; both feature people doing at-times outrageous things in front of a camera, going down tangents that seem genuinely surprising to the viewers and the people onscreen. But Nathan For You is interested in exposing a sort of cynical truth about people (especially in the Los Angeles area)—specifically, that they’ll do anything to be on camera—whereas How To is more showing that people will just do anything on camera, without applying any real prejudice to that truism.
22. A great example of that phenomenon: the Parasite scene. I really don’t know what else to call it without giving it away, because it is bewilderingly hilarious and so out of left-field that it’s impossible not to be shocked by what you’re seeing. If you’ve seen it, though, you absolutely know what I’m talking about.
23. I obviously love How To, but I don’t think this first(?) season was perfect. I think the episode about improving your memory reached for something it couldn’t quite grab—I enjoyed following the paths that Wilson went down, as ever, but I felt unsatisfied at the point in which he landed on.
25. The finale landed weird for me too—but, first, I want to talk about Darcey & Stacey. It’s a 90 Day Fiancé spinoff, IYKYK, not going to get too far in explaining the appeal of this show at the moment. Me and my wife were watching it over Google Hangouts with our friend Lindsay, as we’ve started to do every week now that the weather’s colder and you can’t hang outside as much anymore. On the most recent episode that aired, the pandemic came into full view as far as the show’s plotline was concerned.
26. As I watched a basic recap of everything that went down in those early months, I felt a sense of dread that I hadn’t felt so fully in months—since those early months, really—just totally overcome me. It felt like being kicked in the head and having my vision turned sideways, again. Granted, a level of intoxication was involved here, but I recognized a sense of discomfort in myself that was far beyond taking in regular dramatic tension.
27. The next day, we were watching the How To finale, which starts with Wilson wanting to make risotto for his landlord and, as is the deal with this show, goes down a series of tangents. As the show went on, the pandemic came into full view again—the early months, again, this time cast in the city I live in and showing what felt like a familiar version of the confusion and, eventually, terror that I felt in the first few months.
28. The panic and upsetment I felt was way worse here, especially since the stakes were raised in this particular episode of television in a way that they simply weren’t during, uh, Darcey and Stacey. When the episode ended, I was so upset that I had to do the walk-around-and-take-a-couple-of-deep-breaths toxic masculinity thing because I really wanted to cry but I was refusing to let myself to do so. I felt so fucked up and upset that we had to watch 2/3s of The Banger Sisters, which was awful but took my mind off of things.
29. I did a bit recently where I told people that were close to me a few times that, actually, no, I’m doing better about all the things that scare me and make me sad about the pandemic, that now that things are getting really bad again (and, to be clear, they were never “good”) at least I’m not as upset anymore, and I’m not still choking back tears at footage of hospital workers like I’m watching Sarah McLaughlin show me pictures of abused animals. That’s obviously all bullshit, or at least an obfuscation of the real truth.
30. I feel…traumatized, by, like, everything that was happening (especially everything that was happening in NYC) from March-May, that much is still clear. I’m kind of having a tough time typing any of this out right now, to be totally honest, even though I’ve thought about writing this post for a few days now. Thinking about that time fucks my brain up and makes my head swell until it feels like it’s been pumped full of lead.
31. I hate it, all of it, and I’m definitely going to have to confront it in some meaningful way (hello, therapy), but, man, seeing it on TV reflected back to me in past-tense like it’s 9/11 footage is something I’m just not ready to be able to handle without having some sort of internal rejection of it just yet. (Abby and Lindsay, if either of you are reading this and made it this far: I’m still in for watching Darcey and Stacey, don’t worry.)
32. It feels worse when I think about the delayed-reaction effect this is going to have on most of popular culture, in which we’ll doubtless be reliving and recounting various phases of the still-raging-and-raging-and-raging pandemic in ways both fictionalized and documentary-style for years to come. I’m really not ready for it, and I’m wondering who is and wondering if I could borrow some of their resolve, too.