Don’t ask John Wilson to sell you on his own show. Even after three seasons and some space — the series finale aired last September — he isn’t quite sure how to do it.
“It was agonising enough to pitch it to HBO,” he says.
“When someone wants to know at a party, I’ll just say, ‘It’s like Planet Earth, but for New York.’ I’ve said that so many times at this point, the words have lost meaning to me.
“I’m really bad at pitching: I make it sound really boring, and I think that’s a struggle that people who watch the show might have, too.”
How to with John Wilson is anything but boring.
Sure, episode titles of this docuseries may include How to Cook the Perfect Risotto, How to Find a Public Restroom and How to Watch Birds, but they stretch a simple premise into cross-country odysseys.
Wilson’s attempts to undertake everyday tasks spiral out of control. Or, rather, they spiral into something far funnier, and much more meaningful than mundane.
“I like starting with minutiae, like battery disposal, because the farther away you zoom out from it, the more profound it gets a lot of the time. I like that telescoping effect that it has,” he says.
Simply describing what happens — say, how bird-watching involves exploding cars and a Titanic conspiracy theory — might pique interest, but it misses so much of How to’s magic.
That’s why headlines praising the show can have a touch of desperation, like a friend recommending a must-watch series they can tell you have no interest in.
The pleading is understandable as How to is arguably the 2020s’ most acclaimed show you likely haven’t heard of: In one episode, Wilson can’t even get into a HBO Emmys party, despite the show’s nomination.
Wilson’s ability to pull at threads, to find both the most delightfully strange people ever committed to camera (from cryogenics enthusiasts to vacuum collectors) and the hilarious, sometimes disgusting sights of New York, is simply dazzling.
That stems partly from the show’s intimacy. Filmed from Wilson’s perspective and guided by his dry narration, it more resembles a first-person video game than a high-budget HBO documentary. It’s visually unlike anything else on television.
The narration and interviews are refreshingly unpolished, too. The show is filled with uhms, ahhs and pauses, especially as he tries to address a completely unexpected revelation, including a man sharing that he performed self-castration. (Yes, really.)
Something like a 2020s update on the flâneur — an artist who wanders the streets to find inspiration from overlooked sights — Wilson’s show takes what others might see as visual detritus to reveal how confounding daily life can be, at a time where it can be tempting to drown out daily noise.
“People have approached me and told me that it’s changed the way that they see the world, which is extremely flattering, because that’s what a lot of the best art does,” says Wilson.
“I don’t know if it made anyone take their headphones out, though.”
Collecting rare images
Wilson is in Sydney for this year’s Antenna Documentary Film Festival, until February 13, screening a series of films that inspired him. His selects range from cult favourites on urban planning, to DIY diaries and interviews with a bus of tourists travelling through Europe.
Wilson says he isn’t against a more traditional talking heads documentary, but he’s motivated by collecting off-kilter visuals.
“I feel like it’s a part of me,” Wilson says of his camera, “but it is something I can put down.”
“If I’m out doing something interesting, I feel like I need to bring it around. And it forces me to actively do interesting things.”
How to began more than a decade ago because of this glut of collected images, with Wilson recording continuously, then uploading three-minute edits online.
“I had all of this imagery over the years that I didn’t know what to do with. I would just have to make a movie at the end of every year so it had a place to go,” he says.
“Otherwise, I feel like it would have been lost forever in a hard drive somewhere.”
Those edits caught the eye of Nathan Fielder, the actor-comedian behind some of TV’s most bizarre shows like Nathan for You, The Rehearsal and The Curse. Fielder is an executive producer on How to, and helped Wilson pitch the television version, debuting in 2020.
This allows Wilson to collect even more footage, with a second-unit team of four to five people filming to briefs, including people carrying large items, store signs with typos or bread discarded in the street. From there, Wilson could script his story — or just make a visual gag.
“I still remember every single image,” he says, estimating they’d get 40 hours of footage a week.
“If I was talking with the editors and say, ‘Do you remember that shot of the banana on a bike seat’, we’ll all say ‘yeah’. These unique images are burned into [our] memory, and there’s no limit to how many you can remember.”
Wilson also obsessively collects interviews with people with their own obsessions — including men with an overwhelming baseball memorabilia collection, or people who compete in pumpkin-growing contests.
What is ridiculous to some is sacred to others, and Wilson’s right there with them, another collector trying to stave something off.
By collating the ways people adjust to modern life — from Amazon workers peeing in bottles to avoid late-delivery penalties, to joining a post-Avatar depression group who find the real world drab after seeing Pandora’s CGI world — Wilson subtly shifts our sense of what is ridiculous from individuals to their surroundings.
“I don’t like to do things about politics — well, explicitly about politics. I think there’s a lot of political messaging within the work but it’s disguised in a way,” he says.
“Humour and this style of documentary are a great Trojan horse.”
How to with John Wilson is streaming on Binge.