No one captures the world quite like John Wilson. For three seasons now, the filmmaker has begun his HBO documentary series “How To With John Wilson” with the greeting “Hey, New Yorkers!” But as the show reaches its natural endpoint with the latest six-episode run, it’s clear that its wide, deep, strange scope goes far beyond the boundaries of the city Wilson calls home. In following the mind map style of observation that has now become Wilson’s signature, the new season features many unexpected detours around America, each more bizarre, surprising, and informative than the last. Season 3 isn’t a perfect sendoff – it has more of an uncomfortable edge than endearing prior outings – but it’s still offbeat, creative, and very funny.
“How To With John Wilson” starts with the same framework as always, beginning episodes with the promise of helping viewers understand how to achieve a simple task and ending them somewhere else entirely. This time around, quests to find public bathrooms, learn to work out, and get into sports end up leading to giant pumpkin-growing competitions, 9/11-themed bodybuilding competitions, and vacuum collector conventions. Though the framing narration around each episode doesn’t pack quite as much punch as in previous seasons – Wilson’s relationship to the material seems a little more sporadic than before – the show makes up for it with some of the most memorable interviews it’s ever featured to date. Wilson asks strangers questions with an openminded sense of curiosity, and the result is often profound and always interesting.
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It can also be extremely weird. The show functions best as an examination of specific subcultures and eccentric personalities, and this season includes a surplus of quirky, delightful, and wholly authentic interviewees. It’s impressive how often Wilson is able to gain access to the inner lives of strangers simply by asking, “Can I see?” Just as previous seasons took him to an “Avatar” fan club and a Mandela Effect convention, this season includes forays into the worlds of people who unabashedly spend their time fixated on things many of us have never considered. The show’s creator is clearly a stranger-whisperer, too. When a woman tells Wilson about the time she dated an assassin or a man opens up about an act of body modification he did in secret decades ago, the show suddenly feels like a minor documentary miracle. Wilson’s on-screen persona is awkward, but he’s also clearly disarming to his subjects, perhaps because he listens so intently.
Still, this season doesn’t try so hard to maintain the air of magical serendipity that made the first two seasons so special. More than once, we see people call the cops on Wilson for filming, and his unusual earnestness doesn’t fly with a few of the people he encounters. When strangers find Wilson off-putting or intrusive – as some reasonably do in a few cases – it makes for a discomfiting viewing experience that doesn’t quite gel with the show’s prior undercurrent of sweetness. This is the first season to drop after Nathan Fielder’s grandly experimental series “The Rehearsal,” and there’s a Fielder-like quality to the way Wilson occasionally puts people in awkward positions. This shouldn’t be surprising given that Fielder himself executive produces the show, but it’s still jarring – and made all the more so when Wilson tries his own hand at some minor yet meta viewer manipulation.
Documentary lovers will still find plenty to laugh and gasp over here, as the show maintains a steady flow of rare and delightful New York City B-roll footage. The opening and closing moments of each episode are a wonder in their own right, and this is the kind of show that viewers shouldn’t look away from for even a second. It seems that every single thing a person or animal can possibly do has been done in New York City, and Wilson has been there to capture a whole lot of it. He decorates each intro scene with excellent visual jokes and perfectly cut-together snippets of life in all its funky glory, capturing upside-down exercisers, pets and people on ledges, and the city’s most noteworthy bathrooms. That last topic leads to some of the show’s most off-putting imagery yet, as the camera doesn’t shy away from the excrement-filled nooks and crannies of its bustling metropolis.
“How To With John Wilson” Season 3 isn’t a step down for the series so much as a step sideways. The first two seasons took place just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit and in the wake of it, respectively, while Season 3 shows a world that has opened up for better and worse. If this version of Wilson’s reality comes across as a little less friendly than the previous seasons, it could be because America’s sense of camaraderie in the face of struggle has worn off. This season’s interview subjects are often fractured and lost and, importantly, focused on their own version of the world which sometimes bears no resemblance to that of the person sitting next to them. Wilson isn’t afraid of speaking with controversial figures – one guy he chats with has a “F*** JOE BIDEN” sign painted on his truck, while another makes a shocking statement about a national tragedy – and it seems clearer than ever that “How To With John Wilson” isn’t just a weird, funny show, but an anthropological artifact in the making. For all its jaw-dropping interview moments and off-script side quests, some of the best moments in “How To With John Wilson” come when the filmmaker seems to genuinely connect with people who are as open to others as he is to them. It happens this season at the vacuum convention, and with several older interviewees who are happy to share their wisdom or lack thereof. It’s hard not to come away from this series inspired because Wilson himself has an inspiring commitment to humanizing every person caught by the eye of his camera. After eighteen episodes spent witnessing the world through that camera’s point of view, it’s all but impossible to look at a stranger on the street the same way ever again. [B]
“How To with John Wilson” Season 3 debuts on HBO on July 28.