Stream It or Leave It? How To with John Wilson
In this episode, we tackle HBOMax’s New York docu-comedy series How To with John Wilson – quickly becoming a cult favorite which “saved me during lockdown,” said Shindy.
Under the comedic guise of a ‘How To’ guide, each episode of starts from a simple yet slightly ridiculous premise such as “How to Make Small Talk,” and morphs into a freewheeling adventure through New York and its characters.
Video footage of random moments from the city’s day-to-day life are used as surreal and memorable visual metaphors for John Wilson’s quirky narration.
Mat: It's one of my favorite shows of the last year. It brought me a lot of joy and I'm glad we're spreading the word.
Jeff: I’ve got a better elevator pitch: Woody Allen as a millennial documentarian with genuine empathy, filming a choose your own adventure series.
It’s not the New York of Sex and the City or Friends
Shindy: This was definitely a show that resonated with me because as a true New Yorker, I was able to take a look at my city through his lens.
You don’t get the glorified New York that you see in romcoms, where everything's beautiful and they've color corrected Central Park and all those dingy dirty elements of New York are completely whitewashed out.
It’s a really accurate portrayal of what New York is like for many people who live there, truthfully… How quirky the city is and how you you'll see things that you never see anywhere else in the world. From 10 years of living there, the city surprises you every day.
Mat: It's a great counterpoint to Sex and the City and Friends. It's fun to see someone showing that side. And it's just amazing to me that there's still new stories and new things to be shown of New York city.
Why John Wilson is beyond relatable (02:37)(10:45)
Jeff: It's a really funny and intentionally ironic show. It’s interesting that it kicks off as a series sort of aimed at people who live in New York city, but all of the things that he ends up talking about are so common to everybody.
Mat: Pulling out these universal narratives out of it, I think it’s just brilliant.
Shindy: He's like a modern day, social anthropologist. He goes through and he analyzes people's behaviors. And luckily, he captures it all on film.
Mat: It reminded me of Borat! You have this innocent-seeming character who, by his approach, people get comfortable with and reveal themselves in ways which you wouldn’t normally get.
And then you mold that kind of comedy into some brilliant observations of humanity. Like Sasha Baron Cohen, it looks simple but it’s quite brilliant. All the associations he does – not just the images to the script, the thematic associations to each episode. How carefully he brings out things in people and how quick witted he is.
Jeff: It reminded me in some ways a little bit of Errol Morris, his early work. He just let people talk, there was almost no interference. There is no judgement coming out of the camera – all the judgement is coming from you.
Shindy: John is a listener, which people should do more of these days – just listen and be kind.
His curious co-stars, people he randomly meets and follows, end up being the real stars of some episodes.
Shindy: If anything, this show proved to me, there are some wacky people out there. Not necessarily in a negative context, but it's a very diverse, big wide world out there. And so, New York is such a wonderful backdrop for this show because I don't know that it could present human behavior in such a great way had it not been in shot in New York city.
Show parallels
The series also reminded Shindy of cult 1998 documentary The Cruise, narrated by Timothy ‘Speed’ Leitch, who was then a guide for bus tours in New York City.
Shindy: It is so good. I watched it so many times because I knew I wanted to live in New York. He has a passion for the city. He knows the city inside and out, but he's also super quirky and he's funny. So he's observing the city going around. That’s what I think what most reminded me of how to with John Wilson.
How How To with John Wilson came to be (06:22)
It took a narrative coincidence worthy of a How To episode for the series to come to life.
Mat: He was making his own little, short videos for Vimeo. It took him a year to do a 10-minute video. He was doing it on the side, he used to work for a private eye. And that's what he says gave him his little insight - he'd have to look through hours of footage and find relevant things.
Some of these videos that he put on Vimeo went viral. Nathan Fielder, who is a bit of a comedy genius from Nathan For You on Comedy Central, had seen these videos and then he just ran into him in a restaurant in Chinatown and they just got talking.
He said, ‘I think HBO may be interested in this’. Apparently, John Wilson thought it might be a prank until the moment he walked into the meeting. What a gamble for HBO to take - a guy who films rats in New York city and who can string some poetry out of it. And, bless them, they did it.
Our team was amazed at the amount of work and footage needed to put together six 25-minute shows boasting dozens if not hundreds of clips each.
He recruited an army of people to go around shooting what most people would call B roll, but for him is ‘A roll’. He gave them a little ‘style bible’ – ‘this is what I look for. This is how I shoot, come and watch me for a couple of days.’ And then they just gathered hours of footage.
I cannot imagine what it was like to itemize and categorize all this material. Literally and poetically categorized, and then a crazy edit process, I’m sure.
Favorite Episodes (09:29)
Mat and Jeff - How to Cover your Furniture
Mat: I thought that was just a perfect 25 minutes of television. I love the journey of the episode and the characters they brought in. There are some pretty wild thematic associations. It was so well-designed - and it ended with an amazing punchline.
The journey starts off with protecting furniture with plastic covers and ends up with an anti-circumcision activist half-naked on his bed, talking to John about the film Parasite while a bizarre device hooked to his bed tugs on his foreskin - one of the team’s favorite moments.
Shindy: Yeah, there was no warning to that. One minute the dude's preparing grapefruit soda and then without any warning, next thing, you know, he's naked on his bed with his Shalom out and tethered to his machine. It’s like, wow, people do the darndest things!
I loved the journey of that episode because it was like a commentary ultimately on materialism and anxiety over our possessions. And it got really deep, despite the fact that the title is like how to cover your furniture.
Jeff: I think that that was probably my favorite episode as well, because it was sort of like leading into how we protect things. And in some ways, we protect the wrong things, it's sort of this misplacing of affection.
Shindy – How to Make Small Talk
Shindy: It was just a fascinating entry into what the whole series was about. He does this a lot throughout the series - where it's like those abstract accompanying images with the script. And so, it's abstract, but it's satirical.
It goes down that rabbit hole where he's whisked away, ‘Let's go to Cancun!’, and then it's like the MTV spring break. Totally unexpected. And then it comes full circle with him getting the download from the one friend he makes there.
There were less laughs in the poignant final episode of the series, How to Make Risotto, but as it blends into the beginning of the pandemic, there was so much to admire.
Shindy: I thought he introduced that so delicately, with everything that was going on. And by the time you watched this, or for me at least when I was watching that during the pandemic, it was so sad. It brought it too close to home.
You don't want to watch anything about a pandemic, but I think in terms of how we introduced it and captured it, it was delicately done and well done.
For once there were no hang-ups for the team – except for Mat, who frets over the coming season two and beyond.
Mat: The only fear that I have is that it might get overdone. How many times do we think he can do this before it becomes done and he needs to move to something else? It's a very particular combination of quirkiness and freewheeling, which after a while may not feel that natural, it may feel forced.
Stream It or Leave It? (26:15)
Stream it!
Bonus: What else are we watching? (26:52)
Jeff: Joseph Campbell’s Mythos, Amazon Prime
Mat: Line of Duty, Amazon Prime
Shindy: Master of None, Season 3, Netflix