John Wilson Is Making the Least Predictable Show on TV

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You might think that there’d be something uncanny about walking around New York with the filmmaker John Wilson, insofar as that’s what much of his HBO series, “How To With John Wilson,” consists of: We see footage he’s magpie’d from around the city while he muses, in his thoughtful-Muppet voice, along baggy themes. A morning stroll near his building, in Ridgewood, Queens, did not offer up anything with the kind of Wilsonian surreality the show specializes in — but our destination, a dollar store Wilson described as one of his favorites, did. He told me that he spends a lot of time in dollar stores when he has writer’s block. Nearby he pointed out a display of tools from Trisonic, a budget brand he investigated in a 2016 short film, before collecting the things he’d come for: sink strainers, a miniature folding chair, a toilet seat with a fluffy white Pomeranian printed on its lid. On the way to the checkout, he marveled at a product he said he’d already purchased from a different dollar store: a clock radio with a built-in fish tank far too tiny for a fish, a “cool dollar-store-only object.” The entire place suddenly felt like a tidy analogue of Wilson’s show: filled with things too mundane, too accidentally strange, too tacky or sad or flawed or lacking in panache, to actively star in anyone else’s account of the world.

“How To,” now in its second season, is (nominally) a tutorial, offering advice on subjects like wine appreciation and parking, and (formally) a documentary, following its themes to a bowling-​ball factory or to interview a teenage real estate agent — and (ultimately) a form of memoir, a personal essay on video. But Wilson does magic with his staggering archive of street footage, all full of details that, if you encountered them yourself, you’d ponder for days: peculiar behaviors, dreamlike coincidences, strange omens and general “glitches in the Matrix,” as he puts it. Two workers mop a sidewalk in balletic unison; a man in a parked car idly sucks a woman’s toes; a woman places a live pigeon in a Duane Reade bag like a salad she’ll finish later. “Sharing your most intimate thoughts can be a disturbing and messy experience,” Wilson observes, as we watch a police officer pluck a sweater from a pool of blood on a subway floor. It would take a lot of footage to craft a timeline of romance from images of people publicly flirting, groping, proposing, marrying and bickering, and even more to end it with paramedics removing a corpse from an apartment building. Imagine the volume you’d need to be able to end it, as Wilson does, with paramedics dropping that body.

There are highbrow precedents for Wilson’s close attention to the strange-and-ordinary, but what “How To” often resembles is the stuff you’d see posted to Twitter or TikTok in 20-second chunks, with glib captions about urban living or relatable moods. Wilson, who is 35, says that he loves seeing that kind of stuff online — “but I find it so tragic that it just kind of disappears.” He’d always felt compelled to build something larger from that material, lest it vanish into a “formless blob of content” or rot on an old hard drive. “The impulse to make the work like this to begin with,” he says, “was about giving a shape to all the stuff I was afraid of losing.”

People talk about television’s capacity for novelistic depth, but surely the medium has more in common with pop music: We expect it to obey certain rhythms, resolve its motion in certain ways, pulse appealingly in the background even when our attention is divided. Part of what’s bewitching about “How To” is the extent to which it manages to replace those conventions with its own. “I get so bored watching something when I begin to realize the pattern,” Wilson tells me. Each of his episodes contains at least one moment in which you can scarcely believe the turn things have taken. The very first — “How To Make Small Talk,” which aired in October 2020 — leads Wilson from collecting a sweater from an ex to a vacation in Cancún, where he discovers MTV filming spring-break content; there he meets Chris, a weary-eyed party bro who eventually reveals that he came here in the wake of a friend’s suicide and is processing his grief in the least reflective environment imaginable. It’s one of a few remarkable turns in the episode. What’s more astonishing is that you might, watching it, have one of those rare TV experiences when you realize all the typical rhythms have fallen away, and what you’re watching has become unpredictable and alive — and somehow you’re not sure whether you’ve been watching it for 15 minutes or 45.

Wilson presents as having lived the life of a middle-class tristate Everyman, only marbled with an obsessiveness that pulls him in deeply weird directions. He was born in Queens, to city natives who soon moved the family to Long Island. One of the first things he told me was that he was grateful for his parents’ support, in part because he’d been “a bit of a tyrant — I was just very focused on making my little movies, growing up. Sometimes I would miss family vacations just to finish these pathetic little projects.” At one point, he says in the show, he made a movie every day. In a first-season episode he reveals a pile of notebooks in which he’s tracked everything he’s done each day for more than a decade, a grid of bullet points memorializing the four strips of bacon he ate or a train he took to Union Square.

When he was young, he says in the second season’s “How To Remember Your Dreams,” his friends wouldn’t let him play Dungeons & Dragons with them, “because they said I wouldn’t take it seriously.” In response, he says, “I completely rejected fantasy from there on out. I started to only read books about real stuff and became obsessed with the authenticity of documentary filmmaking.” He struggled to fully enjoy fictional TV and was especially annoyed by things like dream sequences. (We see a shot of a barbershop named the Sopranos.) “While everyone else was going to Comic Con,” he says (as a man dressed like a wizard exits Washington Square Park), “I started going on court-TV shows to fill the void” (a 16-year-old Wilson appears, beaming, at the plaintiff’s table on an episode of “The People’s Court”).

He studied film at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he made a documentary about balloon fetishists. Afterward, in the city, he worked a series of video-related jobs, each disillusioning in its own way: advertising, shooting infomercials, combing through a private investigator’s surveillance footage or serving as a production assistant for a reality show called “American Gypsy,” which offered “one of the first moments when I was like, this is all fake.”

The impulse to hoard funny chunks of reality is reflected in Wilson’s apartment, the same rooms where he films his cat vomiting or his ruined risotto getting flushed down the toilet. (The toilet, he says, is a “very underrepresented image” on TV; he didn’t think it was weird to flush food down one until his show aired and people commented.) As he was showing me title cards from the series, which he paints on bits of newsprint, I realized that he was surrounded by stuff from the show: a chart of the “Mandela Effect” explored in the first season; a painting of a relatable amputee from the new “How To Throw Out Your Batteries”; some vintage Ray-O-Vacs from the same episode; he was even wearing a T-shirt from the parking convention in “How To Find a Spot.” A nearby shelf was stocked with those “books about real stuff,” including Studs Terkel with his interviews of ordinary Americans. Another of Wilson’s favorites is Susan Orlean’s “Saturday Night,” portraits of how various Americans spend the evening, from 1990. While hiring for his second season, Wilson kept mentioning wanting someone like Susan Orlean, until an HBO executive pointed out that they could probably just ask Susan Orlean, who came on board as a writer.

Wilson’s show: filled with things too mundane, too accidentally strange, too tacky or sad or flawed or lacking in panache, to actively star in anyone else’s account of the world.

Wilson told me about his love for the Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl’s “In the Basement” — “just a bunch of very slow portraits of people in their basements,” each space devoted to some unique purpose. He showed me a clip from one of his favorite artists, George Kuchar: “He made this series called ‘The Weather Diaries,’ where he would go to this motel in the Midwest every year and try to document extreme weather but then just get really distracted.” He’s an admirer of Louis Theroux’s BBC documentaries, of “Heavy Metal Parking Lot,” of the many hits of close documentary attention to how bizarre ordinary life can be.

“Everything is such a performance these days,” he said. It’s not as if Wilson is above using shtick to shape his show — his voice-over is a beautiful one, deploying sinus noises and uncomfortable trailings-off to keen effect. But he does seem to have a fear of his reality being distorted. While constructing the show’s first season, he says, “I would break down and cry in the edit, just because I felt all these hands trying to shape this thing that was so intensely personal to me.” Working in advertising, he’d seen how you could degrade and commercialize someone’s work. His show’s format, he hoped, was protection from that — at the very least, he joked, he wasn’t about to be recast with Ryan Seacrest.

If you want to see an Edenic, before-the-fall depiction of American adults, look for clips of Groucho Marx’s “You Bet Your Life” television broadcasts. They began in 1950, when you could find guests who hadn’t yet absorbed the norms of televisual behavior, and would present themselves the same way they might have addressed a new neighbor or an Elks lodge. They seem touchingly pure, while Marx, waggling his brows in the midcentury equivalent of “that’s what she said” jokes, might as well be from the ’90s.

The people Wilson features on his show occasionally remind me of those guests. It’s not that they don’t understand proper TV behavior; these days we learn that before addition and subtraction. But even successful efforts to replicate it tend to be helped along by editing; Wilson likes to say that on reality TV, if you kept any shot rolling just a few seconds longer, the illusion would be shattered. “How To” is constantly finding people who crackle to life in those extra seconds. It’s important, Wilson says, to see these unpolished portraits, “because a lot of the stuff we consume makes us feel like we’re not enough, sometimes. Because we’re not cheery enough or sharp enough.” He uses the word “representation” here — the representation of ordinary American ungainliness.

The people he focuses on do trend toward those typically neglected by television. They’re middle-aged with brusque local accents or wealthy but not in a worldly way; they have some kind of sales patter or nutty theory you’d normally tune out; they’re nerdy or goony or oversharers. Sometimes they aren’t trying to meet the expectations of televisibility; sometimes they’re trying too hard, and the effort is coming out lopsided. Sometimes they’re absurdly televisable, as with one Vivian Koenig, a no-nonsense older woman seen giving her husband a theatrical “can’t you see I’m busy” gesture that puts America’s top comics to shame. If TV works like pop music, seeing these humans on it is as recklessly thrilling as seeing Harry Styles pluck a random dad from an arena crowd and hand him a microphone.

It must be exciting, I told Wilson, when amid the countless conversations he records, he realizes he’s stumbled across a real live one.

“Do you not feel that,” he asked, “when you talk to someone that is slowly revealing a cascading story to you, or they don’t always realize how interesting it is?”

Most of us, I said, are busy, and cautious, and when a stranger starts opening up about, say, their anti-circumcision concept album, we politely vanish.

“I do that, too, sometimes,” Wilson said, “when I don’t have the time or the camera.” But when he’s seeking this stuff out, “you can tell immediately if someone wants to be recorded or not. And in that moment, when they give you an inch and you continue talking to them, and you raise the camera a little higher, a little higher, you begin to realize that oh, my God, so many people have a story.” Often, he told me, he would film someone for an entire day before they even asked what it was for; they just wanted to be recorded.

Holding the camera himself, he says, “changes the energy of the room.” Part of Wilson’s charm is that he almost never lets this energy provoke a cringe, except at his own expense. That reversal is the point of astonishment in “How To Cover Furniture,” a rumination on how we try to protect things from harm. At its climax, an interior designer answers Wilson’s questions with a friendly evisceration of his whole vibe: His camera, she says, is a protective mechanism, which he uses to connect with people from behind a barrier. She looks into its lens and offers advice that feels both kind and situationally hostile: “I would love for you, sometimes in your life, in your head, to be like, ‘I should put the camera down in this situation. I should just be John.’”

In his 2017 short “The Road to Magnasanti,” Wilson observes that Brooklyn’s new condos “will often decorate their halls with murals of the street, and photos of a New York they’re trying to replace — which may actually end up coming in handy, because soon enough that city will only exist in pictures.” Preserving the texture of that city is one of Wilson’s fixations. He chooses wider shots that can “basically also act as a photograph, if people need to go back and reference what one corner looked like.” His prepandemic footage, he says, is very likely “one of the most comprehensive archives of what New York looked like right before it changed forever.”

And yet one of the main impressions you get, watching his show, is that New York could hypergentrify itself into one continuous A.T.M. vestibule, or sink under rising oceans, and somehow you’d still go outside and find its residents, over by the deposit envelopes or oyster beds, doing their casually deranged thing.

Television offers us both a chance to learn about the world around us and a chance to imagine other worlds entirely, but an unsettling amount of programming somehow combines the worst of these possibilities. It takes us to exotic worlds but insists on filling them with familiar narratives; or else it purports to show us reality but makes that reality offensively artificial. Wilson’s quirks and anxieties — the vexed relationship with fiction, the terror of impermanence, the hunger to observe — seem to have channeled him toward a lovely alternative. He wanted to be able to make his own entertainment, he told me, because so much around him felt straitjacketed, “trying to make different versions of the same thing.” He seemed sincerely baffled by all the repetition. “I don’t know why everyone feels like they need to chase these archetypes a lot of the time,” he said. “I don’t know why people are so afraid of just, like, doing something new.”

Nitsuh Abebe is a story editor for the magazine. He has previously written for the magazine about the film “The Irishman,” devil’s advocates, “grifters” and the musician Richard Dawson.