‘How To With John Wilson’ Season 3 Provides One Final Reminder That Wondrous, Gross, And Miraculous Things Remain Abundant In New York City

With his 2017 short “The Road to Magnasanti,” documentarian John Wilson is confronted by a projection of fast-approaching dystopia via the urban planning simulator SimCity 3000. Filipino architecture student Vincent Ocasla used the game to design the theoretically perfect metropolis, a pinnacle of optimization housing the maximum number of residents in streamlined spatial efficiency. As a concept, the thicket of skyscrapers represents a final completion to the ongoing project of development, but the surfeit of pollution, widespread unemployment, and insufficient infrastructure would make the quality of life pretty dismal in practice. Wilson carries this tension between progress and decline with him as he takes his camera from his desk out into the world, where stitched-together snatches of street scenes correspond or give counterpoint to his uneasy, halting narration. Describing the culturally vacuous uniformity of Magnasanti, he trains his lens on some ominous, anonymous high-rises climbing into the Manhattan sky. In Magnasanti, standard-issue necessities can be purchased on every single block; in Wilson’s New York, self-contained live-work-play condo complexes and apartment buildings styled to resemble subway stations repackage the charms of the outside while eliminating the need to actually make contact with it.

Wilson recycles one bit for his cult-phenomenon HBO series How To with John Wilson, in which the crew of the CBS political drama Madam Secretary dresses up his block in the Ridgewood neighborhood of Brooklyn as war-torn Syria for an intense aerial strike. (“This was nice, because they got to blow up the Middle East and New York City at the same time,” he says in the short, just one instance of his unassuming book-report deadpan taking the edge off of cutting sentiments. He didn’t repeat the line on TV.) How To continues its creator’s fretting over the feasibility of the city he calls home, and in keeping with the instructional title, makes a case for what little can be done about it. Each half-hour episode poses as a guide to hilariously banal second-nature tasks before pivoting into existential meditation, his tips for engaging in small talk or finding a parking spot invariably giving way to matters of isolation and mortality. Taken as a whole, this curriculum on self-improvement becomes an impassioned civics lesson for city-dwellers everywhere, made all the more pointed and poignant in its final season. As Wilson watches a way of life going extinct in slow motion, he entrusts whatever remains of New York’s future to its most valuable, self-replenishing resource: its people.

With more color and accuracy than most slices of the Big Apple, How To captures the paradox that this gleaming testament to the ingenuity of man can be simultaneously the greatest and worst place on the planet. In one of his go-to comedic devices, Wilson strikes an ironic chord by pairing pleasant synthesizer music with footage of mountainous garbage heaps, skittering vermin, vomiting strangers, abandoned excrement, or the odd puddle of blood. He also recognizes that abruptly encountering something horrifying is the price of admission to the sidewalk, which offers just as many samplings of the strange, delightful, and transcendent. A man drags an air conditioning unit by its cord like an uncooperative dog on a leash; a door repeatedly opens and closes with no visible prompting; a pair of coroners hauling a corpse out of a home lose their grip and the stretcher crashes to the ground. Wilson built his technique on the beautiful, correct principle that if you venture out into New York and keep your eyes open, you will bear witness to several quietly incredible things every hour. 

As America’s most walkable city, New York City fosters a degree of spontaneity unavailable in geographies so spread out as to require a car. That sealed-off, A-to-B mode of transportation doesn’t allow for the exposure to one’s surroundings that leads to wandering detours taken on a whim, and that’s precisely how Wilson gets much of his best material. His penchant for striking up conversation with the oddballs crossing his path often takes him off the street and into their homes and workplaces, and he receives their hospitality with gracious curiosity. Though the occasional interview subject will reveal themselves to be a frightening or profoundly unwell person, Wilson practices a policy of patience and open-mindedness that looks past the first glance. 

The discursive structure mirroring an aimless constitutional frequently sends an episode into a peculiar micro-community of enthusiasts, such as a meeting of Avatar mega-fans or a convention of vintage vacuum cleaner collectors. The initial instinct to have a laugh at the expense of the weirdoes is scuttled by Wilson’s earnest attempts at understanding, which always locate a humanity — sometimes tender, sometimes warped — beneath the eccentricity. In one of the first season’s most touching passages, a montage shows Wilson’s disembodied hand opening various doors just to see what’s behind them, as if sharing the secret to ferreting the extraordinary out from the everyday. Wondrous, gross, miraculous things are all around us.

Like many New Yorkers, he finds that leaving town grants fresh perspective on it, as with a visit to an enclave of electromagnetic hypersensitives in a secluded pocket of West Virginia during the latest season’s second episode (which debuts tonight). Startled by the ambient cacophony after an earwax cleaning, Wilson searches for peace and quiet across state lines and amongst the self-diagnosed, who claim that only in the remotest, untouched woodland can they be free from the 5G cell signals causing them chronic headaches. They’ve opted out of the fragile, sacred social contract that governs coexistence in high-density climes, and they don’t seem much better off for it, one pair of neighbors still beefing even with acres between them. As Wilson returns to his borough, he concludes that a certain decibel level is an acceptable burden for the company of other people, and that we can only do our level best to be decent to one another.

The open public spaces that make New York worth the lamentable state of its average apartment are disappearing, gobbled up by construction on an expensive, hostile, privatized tomorrow. The blissed-out chillness of High Maintenance — a fellow HBO half-hour roving through the same sectors of Brooklyn, following a sociological bent as it peers in on the locals’ interior dramas — feels far from How To, in which the vibes are comparatively awful. High Maintenance’s first season ran during the twilight of the Obama administration, and sustained a liberal-minded optimism through its broadcast; How To’s debut season closes on the outbreak of COVID, a nightmare for someone who subsists on exploration. The new season is the first under the mayorship of Eric Adams, a former law enforcement official that’s not the least bit shy about inflating the budget of Earth’s largest police department. The cops play a recurring role as villains in Wilson’s trespass-happy adventures, omnipresent as they enforce the corporate claim to the land. In one of the cheekier applications of his associative editing techniques, Wilson cuts from a shot of officers on the stroll to strips of bacon frying in a pan.

New York’s finest make an appearance in the premiere of this farewell season, hustling Wilson off of the street in front of Hudson Yards, a sprawl of prime-cut real estate encompassing upscale living quarters, elite offices, and high-end shopping. He only entered the mall segment’s labyrinthine hallways in search of the one bathroom servicing the entire building, in which he beholds an apocalyptic vision of Manhattan 2.0: sterile, indistinct, atomized, and automated. The humble toilet takes on a symbolic significance as Wilson teaches us the trick to finding one, framed as a gauge of the city’s willingness to do right by its populace. (An extensive initiative in the ‘30s raised the number of freestanding commodes, which were then closed by budget cuts in the crime-obsessed ‘70s.) A matching visual metaphor presents itself in The Vessel, a 150-foot-tall shawarma-shaped staircase to nowhere that had to be closed to visitors after the fourth jumper committed suicide. As a monument to the folly and excess of the uberwealthy, it encapsulates the working class’ persistent anxiety that all of New York will soon be like this: shiny and pointless, ugly and inaccessible. Wilson acquiesces to his removal from the premises — “This place was already inhospitable enough, and I’ll never return,” he tells the NYPD — but he’s not taking it sitting down. He returns with a symbol of his own, a model of the Vessel hot-glued together from the plastic bottles full of urine that line the gutters of toilet-deprived areas. This canny gesture of pushback puts the show in miniature, left with us like an I HEART NY souvenir. It’s a fitting tribute to this glorious and grimy city, assembled on the cheap yet made with care, pungent and acidic on the inside. 

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.