‘How To With John Wilson’ Is Still TV’s Most Profound and Bizarre Miracle

How To with John Wilson may be the most New York show ever, and in its third and final season (premiering July 28), it continues to express its effusive love for the city that never sleeps and, by extension, the diverse people who live in it. It also remains one of the most inventively personal, surprising and odd series to ever get a broadcast deal, much less one with HBO, which—between this and executive-producer Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal—has firmly staked its claim as the mainstream home of unconventional outsider comedy.

Wilson’s show has a simple set-up: each episode follows the comedian/filmmaker around the five boroughs as he looks into the best way to do something ordinary, be it (to name a few of his prior topics) remembering your dreams, investing in real estate, making small talk, or splitting a check. Wilson wryly narrates these installments, whose footage either focuses explicitly on him as he goes about his inquires, or is around-town material that he’s shot during the course of what must be daily jaunts through the streets, subways, stores and assorted nooks and crannies of his beloved metropolis. Part helpful guide, part sociological survey, and part intimate biography, it’s at once confessional and universal, as well as slyly profound, since Wilson’s superficial silliness always belies his true philosophical interests.

How To with John Wilson’s third go-round doesn’t deviate from its template, with Wilson tackling a variety of subjects to which almost anyone can relate—and which are particularly germane to New Yorkers. That begins with the small-screen auteur’s analysis of the best means of finding a public city bathroom. Wilson visits a variety of toilets and washrooms in and around New York, many of them in scary disrepair, all while providing a brief overview of the history of such locales and the neglect into which they fell starting in the 1970s. He finds one Brighton Beach spot that’s lovingly maintained by a woman at her own cost, hangs out in a self-cleaning stall (including while it’s in sanitizing mode), tours a waste management facility, and embarks on impromptu journeys to other states with strangers, discovering multiple unusual restrooms in the process.

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