How to make it new
A very 21st century TV show that has to be seen to be believed
In a late episode of HBO docuseries How To with John Wilson the titular presenter admits over a montage of motion-detector soap dispensers squirting into his hand with a grunt that years of living with roommates has shied him from ever vocalising his orgasms. Heard separately, his words would be crass; seen separately, the montage meaningless. Together they make a joke, and of a species more and more endangered. No, not because of its sexual content; its form. On FKA Twitter a screenwriter let us in on the new dispensation:
In this atmosphere of cheering surrender, it’s encouraging to find a show that can’t be watched the exec’s way, i.e. watched-without-looking (reducing film and TV to radio with supplemental pictures). It’s like when you’re told, “You have to watch ___!” but taken literally: since every episode of the show comprises end-to-end audiovisual remarks and jokes, you have to keep eyes and ears on the one screen for them to work. And when they work they’re funny, moving, insightful: pleasurable. With this combo of necessity and reward Wilson trains a modern audience how to watch his show, to want to pay attention to it—the sort of attention he pays to restroom soap, extreme pumpkin farmers, an estate agent who dated a serial killer, a 9/11 commemoration by bodybuilders too young to remember it, New York City, the world.
That’s the how. What about the what? From NHS ads about communing with forests to mindfulness apps on the phones that squatted our minds in the first place, the world isn’t short of reminders to pay attention (“Karuna! Attention!” caw the mynah birds in Aldous Huxley’s Island). But Wilson would have us notice more than trees and our bodies. With each episode introduced by his nasal “Hey New York”1and framed as a how-to guide to an everyday problem (‘How to talk about the game’, ‘How to split the check’) which then spools out in a left-field direction, the show is like a show-and-tell by the class’s most curious kid.
Too curious? For every shot of candy floss clouds against a salmon-pink skyline there’s a montage of ‘taxi driver droppings’ i.e. the plastic water bottles they leave on the curb, brimming Mountain-Dew-yellow with piss. For every cinema verité image of a man dancing atop a moving train which could be captioned with Winston Zedmore’s cry of “I love this TOWN!”, there’s a through-the-keyhole look into a porta-potty stranded on Brooklyn bridge that’s nonetheless managed to get shotgun-splattered in shit.
Not to make Wilson sound like he’s pioneered the form of the gross-out documentary. It’s more that he’s willing to follow any trail to wherever it’ll lead: deeper into the city and its citizens. A visit to boardwalk toilets in Brighton Beach daubed in life-affirming kitsch prompts a story from a volunteer cleaner about a girl who stepped back from suicide after she read one of the uplifting posters. Sewage workers in the city’s grossest job frankly explain how it’s one of the most essential: without them New York would clog to a standstill. Unsurprising to learn Wilson’s dad is a systems analyst and his mum an educator in public schools. From any place, high or low, he can snuffle out an edifying story of the weird and wonderful. This isn’t morbid but vivid curiosity.
So weird and wonderful are some moments that the USP of the docuseries has become its serendipity.2 Wilson has spoken to interviewers about times in the past he faked his way into a job or onto court TV, leading to his current deal with HBO; it’s as though whenever he’s bold, the world is bolder back. Coaxing a repairman to bitch about Dyson vacuum-cleaners, he ends up at a vacuum-cleaner convention then let into the archival basement of one collector then into the man’s grief about his just-dead dad, which in turn gets Wilson to mourn his grandma through an old model Hoover she left behind.
The docuseries’ bounty of serendipitous moments combined with its amateur, DIY aesthetic - hand-painted opening titles; Wilson as both presenter and cameraman; his effaced form even so (we glance him only in mirrors and photos); the B-roll footage that patches together every episode - have given rise to the disbelief on talkshows and social media as to how truthful it really is. Take the season 3 episode ‘How to track your package’. Was it pure chance that it pivoted so conveniently from an earlier mix-up about organ deliveries, to tracking church organ deliveries, to meeting an r-shaped man who works in a cryogenics lab, to him confessing that as a youth he castrated himself i.e. had his own missing package?
This disbelief betrays a vulgarity that always lurks behind the squaring-off of chance and contrivance, in locating truth only in the untinkered. The dynamo of How To with John Wilson is the way its amateur aesthetic is a sophisticated artifice. Wilson and his co-writers (including a New Yorker journalist and a stand-up comic) start with a draft of a script to brief the camera-crew as well as Wilson, then a draft rewritten in light of the footage they come back with, then a draft for the edit and narration that’ll give each episode its shape and unity (call them triple-cooked scripts). A good analogue for this would be the faux-spontaneity of a stand-up comedy set, one that’s been buffed to brilliance through cheers and boos on the club circuit. With this painstaking craft Wilson takes us past the hard, trite splits between documentary and mockumentary and scripted video essay; he even tackles head on the Documentary Paradox in one episode, ‘How to watch birds’, his post-internet version of Orson Welles’ F is for Fake, in which he confesses a hoax about an overflowing toilet through another one about the Titanic.
The show’s artifice leans on digital tech and the clerical obsessiveness that it’s facilitated. In the episode with the cryogenics, one man gives a grim look at how the resurrected might spend their indefinite lives: downloading every hour of the extant thousands of The Bachelor, for instance, and poring through them shot by shot, logging each contestant’s romantic tricks with bespoke initialisms in a never-ending spreadsheet. This bachelor of his own is like a nega-John Wilson, who himself has daunted interviewers with tales of an editing process that requires trawling the thousands of hours of digital video he and his crew have captured, tagging clips with keywords, then searching and sorting for what he can splice together into a story that’ll do justice to the real people in it.
Such a process wouldn’t have been impossible before digital video and home editing software. It would, though, have been faffier and more expensive. So while I won’t claim How To with John Wilson could only have been made now, it is a show by and for now, by and for our present moment—that moment of lucrative online video essays and YouTube tutorials for everything, when anyone can afford to be a gonzo vox-pop video journalist.
There are videos that have come out of this moment that are fresh and far-reaching, both content- and audience-wise (see Oki’s Weird Stories or Andrew Callaghan’s Channel 5 / All Gas No Brakes—actually see them!). Notwithstanding it’s a TV show, How To… deserves to be put among the best of them, the best in post-internet digital filmmaking (alongside meta videogame-stream Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough, the creepy-pasta apotheosis of The Backrooms, and the podcast absurdism of Pipe Rock Theory by How to… co-writer Conner O’Malley). Wilson, and his producer Nathan Fielder, get what milieu they’re drawing from, thriving in: their promo for the last season of the show was a spoof behind-the-scenes of a content-maker mansion for TikToker twinks. Wilson could’ve reacted against TikTok, Reels, YouTube Shorts and all the other short-form video content that’s apparently atomised our attention3 by doubling down on their opposite: on celluloid fetishisation or slow cinema. But as he told Mubi Notebook, “I wanted to make work that I didn’t really feel existed out there yet.” And he’s done so—by taking the ironic option, using the form of film and TV’s successors to refresh their predecessors. (Maybe this is why he calls the episodes of his very post-internet show nonetheless his “movies”.)
Wilson is what Milan Kundera would call an anti-modern modern. He swims neither with nor against the tide but follows the sound advice and tacks perpendicularly. He goes with the grain to reroute it. The best art in the age of digital tech and the internet couldn’t exist without them (or only with difficulty) but at the same isn’t about them, let alone sucks up to them. Thanks to Online, there’s never been more - and more rapidly increasing and spreading - video content, but Wilson uses the form of digital filmmaking to illuminate those parts of life that most digital video content tends to miss or muss or profane.
And so while How To… might feature brand influencers and Instagram photo shoots, it does so to invert and deepen them, simply by sticking around long enough either side of the self-promotion: it’s like when you catch somebody’s soul after they drop their “Smile!” for the camera and before they resume the mask of everyday life. In place of social media’s pseudo-abundant, -exotic, -democratic content (‘Let a thousand followers bloom!’), the show rouses our novelty-appetite only to remind us what else we’re hungry for: not just, for example, factoids about New York City scaffolding that prevents further deaths from loose masonry but corroboration of our worries about how hostile public space has gotten for the public. While the Mandela Effect might seem, post-LLMs, like one of the quainter, less harmful internet delusions, Wilson finds in it a lesson about the shakiness of overfed memory even when everything is recorded nowadays by the likes of him. And while the brisk imagery of the show visually echoes a mindless doom-scroll - take the series of critters that opens the episode ‘How to work out’ (which itself recapitulates the outsize presence of animal photos and videos on the internet) - the imagery always has, because of how it’s edited and narrated,4 a structure, unity, a mindful purpose (in the case of the critters, to tell the old story of innocence to experience via puppies, frogs and crashed-out city park squirrels).
You don’t have to be an aficionado of public service films to know this technique isn’t new. Anybody who didn’t flick to another channel during the non-Muppet segments of Sesame Street is well acquainted with narrated montage in documentaries. That’s because Wilson, as an anti-modern modern, doesn’t just co-opt the innovations of the internet-era to resist its degradations and revitalise the TV and film doc forms. He also redeems what might’ve seemed outdated or superseded in them by growing rootedly out of their history.
In his earlier, not-so-dead-end jobs Wilson spent time on the sly watching a movie a day by his predecessors: documentarians such as Les Blank, with his like sympathy for the weird, or Frederick Wiseman with his epic films on institutions.5 The nearer lineage Wilson stems from includes Louis Theroux, of whom he’s a professed fan and whose influence can be seen in the How To… episode with the supportive gooning memes (which if you don’t know what they are: enjoy); and shows like Nathan For You by his producer Fielder, the finale of which, ‘Finding Frances’ wasn’t a mockumentary or prank-reality-TV like that which had come before but something stranger and sadder: a show sloughing off its silliness and artifice in real-time.
Wilson’s studied awareness of the history of the form might explain his show’s self-awareness, that it knows it’s a documentary and what that entails and forecloses. Its very first episode ‘How to make small talk’ was like a covert primer on the art to interviewing. Its season 2 episode ‘How to be spontaneous’ was an unexpected sequel to the first season’s feel-good closer, reminding us narrative artworks have happy endings only because they have endings, while life is open-ended, something which all documentaries gesture towards by the nature of the medium even if the subject matter might be more circumspect.
We’re often told, especially by those allergic to realist art, that films and TV about life are also always about film and TV. (Even the most realist art about life ends up having to be a little about art because no form is transparent, every form has to interface between subject matter and artistic language.) But films and TV that are about film and TV - the sort people find too insider-baseball, too self-reflexive if not self-indulgent - are also always about life as well. Art about art is about life because life contains art. Those rare shots we get of Wilson on his camera in a mirror aren’t by accident. All documentaries have to select a part of life, can’t be as comprehensive as life itself; and what they’re about doesn’t have to include documentary-making for them to remain true-to-life. Wilson, though, artist that he is, can’t but incorporate documentary-making into how he makes his movies. I mean it would’ve been odder if the attention he pays to the rest of life hadn’t been paid as well to how he documents it. That’s why his title format can be read as a justification: the docuseries showing us ‘How to make documentaries new’.
Ezra Pound’s “Make it new” - the modernist credo - is too often read as if newness is a stylistic choice, a sheen that can be whizzed up and applied (like when a social media team gets told “Make it go viral”). Or as if newness is either a matter of what happens to be the latest, the last in the cultural line, or a wholesale rupture from the prior culture. (Too easy to imagine a tech start-up having the slogan “Make it new” alongside “Move fast, break things.”) Or as if newness was simply moreness: the core ethic of the internet.
But the “make” part is as important as the “new.” When Pound in ABC of Reading called literature the “news that stays news” he didn’t mean a given great work somehow keeps churning out new content like a monomaniacally refreshed home page. He meant that when a writer charges their language with the utmost meaning and exactness, our interest in their work will never wear out. Originality understood here not as arbitrary novelty but distinction. One of the funniest lines in How To… is when Wilson, riding shotgun in a helicopter to test if and when a bag of potato chips will pop from the air pressure, demands, over the pilot’s safety warnings, that they go “Higher”—the deadpan megalomania of the auteur but also a line that can be taken as the ethic of his show. For a modernist artist, aiming higher - not only in theme but form - means devoting themselves to making work that fulfils the potential of the form against all other considerations, which devotion is best founded on what came before (in Ezra Pound’s case, the classics, the ancients: the future lying behind and not in front of the past). With that foundation and devotion, an artwork might pull off and retain the evergreen surprise of aesthetic excellence. Something that always feels new, even when the work’s been done - finished, over - a long time ago.
For that’s the last of the ways Wilson has harnessed the internet and turned it back on itself. Not only is his show as game as the internet without ever gawping for likes, not only does it have compassion for the mass ephemera of the modern world without being ephemeral itself, it - unlike the internet - has an end.
The show could never have gone on indefinitely. By season 3 Wilson was more distrusted by potential vox-pops, more turned away on sight (call it the Sacha Baron Cohen effect). He stopped making further episodes and made a whole instead.
So what? All art has an end—but that mundane fact stands out afresh with a TV show that was in part a response to the internet’s callous endlessness. Neatly its finale took place among, on the one hand, cryogenicists and a castrato - i.e. those who don’t want to end or be superseded - and on the other hand a new father squirrelling away frozen pizzas, a burglarised woman freezing her eggs, and Wilson himself wondering whether to have kids.
What he left us in the meantime is an eighteen-part, nine-hour documentary that’s like a New York preservation society as TV show67—albeit more curiosity shop than civic museum. And another chapter in documentary history worthy of following the best in the form. And a post-internet artefact that absorbed and exploited its new ways of seeing, and non-seeing, to get us to see the world definitely again. To paraphrase a friend about another great recent digital movie, “Thus is art ever renewed and reinvented.”
I imagine a local version: “Alright, London.”
This serendipity includes the shape the show’s been given by world events. The first season’s final episode ended with the start of the COVID19 pandemic; the second season - peppered with footage of mouth-masks, partitioned shops, a guy dismayed by his measure of air quality on the subway versus chain stores - was set throughout. Wilson has told interviewers about fearing these seasons would be deemed trivial in such times, when in fact viewers deemed them a life-raft, a reminder of what they missed about cities and people, proximity-grossness included. And so the third and final season was consciously post-pandemic: one episode deals with turning to birdwatching after feeling too cooped up. Another likens Wilson’s own protein diet fad to hallucinating dachshunds as wieners, bacon as cops. Another episode eavesdrops on a prophetically inane speech from a tot-toting Elon Musk. In yet another we’re appalled by the cross-party contempt for shared space in the world after Covid: a guy in the suburbs with zero qualms about firing a noise-cannon off the back of his pick-up truck; a Burning Man couple who’ve taken self-care right through to self-interest with 1am dance parties for their baby’s birthday, immigrant neighbours be damned.
I’ll paraphrase Sam Kriss here, who, over various posts, points out that the idea of shortened attention spans is a false lead, when people don’t watch videos on their feed but only the initial couple of seconds before pulling to the next (with maybe some cursory lice-picking engagement per each) but do watch 3-hour YouTubes of men recording a podcast or n-hour Twitch streams of inverts playing video games. Better to say all attention has gone fissiparous.
When narrating, Wilson sounds like a man who doesn’t like raising his voice having to get a crowd’s attention (appropriately enough).
He also worked as a candid cameraman for a private investigator which he reports gave him his eye for anomaly.
Superior cousin to Martin Scorsese’s more familiar talking-heads doc Pretend It’s a City, which treated us to Fran Lebowitz’s charmingly frustrated but fundamentally nostalgic past and present experiences of New York.
And not just New York. Embodying its own lesson that detours and dérives are better routes to truth, the show frequently leaves the city. In the final season Wilson takes a trip out and returns every episode, like the tracing of a six-petalled flower.