We are gathered here to celebrate the beginning of the end for How To With John Wilson, a show that somehow blends a showcase of human weirdness, modern annoyance, mundane misadventures, and litter to create something that touches profundity while in pursuit of presence and meaning.
With a final 6-episode volume (which debuts Friday on HBO), Wilson isn’t necessarily promising a grand thesis statement (perhaps partly due to the fact that he’s still going to be telling stories, just through different projects). Instead, he’s doing what he’s done during the show’s first two seasons, exploring, observing, theorizing, and showcasing a broad spectrum of humanity while turning his camera on the world around him, celebrating uniqueness and connection all the while.
As we have at the start of each previous season, Uproxx spoke with Wilson about all of that and so much more, closing the loop on an enjoyable series of conversations with a filmmaker who has elevated people-watching to a literal art form during a, let’s say a highly eventful span of three years.
Through the show, you uncover a lot of things that I would imagine in the moment are somewhat surprising. I’m just curious if you found yourself changing with the process, getting more used to these kinds of things, getting more used to just abject human weirdness as you went through it?
It’s less that I got used to it. I think I just started to gravitate towards it more. When people reveal something very personal to me during an interview, I don’t react on my face, but I feel this intense high inside, that this person trusts me and that I am having an actual real moment with somebody, or I’m getting a real moment from somebody on camera and I’m kind of just more in shock that I’m the only person there witnessing something like that.
That’s the high that I’m chasing throughout all the work; getting to these real moments with people that we don’t usually have access to in our personal lives or in other media that we watch. I feel so much content out there doesn’t want to go to these really complicated places with people because a lot of reality content and even fictional content, there’s a lot of heroes and villains and there’s not as much in between. And it’s like, it’s all that weird gray area stuff that I think you can relate with the most. Because people do confess these really personal (things).
People say a lot of stuff that you might on the surface think is kind of weird in the show. But then I try to make you see that you’re only a couple of degrees away from this person, or you just might feel the exact same way as this person. There’s a bit of this person in all of us, in a way, that you’re seeing.
For sure. Thinking about other shows that you watch, or reality TV, like you’re saying, it’s almost like you take away that there’s maybe eight kinds of people and you watch this show and you see that it’s a much bigger box of crayons personality-wise that we have out in the world. It’s refreshing, honestly, to see them.
Yeah, I just find it so insulting when we don’t give people the space they deserve. I think that there’s this whole generation of reality, kind of nonfiction stuff that wastes so much opportunity with these really complex people by flattening them, and I want to encourage people to not do that anymore.
Yeah, it’s a cynical sort of productization. Again, it’s only a handful of archetypes that they want to showcase, and so everything feels just homogenized as opposed to something like this, which feels like I said, more like a rainbow of personalities. Was that the goal from the start, to showcase that?
I mean, that was part of it. Part of it was to reveal parts of myself. Part of the goal to begin with was to reveal parts of myself that I was afraid of revealing, but also exploring humanity in a way that I felt was being neglected in other media.
You mentioned revealing parts of yourself. I know catharsis through art can be tricky, especially at the end when you’re kind of looking back at it. At the end of the show now, three seasons in, any pause over any bits of yourself that you revealed? Do you feel like you didn’t give enough?
I don’t regret anything that I’ve revealed.
Are there things filmed that you pulled back specifically because it was too much, with regards to your personal revelations?
No. There was some stuff that didn’t make sense narratively, some anecdotal stuff that we took out. That was just kind of fat and we just trimmed it as we were editing stuff. But again, people just reveal so much of themselves in the show, that I needed to either meet them there or kind of overdo it with my own memoir stuff, just so it didn’t feel like I was just gawking.
This may sound like an insult — it’s not — but some episodes feel more intentioned or kind of polished than others. I like that. It feels refreshingly uneven at times with the story. Is that intentional to not necessarily have it feel so polished and so crisp that people start to wonder if it’s staged?
Yeah, totally. I never want anyone to think it feels staged. I want everyone to believe what they’re seeing and some episodes are extremely tight in how they wrap up and cover everything, but I like kind of having variation with that because then it doesn’t feel like a formula as much. And the idea of a formula is something that I’m constantly trying to fight.
Yeah, you’re not making Law & Order, you’re making something that feels like a fingerprint. Something that’s a little different in every iteration. Right?
Yeah, that’s well put. Otherwise, people get bored once they see what’s coming.
Yeah, anyone would get bored if they were trying to fill a specific template each time.
Yeah.
I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but I always feel like it just feels like a sunnier story when you’re talking about a specific interest that people have that they kind of come together to share as opposed to things where people are more isolated with their interests. The silo guy story is a bit sadder than the vacuum club because one is someone who’s trying to limit their indulgence into their own sort of interests to make sure that they still stay connected and one is people sharing an interest.
Yeah. I usually do celebrate these larger groups within the show because no matter how niche their interests are, I love that they found each other no matter what the obsession is. But yeah, the guy in the bunker, I did also see a bit of myself in him, but also I think that’s this kind of logical extreme in the episode for privacy and as it relates to restrooms and stuff like that. And the fact that he was also a septic tank specialist was like too perfect to me.
Is there a specific theme for this season or an overarching idea, whether it was intentional going in or whether at the end of it you feel like it revealed itself? I have my own takeaways, I doubt that they’re the takeaways that you intended.
I would be curious to hear yours.
I’ll be vague here, to not spoil anything. But in the early going, it seemed like some of the messaging was to be careful to not get too into our specific sensitivities, but then there’s also sometimes a danger in getting too into our specific interests as well. I spent a lot of time indoors during the pandemic because I’m immunocompromised. And so to me, I always felt like there was a risk in getting a little too inside oneself. So I kind of took that away from the show.
That’s good. I think there is a risk to getting too much inside yourself and it’s something I try to fight because otherwise you get lost in this galaxy of options. But getting lost in there is something that a lot of us do at the same time, and I want to make people feel comfortable doing that.
There’s a lot of stuff that we cover in the show and it’s really hard to sum up what the project of this season specifically was. There’s a lot of non-sequitur stuff in there. But I think this season is kind of about truth, it’s about desire, it’s about the infinite. It’s big things that I think about all the time that I’m not really sure about. Commitment.
And vacuums.
Yeah, vacuums.
The season premiere of ‘How To With John Wilson’ debuts Friday on HBO