The HBO series How To With John Wilson attempts to answer life’s big questions – and ends up with some bizarre, yet profound, answers
What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen on television recently? Kim Cattrall’s “will this do?” cameo on And Just Like That? Tom winning Succession? Matt Hancock singing Ed Sheeran on I’m A Celebrity…?
Stand down Matt, and put away your hair-brush microphone. There is a new winner, though UK viewers must wait a little longer to experience it first-hand and in its totality. Last weekend, the comedy-documentary How To With John Wilson concluded on US network HBO after three sanity-distorting seasons. It went out with a bang, a whimper and a roar of unfettered derangement.
The cliche around American TV comedy is that it is mass-produced and formulaic. But US television has in the last decade conjured, essentially from nowhere, a new genre of comedy so insane it isn’t actually funny and is closer to staring into the maw of pure madness. The market leader is Netflix’s I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson. Essentially, it’s the Fast Show as scripted by HP Lovecraft – one sketch involved Robinson allowing himself be humiliated by a cheesy magician, only for his wife to take this as a cue to call time on their marriage. It starts funny and ends up bleak beyond all comprehension.
That’s also the trajectory pursued by How To With John Wilson, which has the simple framing device of Wilson, a former private detective and music documentarian from Long Island, tackling various subjects armed with a home video camera. Episode one is titled How To Make Small Talk and concludes with Wilson in Cancun infuriating an MTV crew and bonding with a lonely young man whose best friend has died by suicide.