How To With John Wilson continues to brilliantly capture our pandemic moment

From the obsession with Tiger King to the self-care of Ted Lasso, the COVID-19 pandemic had a profound effect on how we watched television in 2020. However, in terms of its presence on TV itself, there is no show that better captured the effects of the pandemic than HBO’s How To With John Wilson, which spent the final episode of its first season turning its observational eye to the terrifying early days of COVID’s spread in New York City.

Throughout that first season, Wilson demonstrated the versatility of his documentary approach by exploring seemingly inane topics—making small talk, covering furniture, putting up scaffolding—through a combination of narration, random footage from his travels in the city, and a true cornucopia of interviews that crescendo into a strangely profound statement on the existentialism of modern existence.

The COVID episode, “How To Cook A Perfect Risotto,” didn’t have to adjust the show’s formula to address the pandemic: Wilson was already perfectly positioned to capture the psychic turmoil of a crisis that connects us with its global ramifications but also forces us into isolation, unable to rely on those connections. Wilson’s second-person narration—although told from his point of view, it’s always “you,” never “I”—called out to the audience to see themselves in his relationship with his elderly landlady, and to consider the uncertainties about themselves that emerged so readily when the world became so uncertain.

It was a powerful bookend to an often weird, always fascinating short season of television, and a lot for the show’s second season to live up to. And while the second season doesn’t reach a profound conclusion that captures a pivotal moment in human history with striking clarity, and while the show’s sense of discovery is less impactful when the formula has been established, How To With John Wilson continues to capture something ineffable about the human experience and the pandemic, while also delving a bit further into Wilson’s own autobiography in the process.

In the season premiere, “How To Invest In Real Estate,” Wilson is forced to describe his work to a mortgage broker, and he doesn’t really know how to turn what he does into something legible to an average person. He lands on “memoir, essay, takes place in New York City.” When he delivers good reviews as proof that he will continue to get work, she more or less tosses them aside, because nothing can make “Shoot everything about your life, pick out random bits that match up with structured narratives, and follow every instinct—good or bad—to find stories that speak to the human condition” seem like a good investment.

Obviously, it’s great that HBO disagreed and invested in this second season. And there is evidence to suggest they did invest in it: There’s a slightly larger scale to the proceedings, whether in the accommodations on Wilson’s trips beyond New York or in the execution of episode-ending stunts that brings some stories like “How To Remember Your Dreams” full circle. How To With John Wilson will never be a flashy show, or rely on spectacle to tell its stories, but there are moments where you’re reminded that this is not just a man and his camera, but rather a man and his camera with the expense account of AT&T.

It’s a productive tension in most instances, though, and the show is largely the same as it was in the first season. If there’s a change, it’s that Wilson starts approaching the autobiographical nature of the series from a different perspective, occasionally moving away from the day-to-day to explore chapters of his own past—including a surprising connection with another HBO documentary project—within his storytelling.

It would be wrong to say the first season wasn’t personal for Wilson, but it was a slow-burning self-portrait, an introduction to his psyche that saw us learning bits and pieces about him as he spun his mostly impersonal stories. This time, with Wilson already a known quantity for returning viewers, we get what amounts to origin stories, snippets of his past that become more foundational to the stories being told.

In simplest terms, Wilson seems more comfortable treating himself as the main character of these stories. As noted, there’s a bit of an inevitable letdown when working through the second season knowing how the formula plays out: Part of the thrill of the first season was learning Wilson’s style and seeing how it could be deployed, and that’s absent here. The turn toward the personal, though, is a meaningful and effective inflection of the show’s structure. Wilson’s still mostly behind the camera, but he’s both quicker and more willing to make connections to his own experience, and there’s a stronger sense that these stories begin in a place of self-reflection than the “curiosities” vibe of season one.

Wilson still ends up in many of the same types of places—the man loves a convention—but his reason for being there seems less like a documentarian’s duty and more of a personal quest. This actually creates a new issue when the episodes lack seriality, leaving us hanging on how his personal struggles fared in the long term, but that’s another productive tension in a show defined by them.

Despite the prominence the pandemic gained during the show’s first season, Wilson’s personal quest lacks explicit acknowledgment of the ongoing pandemic. With much of the footage filmed during that blissful window between widespread vaccination and the arrival of the Delta variant, there’s fewer masks than you might expect, and none of the season’s six stories are about COVID directly.

And yet much as the first season’s storytelling didn’t need to be adjusted to speak to the arrival of COVID-19 in the U.S., How To With John Wilson captures the pandemic’s ongoing impact on our lives without speaking its name. The self-reflective turn speaks to how a year of isolation pushed so many people to re-evaluate their view of the world, and Wilson’s striking mix of endless curiosity and social anxiety is a perfect match to the hesitating re-entry to society so many have grappled with throughout 2021. And as a bonus, when a field report or interview falls flat—there’s a dive into fan culture that feels a little undercooked—it’s easy to just say that Wilson is, like all of us, not necessarily 100% back in his groove.

If you were already obsessed with How To With John Wilson after season one, you’ll be thrilled to have Wilson’s halting speech patterns back in your life, and scream in terror and delight at the latest assortment of New York City moments he captured since he last checked in with us. But while the shift toward the personal means that invested viewers will take more from his latest set of lessons, the central appeal of the show is that anyone who’s ever felt apprehensive about existing in society can find a piece of themselves in Wilson’s take on the world.

And at a time when things remain bleak, there’s something particularly comforting in the bittersweet resolutions to each of the “How Tos,” acknowledging the mess of the current moment while providing just enough perspective to give one hope for the path forward.