‘How To with John Wilson’ and coping with the pandemic anniversary

I’ve gotten pretty tired of How To guides for coping with the pandemic and its various fallouts. I know they come from good intentions, and hey, I’ve written plenty myself. But a year in, I’m done pretending there’s much of anything the individual can do to pull themselves up by their proverbial COVID bootstraps (if you will) and just be OK right now.

It’s why the nonsensicalness of How To with John Wilson, an HBO comedic docuseries released back in October, is the only kind of problem-solving guide I can stomach during this senseless one-year pandemic anniversary month. 

Executive produced by Nathan Fielder, it shares a lot of the Nathan For You creator’s normcore-style awkward relatability, finding not only humor but philosophical meaning in the little bizarre moments of mundane life. Each of the six How To episodes is like a Russian doll of perspectives, starting off with a very specific and concrete problem — like “How to Improve Your Memory” — that then progressively broadens out beyond recognition with every passing minute. 

So, for example, what starts out as a meditation on the modern compulsion to document our experiences through pictures so we won’t forget somehow brings us to a man who’s part of a  Mandela Effect conference, then to a memory competition champion, before finally dovetailing into the unavoidable fact that our memories will always fail us so the best we can do is learn how to accept losing the people and places we love to the entropy of time. Or, in an even more astoundingly crafty twist, in the final episode Wilson manages to get us all the way from “How to Cook the Perfect Risotto” and into how to deal with living in through a global pandemic.

As Wilson explores his surroundings of New York City with a handheld camera, his voice-over brings all the disparate parts of his attempts to do a thing into one cohesive whole. You never quite know where he’ll take you, but you know that wherever you land, you will indeed feel like you’ve learned something, though it’s never actually how to do said thing. 

What makes the series such a great inoculation for the pandemic wall is how it finds meaning in the most unremarkable and least likely places. We’ve spent the past year in varying degrees of quarantine surrounded by the same walls day-in-day-out, constantly bombarded by the waves of collective and ongoing grief from what we’ve lost. And it just makes everything feel unsolvably meaningless. But if there’s one connective tissue bringing the series together, it’s the stubborn need to make meaning out of nothingness. That’s the ultimate How To, isn’t it? How To Find Meaning In The Nothingness Of Life. 

Somehow, Wilson’s show actually does kind of teach you that. 

His jittery handheld camera — which feels like watching Cloverfield, but instead of a big ass monster it’s about a creeping pandemic or, rather, the monstrosity of existing at all — is a guide for how to see your world in ways you never thought to before. You take something seemingly meaningless, something as insignificant as scaffolding, and you find the angle that makes it feel like it matters. 

And, gosh, I need that right now. I need to be reminded of how to make it feel like any of it matters.

Many folks have spent this month showing the difference a year can make, with side-by-sides of crowded places like stadiums and ocean piers back in early March 2020 juxtaposed against their dystopian emptiness in 2021. How To scratches a similar itch, a rather morbid need to see New York City before and after, his camera’s observant eye watching as markers of the Before Times slowly become unrecognizable.

John Wilson didn’t intend to make a docuseries on how to cope with a pandemic. But in the least instructive way possible, he did. 

But even as Wilson captures that stark contrast of a city going into lockdown, he also captures what doesn’t change. Namely, Wilson himself, who never really seems to grow or transform much despite the myriad of narrated revelations he describes while attempting to solve all these problems. It’s the true juxtaposition of a year-long pandemic: Everything has changed yet remains exactly the same.

John Wilson didn’t intend to make a docuseries on how to cope with a pandemic. But in the least instructive way possible, he did. 

Because this show (even before COVID makes its entrance) was always about dealing with life. And though it feels like the pandemic is an experience out of time and place and absent of life itself, the hard truth is that everything we’ve gone through over this past year has been the same world we were always living in, full of death, catastrophe, isolation, suffering, inhumanity, systemic inequality, an institutional failure. We just weren’t seeing it from a clear enough angle.

The show’s title satirizes the idea that there are ever any straightforward solutions, baiting and switching us into realizing the answer for how to do life is always inconclusive, sometimes even regressive. Wilson rarely accomplishes the thing he sets out to do. At the end of every episode, the answer for how to do it is to simply do what you can, then accept the imperfections of trying.

That’s basically how I feel about surviving this nightmare year, and coping with the repercussions we’ve only just begun to recognize. The answer is that there are no answers. No one knows how to do any of it. Nothing will fix this. 

So, I guess, if we were together alone in March 2020, in March 2021 let’s just say we fell apart in one piece. And for now, that’s going to have to be enough.

How To With John Wilson is now streaming on HBO Max.