How To with John Wilson

How To with John Wilson is an American documentary-comedy series created, directed, filmed, and narrated by John Wilson for HBO. It premiered on October 23, 2020, and ended in 2023, after three seasons. Across eighteen episodes, Wilson turns ostensibly helpful subjects into highly personal essays assembled from footage he shot around New York City. The program’s central joke is its format: a calm voice-over promises practical guidance, while the images and encounters repeatedly lead somewhere else. Wilson’s own uncertainty remains visible, making the advice framework a route into anxiety, etiquette, consumer culture, friendship, family, and mortality. HBO renewed the show twice.

Season one opens with “How To Make Small Talk,” where Wilson uses street footage to examine awkward social contact before meeting a Mandarin-speaking man whose stories shift the episode toward isolation and connection. “How To Put Up Scaffolding” starts from the temporary structures covering Manhattan buildings, then follows a chance meeting with a person preparing to enter a cult. In “How To Cover Your Furniture,” Wilson visits a woman who wraps household objects in plastic and then follows a connection to activists opposed to circumcision. These digressions make ordinary habits feel strange, funny, and unexpectedly revealing to Wilson and viewers.

The second season continued that method while allowing longer stories. In “How To Appreciate Wine,” Wilson becomes involved with a wine connoisseur and attends a gathering of collectors; the episode also follows Wilson’s efforts to understand a bottle of Bordeaux. “How To Remember Your Dreams” connects dreams to a woman researching sleep and a professional who records his own dreams. The season two finale, “How To Watch the Game,” uses Wilson’s search for a way to enjoy football as a path toward questions of community and companionship rather than offering a conventional guide to sports spectatorship at all.

The final season, announced as the show’s last, premiered in July 2023. Its closing episode, “How To Track Your Package,” turns a missing delivery into Wilson’s attempt to resolve unfinished family questions. He travels to Scottsdale, Arizona, to visit his elderly former landlord, and the episode becomes a meditation on aging and missed chances. Throughout the series, Wilson combines deliberately composed narration with unplanned street images, private home videos, interviews, and moments captured in public spaces. Executive producer Nathan Fielder, known for Nathan for You, helped bring the project to HBO; Fielder and Michael Koman were among its executive producers.