How To with John Wilson

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

I don’t watch much television, but was intrigued by the concept and seeing as Nathan Fielder is an executive producer sort of sealed the deal for me. Nathan For You’s first two seasons are a sort of send up of bad reality TV shows that starts to play with the form more in the third season where it begins to function as a sort of documentary of Los Angeles weirdos and the spontaneity of people’s reactions when they know there’s a camera on them culminating in the incredible series finale.

How To with John Wilson functions both as an essay show, documentary, and comedy as one simple concept sort of spirals into an assortment of found moments in New York City with John Wilson’s nervous, squeaky, dead pan narration over the footage. Its form reminds me of Chris Marker’s and Pierre Lhomme’s Le Joli Mai. As the Marker/Lhomme film features cats in cute costumes somehow finding shared space with interviews of the most impoverished Parisians, HtwJW allows thoughts about cats scratching furniture to connect to circumcision debates. I know it’s never funny to discuss comedy, but the direction the show takes in each of its (so far) four episodes is starteling. The lowkey energy and the use of library music and dated electronic music sort of just hypnotizes me (I’ve so far have caught cues by Sven Libaek, Stelvio Caprini, and Mammane Sani). It’s a strange show that’s gentle, shocking, crass, and hilarious in a way that’s just comforting to me.

[therewillbeblus]

I'm only two episodes in, but I'll second your rec. The show takes some of Fielder's observational strategies at mining for comedy in the earlier episodes of Nathan For You, and structures an entire show around it in Chris Marker fashion. At times this feels like a completely fresh form of comedy, assembling a videographer's collage with seemingly aloof and disconnected commentary that covertly uses its banal images to create layered visual gags in entirely novel contexts. It's not the funniest joke but the best example I can think of offhand

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is when he's reviewing how to approach strangers for small talk, and as we watch an apparently random clip of a woman talking on the phone while hula-hooping, he says, "you want to look busy, but also relaxed."

[therewillbeblus]

Okay, the Mandela Effect clan's sincerity at believing that Fringe is real life was great, but I don't remember the last time I've laughed as hard as

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when the lady says she remembers Benicio del Toro dying in 2001, but that she thinks he's still alive, followed by "I'm not sure what that's about but that's interesting." The woman trying to explain why she doesn't understand the internet and losing track of her own thought was a close second.

As the show progresses it feels more like Nathan For You as shot by Ross McElwee, but still original enough to stand on its own legs.

Also, it looks like John Wilson has a website with similarly-themed shorts that predate the show

[therewillbeblus]

Anatomy of a Scene: The Bread Scene is maybe the hardest I've laughed all year (well, this hasn't exactly been a particularly "funny" year, but still). You don't need to have watched How To to see the brief 9-minutes clip, but what starts as a deadpan mock-"Behind the Scenes" featurette, and then takes an unexpected transformation into a single-segment Nathan For You episode where Nathan Fielder

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recruits 17-year-old Tik Tok stars to live at his house and engages in creepy behavior, like counting their calories..

[TraverseTown]

"TikTok is a children's dancing app where children will upload videos of themselves dancing for children and adults to enjoy." is definitely the most I've laughed this year (outside of some moments in How To).

[skilar]

Three episodes have aired from the second season, which finds Conner O'Malley and Susan Orlean now on the writing staff. How To Appreciate Wine is a highlight, with Wilson

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showing up unannounced at a baby shower in a gated community as he tries to interview an energy drink company's CEO. I don't know how this guy does it. His dedication to the bit, if you can even call it a bit, is impressive.

[therewillbeblus]

I really disliked the first ep this season, which is to say I was completely apathetic towards it after a strong first season set the bar high. I guess it gets better?

[skilar]

I hear you. The first and third episodes don't quite reach the highs of the first season. A bit ho-hum and lacking in the unexpected, though I found them enjoyable as a document of NYC. I wonder how much the pandemic has affected his ability to find and follow random leads to absurd ends.

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

After my high praise for the first season, it disappoints me that the second season feels like it lost its focus and its sparkle of what made it feel special. Few things felt as painful to me as the moment in the first episode where John Wilson attempts to take out a massive loan to buy a house and brings his newspaper clippings to the loan officer. Moments in the previous season felt so spontaneous, exciting, and sort of exploratory suddenly, but this just felt like TV comedy. Even the part skilar brings up in episode two where he does an impromptu visit to the CEO of Bang Energy is funny, but as a part of the whole of the episode, I sort of questioned why we were there, especially after the bizarre aside where he talks about performing at a NXIVM event, seemingly having nothing to do with anything other than being an interesting anecdote. All that sort of weird visual poetry, personality, and moments of complex emotion (remember the lone partier in the first episode of this show?) instead wants to laugh at the bizarre characters on screen the way you already see online.

[Murdoch]

I didn't mind the first three episodes of season two. They were lacking the strange characters and twists of the first season but bits like the energy drink CEO',s party and few other smaller moments were amusing and brought back some of the prior season's magic.

Episode four though is like a completely different show at points, feeling in line with the plethora of YouTube amateur documentarians that populate that site's "Recommended" section. I enjoyed the showcase of the sanitation department but the episode felt far more structured and predictable than the usual stream-of-consciousness day-in-the-life style.

[skilar]

Episode four though is like a completely different show at points

I agree. This episode was the low point for me. Last season this episode would have been a deep investigation into

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the contents of the safe left outside his building, or where the safe came from, or both, but this season it's just a moment played for humor before quickly moving on.

It feels like the show's curiosity has disappeared and been replaced with a script. Unfortunately its curiosity was what made it so good.

[mfunk9786]

It's driving me a bit batty, because LQ is still 110% on board with this and I'm losing patience for some of the same reasons detailed above. The moment you see someone that presumably HBO's casting department or a producer went and found for him to chat with (like the guy with a belief that he was a descendent of John Adams), an episode is pretty much toast from there because there is some writerly loop we're about to be taken on, in lieu of anything bordering on slice-of-life observation. And then, of course, a contrived bow (like the safe) to tie it all up. It is what it is, but not even in the same stratosphere as the first season.

Around a decade or more ago (I'm so old!) when the Howard Stern Show went to satellite radio, Richard and Sal (writers and prank callers), looking for legal avenues to making recording pranks on real people that could be played back on the air without needing to secure permission after the fact, would go through the list of fringe people requesting interviews on a number of stations and book some of them on a fictional show. They'd come on the "Jack and Rod Show" to discuss their new book/project about any number of unusual topics, and then Richard and Sal as the hosts would crater the interview with some kind of antics. Kind of a reverse prank call that allows for the weirdo to come into the fold instead of the other way around. Anyway, this season of How To feels just like that bit, mostly in all the bad ways. Zero need to hear from that John Adams guy aside from pointing and laughing at him. The line is a tough one to see at times, but I don't feel the warmth from this show that I did when its aims were more modest and its heart was out on its sleeve.

Will still dutifully watch every one.

[therewillbeblus]

I caught up with John Wilson's short film Los Angeles Plays New York, and it's not exactly funny but the central conceit is interesting:

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John and his friend falsify a story on an inauthentic show about justice, essentially engaging on a level playing field of absurdism with unwitting principals who take themselves seriously, only to discover that doing so is a 'serious' crime with a pursuable penalty in authentic courtrooms

It's pretty intelligent in its crafting of irony, though I didn't laugh much, and it's certainly not a sign-to-come of the smart videography edited in the first season of How To. I wish he went further with the titular idea, which doesn't fluidly work into the more creative concept at the center of the short, though it kinda-sorta tries.

[skilar]

I caught up with John Wilson's short film Los Angeles Plays New York

The premise sounds interesting. Where were you able to watch this? I've checked my usual places but can't seem to find it.

[therewillbeblus]

It's on backchannels, and I think it might be illegal to release because.. well, that's kinda the punchline

[skilar]

Thanks for the heads up. I don't see it in any of my usual spots, but I'll keep checking.

[kidc]

Wilson's short The Road to Magnasanti is available here for streaming for the next week or so (I believe)

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

Wilson's short The Road to Magnasanti is available here for streaming for the next week or so (I believe)

This short just made me feel sad as it was a clear reminder of just how bad the newest season of his show was in comparison to his earlier work. The new season was just TV comedy, but this is something else. Thanks for sharing!

[colinr0380]

In a surprising turn of events this series has just started airing on the BBC with the first two episodes of the first series "How To Make Small Talk" and "How To Put Up Scaffolding" showing this evening. I found John Wilson quite an entertaining character, like a less cocksure Michael Moore or Louis Theroux, or a real life version of the Alantutorial figure (or, as Elegant Dandy Fop suggests in the first post of the thread, a bit like Chris Marker's Sans Soleil character if everything they were philosophically musing upon with deep sincerity was inherently completely absurd and only they are not aware of that fact). It looks as if the interplay between the wistfully naive commentary and the bluntly comic captured by happenchance vérité imagery is the key to understanding his approach to the world. Although like Michael Moore (though less morally questionable) it can sometimes seem a little too convenient in how the imagery just happens to be there, leading to chicken and egg 'which came first?' questions constantly running through my mind. (Basically what I'm saying is that I wouldn't have been surprised if John Wilson probably caused that hotel in New Orleans to collapse by fiddling with the scaffolding. That scaffolding was his equivalent bullying of Charlton Heston moment! )

The "How To Make Small Talk" episode was wonderfully morose in an Antonioni-if-comic way for how it depicts the push and pull between wanting to make friends and having nothing to say to anyone when you do talk to them. Or worse, you find out they are just as messed up, inarticulate and lonely as you are, with problems that you don't really want to know about! I particularly liked the little montage of how relationships develop and end through little captured events on the street, from people messily making out, to angrily fighting, to the inevitable body-bagged corpse being wheeled out of a building. Until the paramedics drop it halfway down the steps, which might be the last physicial moment of interaction the dead person ever had! And I loved the way that he 'accidentally' 'photobombed' a live MTV concert to such an extent that the staff had to pull him out of the crowd because his bewildered, too old figure constantly looking in the opposite direction from the performers on stage was just too distracting and/or depressing!

The "How To Put Up Scaffolding" episode was interesting in showing that all of those New York walkabout videos (by the likes of Action Kid) that I watch appear to be correct in showing that scaffolding is everywhere in that city. I learnt quite a few interesting facts from that programme, such as the origin of all the scaffolding lying in the death of a person all the way back in 1979 forcing buildings to constantly have to have their facades inspected every five years. And that fun thesis statement at the end that it may be a better idea for buildings (such as those in New Orleans) to be built with the scaffolding within their structure rather than bracing it all precariously from the outside. There were some amusing scaffolding metaphors too that kept just edging across the line into wry absurdity, such as the one about how the human body has scaffolding such as plaster casts for legs, which became more tortured and absurd as it got equated to braces and cell structures. And that scene of the rather 'large' lady in the tiny apartment will stay with me for a while, both for the rather unflattering image of her from behind waddling across her bed on her knees to open the window to show the scaffolding there, and for the somewhat absurd image of the exercise bike propped up in the corner of the rather cluttered apartment.

I also found it amusing that both episodes take brief trips mid-episode outside of New York as a kind of form of escape, but inevitably the heart pines for home and Wilson expresses palpable relief at returning to the city that he knows and somewhat tolerates the eccentricities of. With the kicker being that there is some sort of escalating horrific new image (the rat inside the black waste bag in the first episode; the flaming runway fire in episode two!) to welcome him home!

Anyway I jotted down a few pithy notes whilst watching which might capture the sense of the programmes: "Exponential Pillows", "Rubbish", "Kissing", "Faeces/Blood", "Richie Rich/Quantum of Solace", and "Filming subjects from a distance like a disturbing stalker" (which may be the key to the John Wilson aesthetic)

But I enjoyed both the episodes very much, although I will temper my expectations for the later seasons based on the comments above since I can already feel a bit of that artificiality even when it works! But for now surprisingly John Wilson seems to have erected a scaffolding of kindness around the crumbling edifice of my heart!

[colinr0380]

Episode 3, "How To Improve Your Memory" was really interesting (and very reminiscent structurally of Michael Moore, especially his TV Nation series where you have a thesis presented and then an application of that thesis in the form of a staged event at the climax) in the way that it uses the familiar by now structure of voiceover combined with just too specific to be real found footage to talk about the perfect subject of the Mandela effect, as John Wilson just happens to run across someone who works at a grocery store during his weekly shop who introduces him to the theory of unreliable memory and from there takes the by now standard trip outside of the increasingly disturbingly turning into a movie set New York to a convention which turns out to have a more cult-like feel about it, as events quickly turn from just illustrating mundane examples of remembering something differently from the reality of the situation to this somehow definitely proving the existence of multiverses that some more sensitive people just so happen to tap into on occasion. But we should not be worried about this cult being dangerous as, like most cults, its all pretty much a floor show to get you to buy their book which tells you how it was actually the author who created Pokemon cards and nobody else.

Of course Wilson himself takes all of this at face value (aside from the wry associated imagery providing a bit of extra texture), taking questions from attendees about "Where is the internet stored?" (the answer is in "Crystals" apparently) as having as much weight as how Febreze used to have an extra 'e' in it. Maybe the Mandela effect is a strange mix of people having had things change on them (usually minor things like brand names, but also the JFK assassination and 9/11 inevitably comes up as the biggies) so many times that they start applying that suspicion to other things around them with their memories that remember obscure pieces of text or imagery slightly differently from how they actually appear. Then instead of noting that slight difference as something more or less amusing, the person instead tries to understand why the world outside may be the element at fault rather than their memories recalling something differently. At extreme cases you get things like that convention in danger of tipping into paranoid conspiracy theories where people are trying to manifest their concerns about 'living in a multiverse' into reality by communing with others who also feel the same way. In the end Wilson returns home to New York from the convention (the horrific image of the city to welcome him home this time around is the CBGBs restaurant! Which is certainly some form of twisted corporatised nostalgic memory in itself!) and rather than buying into that guy's book reads his own meticulously kept for a decade diaries of every action he has taken, and realises that he does not remember those events in the same way from a decade in the future. Even without actively changing anything (in fact trying to capture every minor aspect of his life in words), the simple passing of time has made him a different person from the one he was and this new John Wilson has different things that he remembers, or wants to remember, about that period now.

There is that interesting moment when he talks about witnessing firsthand the Ronald McDonald balloon collapsing at that year's Macy's Day parade but anyone watching the event on television not being aware of that happening because they broadcast an image of the float from the previous year instead to cover over the problem. But whilst Wilson talks about this meaning that there are two sets of, supposedly equally valid, viewpoints on the event (whilst not really noting the blatant media lies which mean one version of 'reality' was entirely false!), it seemed like he missed the bigger deflating elephant in the room of corporational gaslighting going on. The big reason for the Mandela effect that this episode keeps alluding to but never stating outright is not tricks of memory or diverging parallel universes bleeding into one another, but the much more likely and disappointingly mundane one of just being screwed around with by others constantly changing and tweaking tiny elements of things that leaves anybody who notices the meddling in a state of confusion!

There is an argument that this may not be done intentionally but I think the big issue underlying this episode that is ostensibly just about memory is that if you live in a society entirely controlled by various brands and logos then things can be changed on a whim, with any previous memory and attachment that someone may have also going by the wayside as unimportant (or just plain wrong) too. Many corporations do not like to look back at their old logos (unless it is a really beloved one that has become an iconic branding, like Coca-Cola or the Queen's head on UK currency), mostly because they have just sprung for a fancy new expensive re-design and want you to forget the old one and just go with the new look. Maybe it is all tied in with painful behind the scenes corporate take overs, in which case they really don't want you to talk about how much you preferred their old logo! This also quite neatly ties in with Wilson finding his city block being turned into movie sets for period set films (and, as with the MTV concert in the first episode, ending up being ushered out of the 'set' for being an unwanted and somewhat depressing anachronism!), which is just a more extreme form of finding your reality being changed by a corporate force and just having to go along with it until they have all finished fiddling around with aesthetics and things can go back to some form of normality!

Or maybe John Wilson did not miss the significance of the inherent falsities of the Ronald McDonald 'diverging realities' since his final act of activism is to go into various grocery stores and stick corrected logos on top of Febreeze and sunglasses on the Raisin Bran mascot! The big moment missing at the end of this episode is that I really wished that we could have seen the reaction of that guy in the supermarket to all of the brands turning back into the ones that he (mis)remembered! Would he have regarded it as an act of altruism by Wilson, or just another example of screwing around even more with a person whose concept of reality was already quite unstable? Perhaps tellingly John Wilson has performed his big climactic statement of the episode and moved on without much regard to whether that guy will have been pleased or further confused and tormented into madness by the action!

[colinr0380]

Episode 4: "How To Cover Your Furniture" was very amusing as in a bid to stop his cat's purely expressed love of clawing up and destroying his sofas, Wilson explores ways of covering a new chair and keeping it pristine, although every idea such as plastic covers and simply not sitting on it at all (eventually leading to the original chair being locked up for safe-keeping Ark of the Covenant-style inside a storage locker!) turns out to be extremely uncomfortable and impractical! During this odyssey Wilson meets various people who have wrapped their furniture up to protect against other family members leaving their mark on them, which leads to some fun moments of the daughter of one family revealing on camera that she accidentally dropped food all over the sofa one time! You can just feel the tension in the room that would probably have escalated into all out violence if a documentarian had not been there with a camera to keep everyone in check! Whilst the previous episode felt really Michael Moore, this one feels much more Louis Theroux, as Wilson does genial interviews that gently guides his subjects into unwrapping their most prized possessions for the camera, such as almost goading the family proud of never having unwrapped the plastic covered dining chairs for decades into doing it for the first time on camera, and then zooming mercilessly in on the chip to the veneer that has 'suddenly' appeared on it almost immediately upon being exposed!

The big turn in the episode however is when Wilson just happens to encounter a circumcision protest on the streets one day (this is definitely making New York seem like a wild place, where such things can just be ran across! Such as Wilson musing about "the pigs being out in droves" during the animal section at the start, with the camera inevitably focusing on uniformed police officers as the first layer of the joke, only to then reveal in the same shot that someone is walking an actual pig on a leash behind the policemen! That's another 'too good to not have been staged' moment right there! Or maybe its just daily life in New York?) and that sends him down the rabbit hole of foreskin restoration as a way of covering more intimate items of value. I should say that I was glad to see more serious discussions of arthouse cinema taking place on the television, although the discussion of the merits of the Korean film Parasite with the gentleman trussed to a brass bed by way of a complicated S&M-esque system of wires, weights and pulleys is probably the most awkward position I have ever seen a putative film critic be put into! Thank goodness Wilson did not try and help him out of it, since we have seen what happened to that New Orleans hotel when Wilson touched the scaffolding there!

(That moment of zooming silently into the back of the head of one of the guy's daughters sitting without speaking in the other room, as if in silent shame at her father now doing televised interviews about this subject, was a very Louis Theroux-ian moment too!)

This is really all to get at the big idea of the episode, which is that while it is a natural desire to keep things pristine and untouched (even fun, as we see in the moment of Wilson happily pouring salsa all over his plastic-protected chair, which is sure to have excited Sploshers everywhere!) that it rather defeats the purpose the object was intended for, and that wear and tear is a natural sign of being well used and well loved. As well as, to go back to the cat, a way of marking your territory. Although to approach it from an alternative point of view, whilst is it amusing and risque to equate furniture covers with foreskin restoration that analogy is a little flawed since the foreskin is not really a one time cover preventing function and which has to be permanently discarded in order to properly use the item in question! Even if it gets treated that way in many parts of the world!

Perhaps a better analogy would be to the spines of books. I have an almost pathologic compulsion towards trying to keep the spines of the books that I read as pristine and uncreased as I possibly can, because I like that fresh and untouched look of the books on my shelf. Yet I can also look at my set of Arthur Ransome books that I have had on my shelves since my childhood, when I was much less OCD about these things, and in some ways the creases and the parts where the book falls open at a much read passage are aspects of the item that show that it has been read and enjoyed, as compared to my pristine spine books which look (mostly, I'm only human after all!) perfect but in that care taken also betray no evidence of my ever having read them, or having been near them at all. Much like furniture that seems sad that nobody has ever sat on it because its owners have been afraid to use it for its intended purpose!

Anyway, I was expecting the book analogy and was a little surprised (and dismayed) when it did not turn up, which I am taking as an unintentionally grim sign of how marginalised the printed book is becoming in our more technologically e-book obsessed age!

[colinr0380]

With Episode 5, How To Split a Cheque, we get to the first episode that I cannot really relate to the starting dilemma for, mostly because I am anti-social enough to not have gone to a restaurant since my group of friends at the time met up in central Manchester a couple of months after the end of our university course to wish each other the best of luck for each other in the future. That last restaurant experience is etched strongly in my mind mainly because it signified the major turning point of my life in mid-November 2001, the week before I started my first paid employment and which I also associate with the first day of the US first starting to bomb Afghanistan. In a strange way 9/11 and its consequences serendipitously combined with my leaving education and moving into the somewhat more disappointing ‘realpolitik world’, into a time where restaurant going just did not seem quite as important and living in the new world regime was traumatic enough without having to also go into Manchester to compound the horror even more.

(Plus I do also seem to remember a rather frisky Italian waiter rather unnerving one of the more shy ladies of our group by too enthusiastically brandishing his over-sizedly phallic Mozarella grinder at her in an attempt to season her meal further in a way that made her blush and giggle to recall it afterwards. Which has so influenced my suspicions about the ulterior intentions of waiters ever since that I refuse to be swayed from balancing out the notion with other, potentially more benign, restaurant experiences!)

Here John Wilson gets annoyed at his birthday party meal with friends being written off as a tax expense by one of his friends (and upstaged by someone else’s birthday party at a different table where they both get a cake and a song with a round of applause too!), turning a superficially altruistic gesture into one which potentially monetarily benefits just his friend, which sends him into an existential moment of despair of wondering if that is all he is worth to the other person (a tax write off opportunity) and if any and all those actions that had occurred throughout his entire life that he had previously imagined were purely being performed with love towards him were similarly hiding ulterior motives that were benefiting the person performing them, which then turns into a musing on the concept of fairness in general and if there is any way of fairly apportioning blame and/or praise equally.

My message to John Wilson on the existential question of exploitation is that, yes, everything from the reasons behind the random act of your birth onwards was being done for someone else’s reasons/benefits to them. That’s just life: someone is always getting some kind of recompense or benefit from interactions with you that makes them feel better about the energy they are expending in the interaction – monetarily, emotionally, practically, etc – and that is why they keep doing it. But that rather blunt line of thought also risks breaking down human relationships to an almost sociopathically emotionless extent of a RAND employee seeing every interaction as a transaction of users using each other, which keeps the energy of an interaction (love, money, conversation) flowing inside a functional society.

I do not necessarily see that as always having to be seen as negatively as Wilson sees it. After all if you care for someone, surely you do not mind if they occasionally exploit you for their own needs and might even celebrate or encourage them to use you. Such as someone coming to you for comfort: sure, it is someone using you to make themselves feel better, and draining your reserves of energy to benefit themselves to a certain extent, but it also shows that they see you as a dependable person who they could unburden themselves on. An animal coming to you and insistently demanding food or to be petted may just be practically wanting something from you, but them coming to you shows that they consider you a good provider and trust you enough to stick around. The same with a child asking things of their parents. Similarly of parents raising children: sure, in the most mercenary and transactional view of the world you want children just in order to perpetuate your bloodline and familial legacy and succeed in life in order to become independent and be able to reciprocally provide for you in your old age, but really it is (or at least should be!) a more fundamentally complicated relationship of wishing to bring a being into the world and see them grow and succeed for their own sakes as much as for what you can get out of or expect from them in return in the future. Unconditional love can be a powerful thing even if to those viewing a relationship with a more dispassionate outsider’s perspective it can sometimes seem like exploitation by one party or the other, when relationships are often much more complex give and take interactions than that. And certainly cannot (or at least should not!) be reduced to a simple monetary amount that the interaction was 'worth'.

Back to that friend writing off the restaurant bill on his taxes later on. Does it really matter if John Wilson’s friend benefits from writing off the restaurant bill on his taxes? Why does Wilson see that as exploiting him rather than exploiting the tax system in a more general way, if it even is that? As the person in whose honour the party was being thrown for John Wilson seems surprisingly personally offended as much as if the friend was personally stealing from him. Was it such a terrible faux pas for the friend not to have made a monetary sacrifice (and by paying for the entire party’s bill negating everyone else’s individual sacrifices too) in Wilson’s honour to prove how much they cared for him? You could argue that the friend being there at all was honouring Wilson enough, no matter what they ordered or how much they spent.

Also if the relationship is long lasting enough there will surely be opportunities for reciprocal actions by Wilson himself. He certainly seems willing to do so (rather than being entirely morally repulsed by the idea of tax write offs) by going to an accountant for advice (or absolution for what is about to occur?) and then doing an amusingly joyous montage of filming random things to cut into the episode so that he can then write them off as part of the production of his film! (Which does the wild tonally shifting Mondo film-esque thing of suddenly veering between benign and bland imagery to shock footage of dogs fouling the pavement or people leaning out of their cars to vomit to kind of ward off or punish the IRS person who may be auditing the footage!) So maybe it was the feeling of having one pulled over on him, rather than being the one doing the pulling over, that was causing his crisis this episode? The bigger unasked question is why does John Wilson only appear to assess how much he is appreciated by his friends in terms of money, or whether they bought him a birthday cake, or not? Is he being indignant on behalf of himself, of the company that is being exploited (or other organisation, such as the second half of the episode when he gets to experience a similarly dysfunctional social situation of (un)fairness in action from a more removed perspective in the Referee’s Dinner), or is he being righteously indignant on behalf of the nebulously defined ‘taxpayer’ who is constantly getting bilked by opportunists such as his friend? Does he have a need to see justice served even when it was a ‘victimless’ crime… at least victimless unless you were a victim of your golden whistle award getting stolen by disgruntled colleagues on their way out of the meal, presumably hidden away amongst the many bags of food being smuggled out of the convention room by the patrons!

Anyway, these discussions around proper restaurant etiquette mostly just reminds me of that Jam sketch!

[colinr0380]

I found “How To Cook The Perfect Risotto” quite moving, in which John Wilson decides to ‘treat’ his landlady to some of his home cooking to thank her for all the cooking and clothes washing that she has been doing for him (which, let’s be honest, she is probably doing because she likely has concerns that he cannot do it for himself, and judging by the amount of times that John Wilson gets rendered clothes-less during the series, her fears may be well founded!). Which sends him questing through the backalleys, kitchens and fleamarkets of the city in a search for the arcane knowledge of the secrets of risotto.

The ‘obviously staged’ moment this time around has to be that pan with the handle so wobbly that it seemed tailor made to just be a comic prop! Although I suppose that ironically the replacement pan ended up being even more dangerous!

This seems to be the episode that is trying to do a comment on the “Bake Off” trend of cooking shows both on television and YouTube, and I had some sympathies with Wilson’s attempts at cooking which get stymied by needing the proper equipment and the best ingredients (while I have praised the wonderful Jun’s Kitchen channel in the cooking thread as being the aspirational Julia Child figure to my version of Julie Powell, if I am truly honest I’m probably closer to Kay's Cooking in reality! I'm waiting with baited breath for the Julie Walters starring biopic of this lady! And of course DaThings’ YTPs are where I get most of my cooking information from these days). Even when all the circumstances are set up to begin cooking, there will still need to be multiple takes once the food has either caught fire and burnt to a crisp (along with the pan!) or is just not up to the exacting standard of being something edible enough to give to a landlord who you don’t want to send to hospital afterwards!

In some ways this episode (like all the others, really) is about John Wilson’s issues more than the world demanding something that he has to do (in fact the world is more often than not trying to escort him out of it, so it can get on with its own thing without Wilson being there asking awkward questions and bringing the mood down!). In this episode Wilson is just trying to do something extra nice and special for the landlady, when all the signs probably point towards it not being particularly necessary and best not to even attempt in the first place! It would be far safer for everyone to just go sit and watch “Jeopardy!” with her and keep her company that way, rather than making any grander gesture than that. Although even just doing that becomes fraught with jeopardy in itself…

So, John Wilson gets one more brief escapist trip out of New York City (to randomly flail around on a ski slope) only to return to find that he can never leave the city he is so ambivalent about ever again. And as the pandemic begins (and Wilson’s sub-theme of the episode about the concerns around addiction to illicit vaping and air pollution get trivialised almost into irrelevancy) we get a lovely summing up of the entire first series as all the subjects he has been talking about, from making small talk with strangers to stripping off your restrictive covers and living free from fear, gets quickly muzzled up again by blunt societal edicts. Maybe with all that air travel back and forth John Wilson was the true subversive Patient Zero all along, and his carefree skipping through the streets playing his newly purchased slidewhistle with frankly reckless abandon (both for its effects on passers by, and with seemingly no regard towards whose lips may have been on that secondhand eBay’ed whistle before his own) ended up forcing society to have to constrain his behaviours along with anyone else who came into close contact with him and could potentially dare to emulate his hedonistic antics? Unfortunately it turned out that it was tragically too late to stop the infection from spreading to Lizzo though (NSFW), to whom my thoughts and prayers for a swift recovery and this post is dedicated.

[Murdoch]

I've been really enjoying the newest season. I think it's on par with the first. The episodes have that same natural flow and strangeness (e.g. Wilson being invited to see the Mets and eventually coming across a competitive vacuum convention in his quest to understand the appeal of sports). The Saturday night episode release at 11 pm EST are also perfect. I most appreciate this show late at night when I'm slightly drowsy. I think Wilson's voice has a calming Joe Pera-like effect on me.

[therewillbeblus]

That's refreshing to hear. I skipped season two after a lackluster start, but maybe I'll hop back on the train for this one