On TV
Specifically, on How To With John Wilson
Welcome to the Tuesday UnRecipe post for all subscribers! Today, I’m here to tell you all about my new TV obsession. On Friday, paid subscribers will get my most recent and favorite photo essay. As always: learn more about my work here. Thanks for hanging out!
I am not a good watcher of TV. Unless a show sucks me in from the first moment, I’m going to have a hard time concentrating and committing to the show. I have my comfort go-tos, like The Office and Great British Bake Off, that can be on in the background at low volume and low stakes, but I’m hugely picky about what new shows I will invest time into. I blame Game of Thrones Season 8 for ruining my faith in television.
Earlier this summer, Colin (author of
) put on How To With John Wilson. First, I did what I usually do: puttered around, catching a glimpse or two as I walked past. Then, I caught myself standing in the corner and watching a few minutes at a time. By the time the episode ended, I was sitting next to Colin waiting for the next to automatically start.For those of you who haven’t yet had the pleasure, the show’s premise is at once simple and as deep as can be: video clips from John Wilson’s near-constant filming around New York City are stitched together to provide visual accompaniment for Wilson’s genuine yet quirky advice. The advice starts with something basic—how to make conversation, how to split the check—but the journey invariably twists and turns before finding the solutions. In the episode “How To Appreciate Wine,” for example, Wilson ends up crashing a baby shower in the Florida mansion of energy drink mogul Jack Owoc.
Aside from Wilson’s disarmingly gentle narration, there’s something alluring to me about the show. On one level, I’d love to know how Wilson finds the right clips to stitch together to create his narrative. Filming every day, after all, means you have hours and hours of footage to categorize. How does he sort it all? How does he decide what he deems worthy of capturing? As someone who struggles with digital hoarding, I’m fascinated.
On another level is my captivation with the content of the clips themselves. The vast majority of the moments Wilson captures are organic and mundane. A quick clip of a stop sign or a dog laying on a bench becomes a visual cue for a deeper message that Wilson is trying to convey. Sometimes the clips are beautiful and touching. Sometimes they’re gross. Sometimes they’re disjointed and distressing. They are almost always so New York that it seems impossible to film them anywhere else.
I love the way that these mundane, everyday moments come together to create a narrative of deeper meaning. It feels like a collage or a tapestry woven by a master of the human experience. After watching the show, I’ve been walking around as if I’m scouting moments from my life to incorporate into a themed episode. What if, I wonder, we all walked around like Wilson, just innocently observing and categorizing life’s tiny, simple moments? There’s so much beauty—literal and figurative—that gets lost in the search for the profound. I feel this so deeply, rushing around in search of “the best” photo, that I can hardly explain to you the depth of my affection for Wilson in making me consider this in this way.
There’s a lesson here, too, about tiny, unrelated things that can be unfairly or nonsensically connected to create a narrative that doesn’t exist and the temptation that exists to link things that shouldn’t be linked. Everything contains beauty, yes, but not everything contains a deep meaning. As always, the gray areas are large and expansive, and this lesson is at the heart of How To.
I felt like I wanted to write a newsletter about this show because it connects so deeply to what I have fallen in love with in photography, especially over the last year. Noticing and documenting things—whether wildly important or especially beautiful or completely ordinary—helps you see the world in a different way, and sometimes the different look is just enough. This show celebrates all of that, with an added dose of a pure determination to make life make sense.
Give it a try and report back. I’m interested to hear if you like it too!
See you back here on Friday for farmers market photos! Thanks for being here.