How to With John Wilson

This glorious anomaly of a programme. Weird, wonderful humanity is everywhere Wilson goes.

Equally as eager to make a quick visual gag as he is to muse on why and how we crave community in a seemingly fragmented world, Wilson is a master at work all throughout this farewell season.

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.

While each episode begins with a simple and pragmatic question — how does one, say, safely dispose of batteries? — it ends having transcended and morphed the question into an inquiry into grander things. ... We get to know the man behind the camera more this season, and come to understand not merely his personality — conveyed through Wilson’s excellent vocal performance as charmingly off-kilter, as well as open in a way that invites openness from his subjects — but his ambition and his fear.

Season 3 takes significant strides toward dismantling the layers Wilson has constructed between himself and his show. Friday’s episode, “How to Work Out,” is the first in a string of installments in which Wilson turns the camera to himself and begins regularly venturing outside the New York City boroughs he’s long explored. The result is Wilson’s most vulnerable and ambitious work yet.

It’s like a nice light dessert after all the heavy fare the network offers. We love seeing and hearing from the intensely uncomfortable Wilson, and marvel at how his filmmaking instincts take him in very strange and interesting directions.

“How To With John Wilson” Season 3 isn’t a step down for the series so much as a step sideways. The first two seasons took place just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit and in the wake of it, respectively, while Season 3 shows a world that has opened up for better and worse.