Still Watching...

"How To With John Wilson," "River," "Year Of the Rabbit" and "Extraction 2," plus the odd stray coming across the bow.

I think one of the great bonding elements of this Bastard Machine Substack is that we all know what’s up. Or in this case, what’s down, as we all drown in a sea of great content, delighted and eager to find “new” shows that just aren't, by everyone’s outdated standards, actually “new.” We found them as we were sinking. And we loved them!

We are all People Of Earth, often busy people, and we know that a lot of shit happens in life that does not allow you to be on top of your other shit, like crossing off TV lists.

We know that. We know that shit is real. We bond over the fact that a great show is still a great show even if you’re two years late to it. And a great movie is still a great movie even if you’d never heard of it in 2020 and then just watched it and made your life better by doing so.

We are simpatico here.

It’s why I know you’ll understand the long delay it took for me to finally start watching “How To with John Wilson” on HBO/Max. The strange and engaging and cumulatively powerful docuseries premiered a week before Halloween in 2020, commonly known as The Year Of Our Impending Pandemic Demise.

For me, two factors were in play: I had left TV criticism for TV series writing and while I would like to say that all the early time of my development deal with FX was spent hatching a brilliant idea, in truth it was primarily spent hoping not to die and being “somewhat” hamstrung trying to write a series about happiness and existentialism.

I was reading nothing about TV back then. No reviews. No news. I was watching nothing (well, OK, I was watching “Peaky Blinders” and a lot of movies). I was not reading anything that would allow me to find out about, say, an obscure, quirky, funny documentary series set entirely in New York.

I think Pandemic Days 2020 was bad timing for “How To with John Wilson” because it was extremely bad timing for people living in and dying in New York. Season one was pre-vaccine. Back in the Bay Area I was just trying to cope.

I know now, of course — even without progressing too far yet in my watching — that I love “How To with John Wilson” and that in many ways it’s a show that’s right in my wheelhouse of anxiety and existentialism, of trying to understand that life is a succession of days stacked on top of each other and how we live them is, of course, how we live your lives, when it’s all broken down into the basics.

I find that I can’t binge “How To with John Wilson” and that I can only absorb one, reel back from it, from what I saw, deconstruct my feelings about it and stand back up to move onward. This series is a sneaky gut punch. It gets you when you’re laughing. And it haunts you when it makes you stop.

So it will probably be slow going. And yes, I know that the series just recently finished its third and final season — six episodes in each. But the second season — which premiered in November of 2021, after everyone had time to get acclimated to life after their first vaccine doses and maybe embrace more hope — had by then been discovered, kinda. Found by a small but appreciative audience and more enthusiastic critical reception. It even added to its small writing staff of Wilson, Michael Koman and Alice Gregory, adding noted writer Susan Orlean and comedian and writer Conner O’Malley.

It was, as they say, kind of a thing. (The show would lose Orlean and O’Malley and Gregory for the third and final season, where it was still very much kind of a thing, at least a cult thing).

As I saw the headlines of a few appreciations rolling in at the end of August and beginning of September for the just concluded finale (Sept. 1), I thought it was probably time to start watching. If you’ve been putting it off, come join me in the funny-sad world of John Wilson, where things are strange and “normal” and where cringing is common at the common people who live their lives in and around New York, and how a slightly odd man with a camera and a suitcase of his own issues tries to tackle the meaning of life in a series of lessons on how to live it, or at least how to do some of the things you might be called upon to do while living that life.

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