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In a sense, “How To with John Wilson” is the perfect documentary for our documenting-obsessed culture, a bizarro companion—or corrective—to Instagram’s bombardment of images of other landscapes, other homes, other lives.

How To With John Wilson often twists into awkward shapes to get from its basic points A to its more peculiar points B, and the journey is always funny in its strangeness. The show’s greatest asset is its style: Wilson himself almost always remains exclusively behind the camera, narrating everything we see or interviewing the people onscreen, his speech filled with long pauses and stumbles that betray his own social awkwardness.

[Wilson's] short films and the HBO series can be enjoyed purely as a vehicle for funny found material or oddball interviews, but How To… clarifies Wilson’s artistic project as a special kind of examination of urban living... [It's] an implicit interrogation into the ways urban planning marginalizes vulnerable people, often in exchange for profit.

Between the character moments, John himself constructs poetry out of hours and hours and hours and hours of random footage. Store signs, couples hooking up on the street, rats crawling out of subway trash, an overturned car spinning to a stop, a bag of bread hanging on the subway — the insert shots all swirl together as their own cosmos, and John is our Carl Sagan.

Ultimately, How to With John Wilson asks us to take a step back and consider how our actions feed the world at large—whether it’s worth sharing that risotto if it means risking your elderly landlord’s health... It turns out all of these common objects are indeed extraordinary. You just have to know where to point the camera.

“How To” is nominally a comedy, but the word doesn’t suffice to describe its artful scope and sensitivity. Wilson, an all-in-one interviewer, narrator, and cameraman, has mastered a technique that might be called happenstance vérité: he presents a spontaneous, authentic, unbounded document of the city in the months before the pandemic.

[A] surprisingly moving, deeply weird, and very funny comic sort-of docuseries... Wilson’s gentle show is an original beast.

The results are strange and difficult to describe, but often incredibly funny... But this is no pure randomness. Wilson also provides surprising insights, connecting subjects you’d never consider by drawing on the observations he makes around the city... It’s this kind of thinking outside the box that makes this show a continual joy to watch.

[If] the show’s conceit is somewhat insincere, the connections [Wilson] forms are surprisingly genuine.

“How To” is willing to follow wherever its twists and turns go without making those who flit in and out of the series the punchline. It’s a show that genuinely feels like it’s figuring things out as it goes along. In this particular case, that’s all you could possibly want.

Sometimes hilarious, often beautiful, perpetually odd... so much of the joy of ["How to with John Wilson"] comes from the surprise...You’ll never be entirely clear how Wilson gets from Point A to Point J, yet each individual moment makes a startling amount of sense while you’re there... More importantly, "How to" quickly reveals itself to be asking much deeper questions than the title of each episode suggests.

Much of the show works because Wilson’s just so great at finding unexpected things, whether they’re surprising conversations with people, or unusual scenes happening on a typical New York street corner, or revelations about Wilson himself. He’s a master at the art of defamiliarizing, of taking the kinds of things that happen all the time and presenting them in a way that lets you see just how strange they are.