The good news is: the first series of How to With John Wilson (Sunday, 9.35pm, BBC Two), one of the finest shows to come out of the US in years, finally drops this week.
What the first series of this show – and we’re still just on the first series, for now – achieves is something close to miraculous. It’s a complete modern reinvention of the visual essay form, something funny and profound and head-spinningly human, a glimpse of New York City from an angle it’s never been seen before, at grubby street level and round freakish little corners. Watch the first episode – and I am begging you to do so – and you see it transform before you over 27 short minutes: a staccato opening three-minute riff on the art of making small talk, accompanied with rapid-fire visual gags taken from hours of Wilson’s self-shot footage. And then – whoosh – you’re on a journey that takes in predator entrapment, the grief of an unhealed breakup, a travel agent’s divorce and an earnest party guy’s longing for something real. This is before we even go to the Mandela Effect conference or meet the guy obsessed with foreskins. There is no show like this on TV. Every episode is a masterpiece.
