This article contains spoilers for How To with John Wilson’s season three premiere.
The premiere of How To with John Wilson’s final season dropped on Max last week, and though the title — "How to Find a Public Restroom" — doesn't sound especially outrageous, it's the most infuriating episode of the comedy series that Wilson has yet produced.
If you're not familiar with the show, here's a quick primer. Each episode features Wilson, a documentary filmmaker, attempting to learn how to do something. "How to Appreciate Wine" is a personal favorite of mine, but Wilson has also covered throwing out batteries, putting up scaffolding, investing in real estate, and several other mundane tasks over the show's three season run. How To is produced by comedian Nathan Fielder, and that connection should give you a pretty good idea of what to expect.
Like Nathan for You or The Rehearsal, How To uses nonfiction footage to tell a funny story. Unlike those shows, How To is more in the lineage of Candid Camera, as Wilson and his crew shoot hours and hours of footage, mostly on the streets of New York, then cut the best bits together to fit the instructional narration he provides for each episode.
The story of "How to Find a Public Restroom" is, unsurprisingly, about attempting to find a public restroom in New York City. As Wilson dives deeper into why exactly there are so few public restrooms in the United State's most populous city, I found myself getting enraged at the broader austerity that it represents, a refusal to fund public goods that plagues all aspects of American life.
"There's about eight million residents in New York and another 60 million tourists that come annually. But, there's only around 1000 public restrooms to accommodate everyone. And only two of them are open 24/7," Wilson says. "There are somehow no public restrooms in Times Square or Rockefeller Center, and the Upper East Side is one of the biggest public restroom deserts of all."
This is one small effect of the bipartisan project that is neoliberalism, the work of conservative politicians in both political parties pushing for the privatization of once public goods. Why should we have swimming pools that are open for all when every citizen is a potential customer for a nearby private water park or an ice cream chain? Why provide free breakfast or lunch at school when that means parents are spending less money at a grocery store or restaurant? And why provide free public restrooms when their absence will push people into stores and restaurants where they need to buy the right to relieve themselves?
This pay-for-play setup is rigorously enforced by American law enforcement. In 2020, George Floyd's death sparked a summer of Black Lives Matter protests across every major city in the United States. Despite widespread support, these protests didn't result in major change in the way America handles policing. In fact, the changes that did occur tended to be increases in the amount municipalities were allotting for police budgets. American elites have a vested interest in keeping the police well-funded because the ever-present threat of violence is the ruling class' substitute for funding anything else. Austerity only works when there are armed agents of the state to enforce it.
Though police and public restrooms may seem like they have little in common, the omnipresence of the former and the absence of the latter stem from the same root cause. If there isn't money in a city budget for public restrooms, it's because that money is being spent somewhere else.
In its own funny and gentle way, these are the questions that How To's season three premiere is prodding at. Wilson doesn’t use the word “neoliberalism” but he wrestles with the commodification of the city nonetheless. After cops tell him that he can’t film in the seemingly public area around the Vessel, a honeycomb-like architectural structure in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards — an expensive private real estate development — Wilson leaves. But, later he collects discarded pee bottles that he finds around New York City, fashions them together to resemble the Vessel, and returns to place the replica in front of the original. It’s a monument to the cost of privatization, to the city’s decision to piss away money by subsidizing a functionless boondoggle instead of useful, but unsexy public restrooms.
It’s a small gesture, but in the face of total government indifference, what else can you do? I don’t know, but I can't wait to see what else John Wilson learns how to do this season.