The Tri-State Townie-Verse

'Telemarketers' and 'How To With John Wilson' introduce us to a constellation of East Coast weirdos while making high art out of scruffiness and failure.

Telemarketers, via Warner Bros

Probably my two favorite shows on TV right now are Telemarketers and How To With John Wilson. Both are docuserieses on HBO, but they also feel spiritually connected in some way. If I had to pinpoint exactly what it is about these shows that I find so endlessly fascinating, I think it’s that they both offer rare and unprecedentedly detailed glimpses into the inner lives of a certain kind of character — one that’s particularly exotic if you didn’t grow up on the East Coast. I speak, as you might’ve already gleaned from the headline, of the Tri-State Townie.

You see them every week on both shows, trudging through mud-caked snow in filthy NY Giants jackets, discussing defunct vacuum cleaner models and reminiscing about their dead fathers over the sounds of hissing radiators in rectangular budget motels. They’re loud and always adamant-sounding in a nasally way, passionate about whatever, and thoroughly eccentric.

Growing up, my dominant impressions, of New York specifically and of the Tri-State area by extension, were mostly formed by shows like Friends and Seinfeld, along with insert-whatever-rom-com-or-Woody-Allen-movie-here. New York was that other character in the rom-com, an aspiration as much as it was a place, for ambitious young people to find love, engage in intellectual discourse, and pursue their dreams. Where most of us out in the American west spent our time driving around in cars (“inching along the freeways in our metal coffins,” as Bodhi put it in Point Break) New Yorkers were bantering at Central Perk and dodging puddles wearing tutu-inspired miniskirts. It was a place where even a lovable loser like George Costanza might end up working for the Yankees.

This was all endlessly exotic and kind of annoying if you grew up in a place like I did—where no one had emigrated in order to pursue their dreams, and as far as you could see, most of the people around you all did regular shit, like hang dry wall or work for their dad’s concrete business.

Yet there was also a shadow New York, one that gave kids like me hope in a different way. Not hope that there was a big city somewhere that we could one day go off to pursue our dreams (which, pathetically, I actually did for a bit myself in my mid-to-late 20s), but the hope that even the places we thought of as so cosmopolitan and intimidating and above us still had scruffy dirtbags with strangely shaped facial hair like our friends, and depressing strip mall exurbs like the ones we inhabited, full of big box chains and Sbarro. They mostly didn’t make shows about such people and places (and mostly still don’t), but we nonetheless received occasional, tantalizing glimpses of this world—through the Howard Stern show, and various syndicated sports talk shows where a drunk gambler with a microphone would scream at another drunk gambler with a crackly phone connection about some painfully granular sports detail. Who were these Wack Packers, these angry sports men competitively sneering? Were they actually angry at each other or was this some peculiar mid-Atlantic mating ritual? (Big Fan is another touchstone of the genre).

What was that thing Tolstoy said about “every happy family is alike?” Overachievers are kind of like that, moving from place to place, reading the same books, watering down their accents, and triangulating personalities. Townies, well, every place has them, but like Vincent says in Pulp Fiction, it’s the little differences. With Telemarketers and How To, I feel like I’m getting a new Wack Pack every week.

Produced by the Safdie Brothers, Dani Bernfield, and “North Carolina Mafia” pals Danny McBride, David Gordon Green, and Jodi Hill — themselves specialists in Townie Comedy — Telemarketers follows ninth grade drop-out Sam Lipman-Stern and his buddy Pet Pespas as they try to get to the bottom of the scam company where they met. When Lipman-Stern got a job at “Civic Development Group” in New Jersey in the early 2000s as a 14-year-old, alongside addicts, parolees, and various other oddballs who probably wouldn’t have gotten hired elsewhere, he correctly intuited that all this might be worth documenting. As the company, who basically cold call old people and immigrants to cadge money on behalf of cops, firefighters, and cancer victims and then keep most of it, spirals from controversy to controversy, Sam enlists his pal, Pat, to help him get to the bottom of this whole deal, which seems nefarious from the jump.

While Sam co-directs (with Adam Bhala Lough, a veteran documentarian who presumably helped assemble Sam’s mountain of footage into sellable form), Pat is Telemarketers’ unforgettable main subject (which Sam himself seems to intuit very early on). Where Sam is heavily reminiscent of Giovanni Ribisi’s character in Boiler Room, seemingly a nice but mischievous middle class kid caught up in something, Pat Pespas, right down to the name, is the perfect neo-Wack Packer. A guy named “Patrick J. Pespas,” as the top telemarketer-turned-whistleblower introduces himself countless times over the course of the show, could really only be a tri-state townie.

Sam and Pat make the perfect duo, and Pat the perfect underdog hero, a recovering heroin addict (going from getting high on camera to becoming a recovery counselor as the show progresses) and former death metal musician who is nonetheless on a righteous mission: to expose CDG, and by extension an entire sector of the economy, for conning the vulnerable into giving money that ends up lining rich people’s pockets, almost entirely under false pretenses. The subtext of it all is wondering whether Pat can finish the story before his life falls apart. “What happens to Pat” is Telemarketers’ driving question as much as “what happens with CDG.” (There are some distinct parallels to Bobcat Goldthwait’s fantastic Call Me Lucky, with Pat frequently resembling the dearly departed Barry Crimmins).

Pat’s shaggy mop and scruffy facial hair are constantly evolving throughout the show (from goatee to circle beard to fu manchu and back again), and he conducts some of his interviews from the dining room of his favorite McDonald’s, until he gets kicked out by a cashier who probably doesn’t understand why this lumpy man is always pacing around her restaurant screaming into a flip phone while his younger buddy films it. The New York and New Jersey of Telemarketers is basically the opposite of the Sex and the City New York. Those shows always seemed to depict New York in spring or fall, when it was full of promise and exposed skin, and yet this docuseries 20-some years in the making seems to have taken place entirely during drabbest winter, and never after a fresh snow, when everything is caked in slush and grime.

Pat talks like a guy with no teeth even though he has them, with the mushy consonants and nasally whine of some non-specific tri-state exurb, sounding vaguely adversarial even when he’s trying to be polite. “Don’t get too fresh,” his wife likes to tell him.

When Sam and Pat start trying to stage talking-head-style interviews with experts in the “non-profit” space, Pat conducts them badly, wearing dark sunglasses with small lenses and sweatily asking fumbling questions, like a magnificent combination of Chris Farley in his “the Chris Farley Show” sketches and an extra in the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” video. That he’s maybe too passionate, too eager, too transparent in his motives to be a “good interviewer” in the traditional sense makes him both comical and relatable.

He’s doing what we’re all doing, to some extent, transparently play acting his idea of how someone more “serious,” more “professional,” more “adult” would look, sound, and act. That Telemarketers doesn’t try to disguise or professionalize the comedy of this is what makes it so addictive. “I’m not sure at what point it occurred to me that Pat might actually suck at this,” Sam says during one voiceover, as they travel from interview to interview.

This attempt to play-act as a normal, functioning adult also feels like the main theme of How To With John Wilson, consistently one of the strangest, most groundbreaking, wonderful and hilarious shows on TV. John Wilson is a man who, as his own show depicts him, has made it to middle adulthood without learning to master, or maybe just learning to care, about so many of the things we would expect his peers to know or pretend to know about. You can glean this just from his episode titles — “How To Work Out,” “How To Watch The Game,” “How To Clean Your Ears,” always conjuring a situation in which you’ve arrived at an adulthood test having missed one of the chapters and now you have to cram.

Wilson depicts himself as a guy who’s always filming, which is helpful for a show made up almost entirely of b-roll, but also gives him a space alien quality, like he’s just landed on Earth and is trying to make sense of his surroundings. And that’s maybe doubly tough for Wilson, who seems to live a Constanza-like existence as a kind of man-child surrounded by New York City oddballs. Each episode starts with the basic premise of the title, then inevitably goes on a wild goose chase driven only by Wilson’s laterally thought flights of fancy.

John Wilson is not so unique in feeling like he’s only play-acting as a functioning adult. What’s unique is that he’s so transparent about it. He doesn’t disguise how hard he’s trying to seem normal, or at least dissects himself masterfully for the purposes of TV. Now in its third season, the show seems better than ever now, perhaps partly because it feels like we’re witnessing Wilson’s genuine personal growth in real time. He’s transparent about slowly becoming okay with being on screen himself (he’s always been mostly behind the camera, and there were always occasional glimpses of the man behind it, but he shows himself more and more now) and with becoming a sort of cult pseudo-celebrity.

While not as geographically limited as Telemarketers, part of the draw of How To With John Wilson (which has taken notably journeys to California, Florida) is that it too introduces us to a new Wack Pack of Tri-State weirdos every week. Wilson’s quest to learn how to cover his furniture takes him to the house of man who has built a contraption to regrow his foreskin (complete with full frontal nudity, always a brilliant comedic device); his quest to learn how to watch the big game eventually takes him to a convention of vacuum cleaner collectors, to recount just a few episodes. Part of the fun is watching is the weirdos themselves, and part of it is seeing the mental scavenger hunt that ultimately leads Wilson to them. He seems to have a knack for capturing townies at their most pure, maybe partly because he still feels like one himself—this even as he fits the textbook definition of an ambitious guy living in the Big City pursuing his artistic dreams.

As in Telemarketers, we watch not just because of John Wilson’s entertaining interviews, but because of his entertaining failures to get those entertaining interviews. Wilson doesn’t hide the footage where he gets kicked out of a frat party for being a weirdo, or the footage of him being denied the rights to use any of the footage he shot at Burning Man over a legal dispute (perhaps a better and more succinct comment on Burning Man than anything he could’ve filmed, though I’m sure it was wonderful). In one episode, he gets turned away from the red carpet at an HBO party, despite the giant billboard advertising the HBO show named after him looming just a few hundred yards away.

Both shows are about this tension, between the dumb clumsy babies we all are and the competent professionals we pretend to be in our LinkedIn profiles (a pretense that more and more we feel expected to carry into all aspects of our lives, the modern online experience in which an HR rep is always watching). And maybe that’s the rub: that townie comedy isn’t about townies at all. It’s about scruffiness, fumbling, and failure, that isn’t mitigated by a costume designer or reconfigured into a teachable moment on our inevitable journey towards success.

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Other Notes:

-Once again, thank you from the bottom of my heart to all the paid subscribers for making it possible to share stuff like this directly with you, without trying to pitch one of my vague concepts and subsequent mental journeys to an editor, and then, assuming they accept it, having to see it wrestled into the voice of whatever publication. (Clearly, I identify with John Wilson and the Telemarketers boys). And an EXTRA SPECIAL THANK YOU to my first “founding member,” who didn’t give me permission to use his name, so I’ll simply call him T. I guess I have to clean his house at some point, I’m not 100% clear on how this format works yet.

-New Frotcast! We brought on our friend Sean Keane from the Roundball Rock pod to discuss some recent stories with us, from Hard Knocks to the anti-sex scene lady to the world of AI-generated porn. That one is for Patreon subscribers, but there’s a teaser here and a whole free episode from last week here if you want to “try before you buy.”

-Pod Yourself The Wire will be back with season four very soon. All episodes of Pod Yourself A Gun (our Sopranos rewatch podcast) and Pod Yourself The Wire (our sequel about The Wire) are now up for free. To listen early and ad-free, subscribe on Patreon.