If the early 2010s was a golden era for depictions of Bushwick in the popular imagination – the “Girls” episode “Welcome to Bushwick a.k.a. The Crackcident” comes to mind – then the rest of the decade quietly belonged to neighboring Ridgewood. Its brimming, gentrified tensions appeared in the center of the 2016 movie “White Girl,” the neighborhood convincingly passed for century-old South Philly in “The Irishman,” and now its mundane streets have been immortalized as the primary setting of comedian John Wilson’s ambient, observational TV show – “How To with John Wilson” – whose second season aired last December. 

“Hey, New York,” Wilson says at the top of the show’s pilot episode, which opens on a landscape of the city’s steel-colored skyscrapers, foregrounded by a raft filled with floating trash. The image, which brings to mind the view of the city from very hills of Ridgewood where Wilson films most of his show, feels something like a stand-in for the show’s perspective on both New York and the world, described invariably as “the weirdest show on TV,” “brimming with empathy” and the “quirkiest, most transcendent show on television.”

Wilson’s show collects images of the everyday and puts them together for comic effect. For Wilson, the everyday often takes place in Ridgewood.