One of HBO’s greatest shows is How To With John Wilson. If you’ve not yet had a chance to see, do. It follows a neurotic and immensely likeable documentarian as he tries to dispense advice, using a mixture of decades of footage, luck and The Force, to end up cracking open the universe in ways you’d never have expected.
Which makes it initially baffling that HBO passed on Tunde Wey & Theo Schear’s Hard to Swallow, which is now available in six episodes directly from First Hand Films.
Spoilers follow.
Let me declare an interest. I have made a documentary, one for which I nursed hopes of an HBO deal. It fell through just as Hard to Swallow did. So when I tell you that Hard to Swallow is the best food television I have seen in years, understand that this judgment comes with a quantum of professional envy. The way they failed to get an HBO deal is just more interesting than ours.
I watched it at the gym, on Alicia Kennedy’s recommendation. (Her salon with Tunde Wey and Theo Schear is terrific—subscribe to her newsletter for the link.) I had barely broken a sweat when the show had me: Wey was working through the idea of taxing white people in proportion to their complicity in gentrification.
Hard to Swallow is a very good title. Yes, the show is about food. But food is the medium rather than the object. Accusations of complicity move from the people on screen to the viewer, the documentary industry and, finally, to the two men holding the camera.
The film has had quite a journey. In the 2010s, Schear had been working with Wey on a project that attracted the attention of a small production company. As the pandemic arrived, Wey made the case for letting the restaurant industry die. The argument went viral. A month later, a producer at Issa Rae Productions read a piece in the New Yorker about Wey’s work and messaged him on Instagram. They got to talking. While Wey and Schear were filming a short, George Floyd was murdered. In his excellent producer’s diary, Schear writes that Wey’s previously radical perspective abruptly acquired mainstream appeal.
Seven pitch meetings followed. HBO was first. Issa Rae joined the call herself (camera off). Two weeks later came the news that HBO had passed. HBO Max, FX, Netflix and the rest all seemed to have a full hand of comparable shows already waiting in the wings, or to have filled their food-show quota, and so they didn’t need to acquire another one. HBO Max soon announced Selena + Chef, and Wey’s moment passed.
Schear’s explanation is simple: it was just business. Nobody wanted to take a risk. And, today, they’d not even be able to entertain the hope of an HBO acquisition.
That may be true, but it also feels incomplete.
Why did HBO buy How To with John Wilson and not Hard to Swallow? It isn’t that Wilson declines to turn the camera on himself. He films his landlady, his hoarded videotapes and his failures of nerve, and he’s charming while doing it.
The difference is not reflexivity, but the depth of reflection.
Wilson’s self-exposure lands on Wilson. His anxiety is so endearing that we leave slightly fonder of him and, by extension, of ourselves. Wey and Schear’s, by contrast, is a little closer to home. It travels outward, reaching the funders, the festivals and the film itself. By the final episode, nobody in the frame gets to leave clean, not even you dear viewer, hypocrite, mon semblable, mon frère.
This is what reflexivity is for, and especially in documentary, where the goal is to discomfort the comfortable — and who’s more comfortable than the person behind the camera?
But if you’re going to make a documentary that indicts the documentary industry, doesn’t get picked up by HBO, and is nonetheless one of the most interesting and compelling six episodes of TV you’ve seen in years, you’ll need to follow Wey and Schear’s playbook:
Raise the money first.
The Ford Foundation gave them $450,000. The Pop Culture Collaborative added another $100,000. The funding gave the filmmakers the creative freedom they needed to end up with something completely unique.
Skip the movie star.
Wey and Schear’s industry allies repeatedly advised them to attach a well-known executive producer. They never managed it.
I did. Our film once had a possible version in which Jake Gyllenhaal would have executive-produced and perhaps narrated. (I had a lovely dinner with him and, improbably, Dakota Johnson which, crap, now that I think about it, I may have been crashing their date. I mean, if folk like that have dates surrounded by assistants and buddies and hangers-on like me then they were definitely on a date.)
Anyway, we realised that Jake wasn’t the best match for a film driven by a Malawian woman’s quest to fight patriarchy and climate change. When we walked away from that version and made a film narrated by Anita Chitaya in Tumbuka, we understood that we were also walking away from the likeliest route to wide distribution.Keep the criticism in the cut.
At a few different screenings of Hard to Swallow, women — particularly women of colour — find concerns around gender in Wey and Schear’s film. The sequences remains in the film, and they’re incredibly generative. I know these criticisms because we heard similar ones when we started filming The Ants & The Grasshopper.
For us, it was easy to address, because Anita Chitaya — the main character — has some very pointed views about gender, and of America, all of which make it into the final cut. In other words, we found a way to meet those criticisms. But what happens when a film can’t, but still keeps the criticism in? It ends up that the viewer engages far far more.
Film the argument you are having about the film.
By episode three, the project has become what Wey calls a fever dream. He and Schear are on camera disagreeing about what the episode even is. Those arguments are incredibly dramatic, and far more honest than the polite ones that Wey has with his interview subjects.
Wey and Schear’s amiable and honest disagreements are importantly kinetic in the series, and I was very grateful for them. They structured both the discussion of food, and the discussion of filmmaking, in ways that Wey’s interview subjects rarely could. It’s why the final racist incident at Cannes is so helpfully ambivalent. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the Schear’s impulse to class/race suicide or Wey’s shrug at the incident is the more meaningful.
Accept the Oedipal comparisons with Bourdain.
Pitching requires you to compress the work into language buyers already understand. Wey and Schear came to be presented as an updated Bourdain. it seems as if every food documentary has to wrestle with and then slay him on the road to something more interesting.
Follow these simple rules, and you too can make an incredible series that HBO will reject, but will become required viewing for anyone interested in documentary, food, race, and power in America. So go and buy Hard to Swallow. Ask your library to carry it. The best possible outcome of six years of passes is that the show finds its audience anyway.
I don't have HBO, but from what I can tell, without a few long, graphic sex scenes they don't consider it a show anyway.