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Any time I try to recommend How to With John Wilson to someone who has never heard of the show, I struggle to figure out where to begin. HBO markets it as a docuseries by the filmmaker John Wilson in which he explores the idiosyncratic behavior of New York City’s wackiest residents. But calling it a “docuseries” feels wrong; yes, the program relies on footage and interviews Wilson has collected from wandering through the city, but the material is also presented comedically. And it’s not quite “about” anything: Sometimes an episode will meander from one topic to another so much so that by the end of the half hour, you barely remember where you started.

Describing Wilson himself can be difficult too. He’s ostensibly the show’s star, yet he rarely appears on camera. Instead, he narrates everything the audience sees, using the second-person perspective to refer to his own experiences. (When the building he lives in went through a gut renovation, for instance, he observed that the construction “quickly turned your apartment into one of the noisiest places you’ve ever lived.”) With his Muppet-y voice and awkward throat-clearing, he often sounds nervous to be out and about at all. The camera, it seems, is his shield, his way of making eye contact with a subject without having to look at them directly. In the first season, an interior designer he interviewed gently called him out for the habit. “I would love for you, sometimes in your life, in your head, to be like, ‘I should put the camera down in this situation,’” she said. “‘I should just be John.’”

In the show’s final season, Wilson seems to have absorbed her advice. The filmmaker has offered glimmers of his personal life before by mentioning relationships and his friends, and by incorporating archival footage from his younger days. But Season 3 takes significant strides toward dismantling the layers Wilson has constructed between himself and his show. Friday’s episode, “How to Work Out,” is the first in a string of installments in which Wilson turns the camera to himself and begins regularly venturing outside of the New York City boroughs he’s long explored. The result is Wilson’s most vulnerable and ambitious work yet. If in previous seasons he was using How To to make sense of the world around him, he’s now purposefully trying to make sense of himself—and, in the process, underscoring the limits of his approach. Chronicling reality, the show suggests, always involves some amount of fabrication.

Wilson has cultivated a reputation as a generous documentarian, someone willing to follow his subjects down rabbit holes and spotlight their passions without judgment. Much like The Rehearsal, the similarly unconventional series from the comedian and How To producer Nathan Fielder, Wilson’s work can be somewhat uncomfortable to watch as a result. Both shows mine comedy from how naively open their subjects are about their weirdest obsessions. In Wilson’s case, he deliberately tails people who seem eager to be heard and want to explain their quirks, such as a man he encounters at a grocery store who mentions his fascination with the Mandela Effect, the phenomenon in which people collectively misremember significant events or details. And though Wilson never, in his narration, remarks on the oddness of what he’s filming, the episodes convey his perspective anyway. Earlier this season, he spent time with a man who was trying to move his family into a windowless missile silo; throughout the sequence, Wilson deployed a haunting score that sounded straight out of a conspiracy thriller, as if to underline how ludicrous the man’s compulsion comes off to Wilson.

[Read: You’ve never seen anything quite like The Rehearsal]

Yet in the latest episode, Wilson confronts his impulse to turn people’s eccentricities into entertainment. When he heads to a September 11–themed bodybuilding competition—an event with obvious, if jarring, comic potential—he asks multiple contestants for their memories of the attacks they’re supposedly honoring, but grows silent when he instead receives responses about how mentally grueling bodybuilding can be. And after Wilson meets a trainer who claims he once worked with one of the hijackers, he deliberately cuts away following a short Q&A, and instead plays a homemade superhero film he recorded as a kid on 9/11. It’s as if Wilson himself is too distressed to continue letting others overshare, so he steps in as an alternative, following himself down one of those rabbit holes.

It’s an unexpected technique for Wilson to use—and a revealing one, as he examines why he made a movie, of all things, that afternoon. He considers his role as a filmmaker and contemplates how his platform has changed him—and by extension, the work he does. He splices in clips of himself standing around stiffly on the Emmys red carpet. He inserts footage he captured of Elon Musk, Martha Stewart, and Michael Bloomberg—boldface names he’s shared rooms with at fancy fetes. He draws attention to how, because he has an HBO show with his name in the title, his camera has transformed from being his shield to being his weapon; he zooms in on a billboard of himself looming over Times Square. “You like to think that you are just watching all of this stuff from a distance,” he narrates solemnly, “but maybe this is just who you are now.”

The confession reminded me of something Wilson expressed back in the show’s very first episode. “The more you talk to someone,” he mused then, “the harder it is to hide who you really are.” How To, over three seasons, has never really been a docuseries or a comedy, but an exploration of that fine line between storyteller and subject, and of how impossible it is to objectively record reality. Wilson’s curiosity shaped the show, but as much as he tried to keep himself at a remove from what he surveyed, his own peculiarities influenced every second of what aired. “Everything is such a performance these days,” he once said disdainfully in an interview as he explained why he was drawn to filming everyday people and their mundane lives. In this final season, Wilson sounds like he’s coming to terms with being more than a mere documentarian stumbling upon zany personalities. Instead, he’s a character playing a part.