Who cares about The White Lotus? For at least eight years now, since the debut of Big Little Lies in 2017, HBO has been pumping out nominal satires of the ultra-wealthy. From the travails of the Monterey Five through Succession, Industry, House of the Dragon, The Righteous Gemstones, The Idol, Winning Time, and, of course, The Gilded Age, the premium cable network’s most consistent narrative move for the better part of a decade has been putting a bunch of rich folks in a room and pointing at them. The political postures of these series vary widely, from agnosticism to contempt to affectionate ribbing.
While viewers, in general, seem to perceive that they should disapprove of all this decadence, it’s been hard to discern a clear point of view from the network. Not every show needs to be a polemic on behalf of the 99 percent, and there are pitfalls to an approach that’s too heavy-handed or obvious. But it’s also hard to take HBO’s “eat the rich” manifestos all that seriously when the network is now run by a bunch of private equity Nosferatus.
Among these series, though, Mike White’s The White Lotus has long been the most savage and most accomplished. Starting over every season at a different, far-flung outpost of the same superluxury resort chain, White’s tangy satire has moved from Hawaii to Sicily and now, in its third season, to Thailand. Every White Lotus resort is full of people who are quippily, hilariously telling on themselves nonstop. Here is an insular community’s myopic account of itself; here is the melodrama of lovers and families strangled by their own privilege; here are the scammers who scam them; here are the victims of their humiliation. But, despite the boldness of its bold strokes, there’s always been something about The White Lotus that feels roughed out rather than fully realized. The presence of Thai service workers this season, or local Sicilian criminals, or any number of other upstairs/downstairs farces in previous seasons, tempts us toward a vision of the show that isn’t really in its purview. This is simply a show about horrible, rich, horribly rich people.
Where has all of this swiping at the rich gotten us? Mike White, in an interview he gave toward the end of The White Lotus’s first season, described the show as both a critique and a fantasy. “You go to these colonial spots, and the architecture, the houses, they’re so fantastic,” he said. “It’s so perverse—you go there and you think, This is living! This is the house! I want to be Isak Dinesen in Africa! But then it’s, well, this is not what someone should be wanting.” That is not what someone should be wanting. At its best, The White Lotus is a show that immersively dramatizes the allure of this sort of affluence-enabled fantasy. We may attach ourselves to Kendall or Shiv, but the lives of the people on Succession are ugly, visually hollow; we may match our heart rate to Yasmin or Harper on Industry, but we are grateful to leave that cesspit of stress. Everyone on The White Lotus is a villain, but it’s hard not to want what they have. Mike White helps us to feel that and to sit with it. It’s fantastic, and it’s perverse.
This season, the show picks up at a White Lotus outpost in Thailand. Our bridge from past seasons to this new one is Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), the masseuse and wellness coordinator from the White Lotus on Maui, who was cruelly and unthinkingly led on by Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), a guest who disingenuously offered to invest in a small business for her, then bailed at the last minute in season one. Belinda is taking part in an internal exchange program, where she can learn new therapeutic techniques from the Thai staff and vice versa. The season begins with her adult son visiting her and then, in a moment that’s now familiar from the previous seasons, discovering an anonymous dead body.
And White has provided us with a buffet of character actors in their prime who might end up playing that corpse at the end. It could be one of the members of the Ratliff family. Father Tim (Jason Isaacs) is a tightly wound businessman from North Carolina who, it seems, might soon be embroiled in a scandal back home, though his wife (Parker Posey) is too blissed out on prescription medications to notice. His three children are embroiled in a passive-aggressive, incestuous, psychosexual lust triangle that has all the hallmark discomfort of Mike White’s vintage Chuck & Buck era. It could be the Hollywood actress (Michelle Monaghan) who’s bankrolled a girls’ trip with her childhood friends (Leslie Bibb and Carrie Coon), possibly to reconnect, possibly to lord her success over them. It could be the troubled Rick Hatchett (Walton Goggins), who’s clearly brought his young girlfriend (Aimee Lou Wood, who’s an absolute revelation here) on this trip under false pretenses. And those are just the guests. It could be Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong), the dopey, charming security guard with an unrequited crush, or Sritala (Lek Patravadi), the mysterious, former pop star owner of the hotel and a figure of special interest for the ominously named Hatchett.
As usual, the mystery is more of an undercurrent for the season than its focus. The real drama lies in giving a group of malcontent elites jet lag and letting them bounce off one another. The ingenious thing about setting this anthology in an all-inclusive resort is that White is able to create something like a narrative hell house for its inhabitants to navigate. Each suite, each lanai, each floating yoga island is a chamber of horrors. And the whole property is optimized for the kinds of set pieces that make great TV: doing a sequence every episode that crosscuts between multiple separate, simultaneous, socially violent dinner scenes is one of the showiest, and most enrapturing, dramatic flexes on television right now. In other words, the White Lotus itself is designed, architecturally, to produce drama. It’s a building that smothers its guests in luxury.
This season takes special advantage of that, in particular, in the physical arrangement of Monaghan’s actress and her friends. The trio’s interconnected, tiered suites quite literally signify the power imbalance between them. Monaghan is in the master, with Bibb at her right hand, and Coon in a treehouse alone. During the day, the three women have terse, playacted conversations. It’s clear they don’t really know one another anymore, and their reunion in Thailand has trouble gaining traction. But night after night, after a couple of bottles, the women return to their suites, and, at some point, one of them retires to her room, leaving the other two alone. In that tipsy solitude, jaws unhinge, and the shit talk commences at an operatic level. Because of the arrangement of the rooms, however, the sleeping member of the trio always goes to bed with the poisonous, inaudible hum of gossip, slander, and resentment soaking the walls. Several screener episodes in, I’m hoping it never blows up, that it stays at this exquisite simmer, but, as White keeps visually suggesting, the tsunami is on its way.
Maybe the main way that Mike White is able to represent the Mephistophelian seductions of this lifestyle is by loading every season with scabrous and brilliant performances. What makes The White Lotus great, what gives it an energy missing from other shows like it, is the luxurious feast of roles it offers to its actors, especially its women actors. White’s calling card, as a screenwriter, has long been his ability to design complex and unpredictable human beings for supporting actresses to inhabit, star turns for overlooked or taken-for-granted performers. One of his earliest showcase writing credits, the Freaks and Geeks episode “Kim Kelly Is My Friend,” is one of the best episodes of that great series, and an absolute coming out party for a young Busy Philipps as Kim. The episode—which did not air until the show was in reruns—gives us a peek into cartoon bully Kim Kelly’s desperate homelife and transforms the show itself from a fun, slightly dark teen comedy into an underrated classic of the era.
Since then, White has done the same thing for Laura Dern, for Molly Shannon, for Joan Cusack, for Salma Hayek. How many times has Mike White written the best role a beloved actress has played? The White Lotus is set up almost as a laboratory for these kinds of alchemical experiments. Coolidge as the daffy and depressed Tanya in the show’s first two seasons, Meghann Fahy as the slitheringly sunny Daphne and Aubrey Plaza her deadpan foil Harper in Sicily, and now there’s Parker Posey. Together, finally, they’re almost too powerful.
Posey’s caftan-bedecked, wine-swilling Victoria Ratliff isn’t immediately the narrative focus of the show, though not for lack of trying. “Scene-stealing” feels like an insufficient phrase to describe what this actor does to every frame she’s in, with her deep-throated drawl and slapstick catatonic expressions. In the first episode, her family is shocked to discover that the hotel asks guests to commit to a screen-free vacation. As her husband and children loudly grouse and talk over one another, Posey cuts through the noise like a featured soloist, saying, to nobody in particular, “I’m sick of these phooooones.” I’m not kidding when I say that I immediately clipped this line and made it the ringtone on my phone. This performance combines the improvisatory accent-work genius of her Christopher Guest roles (Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, etc.) with the dramatic range of her indie roles; it is a marvelous feat to be both the funniest actor on-screen and the most compelling soul.
After giving Victoria two episodes of instantly meme-able one-liners, White begins the third episode inside her dream. She’s standing on the beach, barefoot in blue light, fully attentive. She turns to see her youngest son, sitting between hotel staff members, who tells her, “This is what it looks like before a tsunami.” Two more staff members wrap her in a comforter, and, with her North Carolina mansion uncannily looming behind her, she begins to walk into the sea. She collapses as the giant wave engulfs her, and then we cut to her, not jolting awake, but slowly, calmly opening her eyes. She is closer to this grim horror, more aware, than we realize, but, by the end of the episode, she’s her old self again.
When her older son tells her he’s scammed the family an invite to a yacht party, she’s indignant. Her son reassures her that she shouldn’t worry, the people are rich. “Just because people are rich doesn’t mean they’re not trashy,” she says. Her daughter chimes in from the corner, “Most rich people are trashy.” Victoria replies, “I wouldn’t go that far.” This is what it looks like before a tsunami. Or maybe not.
