Psychically speaking, it was a delicate time. No one had it easy, but all sorts of social faultlines had tacitly emerged. “Bubble” cliques. Masking debates. Those with children were frayed and exhausted from trying to work a job while watching their children wither from isolation and distance learning.
Those privileged enough to have worked from home were trying not to think too hard about the “essential workers” who risked their lives in person, day after day, during those dark times. Of the essential workers who’d survived, most were trying not to be governed wholly by resentment.
It was a rich broth of grievances and the first season of White Lotus, White’s brutal satire about luxury travel, captured social cross-currents people didn’t always feel free to discuss openly.
A veteran of the show Survivor, White has learned, through bitter experience, how to leaven some of his more ambitious and nuanced ideas with kitschy bait.
The third season, set at a sumptuous White Lotus resort in Thailand, opens as the first and second did – with an unidentified dead body. The violence of the anthology series has at least theoretically escalated: gunfire interrupts a meditation session, and the character who discovers the body does so while wading through water trying not to get shot.
A corpse, White has said, is a good hook. Audiences rush to guess who died, and that cheesy opening gesture, which has come to define the White Lotus formula, keeps them watching long enough for White to showcase spectacularly uncomfortable, eerily realistic conversations. And ethical scenarios so engaging and fraught that no outcome feels good or right.
The first season abounded in prickly tangles. White captured how much the compulsory courtesy expected of people in the service industry privately costs them. Armond (Murray Bartlett), the delightful, Basil Fawlty-type hotel manager, harboured a veritable volcano of repressed bile.
The guests’ finicky understanding of pleasure was fine-grained, specific and frequently insulting. They were oblivious. They were nightmares. While Armond was technically wrong to give a rich guy (Shane Patton, played by Jake Lacy) a different room than the one he’d paid for, Shane was such a pill that audiences couldn’t help but turn on him. So, briefly, did his wife (played by Alexandra Daddario).
That everyone sort of had a point generated the kind of dramatic torque you see often in real life and rarely on television. The same was true of the untenably affectionate dynamic between a wealthy college student (Sydney Sweeney) who enjoyed lording her liberal values over her family, and the college friend (Brittany O’Grady) she’d brought along – ostensibly as an equal, but perhaps, a little bit, as a charity case.
The third season has less of that stuff.
A lot less.
It feels, in every way, like a slower and kinder copy; perhaps that’s in keeping with some of the ambient Buddhism. Even the guests feel like echoes of earlier incarnations. The Ratliffs, degraded North Carolina royalty, superficially resemble the Mossbachers from season one. There are some differences: Timothy (Jason Isaacs) the stoic patriarch, works in finance. His wife Victoria (Parker Posey) gives every appearance of being affectionate, conventional, dull and insular. (Two episodes remain; I’m hoping for a twist.)
But their brotastic eldest son Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), who superficially resembles Shane, lectures his siblings on power, masculinity and how people secretly want to be used. Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), their college-age daughter, feels like a kinder and more serious version of Sweeney’s character mixed with Albie Di Grasso (Adam DiMarco), the embattled grandson from season two.
And Lochlan (Sam Nivola), their high-school-age son, feels like Quinn 2.0 (the Mossbachers’ youngest) – a dreamy sibling hunched over and trying to disappear as his family bickers. He’s also (socially speaking) an improvement over his predecessor: rather than tune his siblings out to play video games, he gives them chance after chance to connect (with decidedly mixed results).
Six episodes in, the Ratliffs take up the most screen time with the least pay-off. The other guests include Rick Hatchett (Walton Goggins), a morose and somewhat sinister figure who spends his days ignoring the earnest but annoying entreaties of his much younger partner Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood, who routinely steals the show).
And – in a welcome surprise – Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), the caring massage therapist from the show’s first season who befriended the delightful, insufferable Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge). She’s been sent to the Thai resort for a kind of extended work trip and her storyline is in some respects the show’s sweetest.
But the highlight of the season, guest-wise, is a fabulous trio of women in their 40s who used to be childhood friends. Michelle Monaghan plays Jaclyn Lemon, a TV star and minor celebrity who’s funding the trip for Kate (Leslie Bibb), who seems to have married into wealth and lives in Texas, and Laurie (Carrie Coon), a single lawyer with a troubled child who lives in New York.
Coon is of course extraordinary, Monaghan is messy and bold and Bibb excels at projecting a rigid, pleasant diplomacy that gets increasingly brittle as the season unfolds. That old White Lotus magic comes back full force in every scene these three share (with the exception of one extremely long partying montage). Each conversation nudges the obvious tensions forward just a tad. It’s propulsive. It’s believable. It’s very, very funny.
The same can’t be said of the dialogue among the other two clusters of guests. There are so many scenes in which Chelsea and Victoria ask their male partners variations of “What’s going on?” and whether everything is okay – and get no response – that it starts to feel like a joke.
Also absent is any real sign of dissatisfaction (or complexity) among the Thai characters, particularly the workers. A saccharine love story between Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong), an amiable security guard, and Mook (Lalisa “Lisa from Blackpink” Manobal), another employee, barely intersects with the main plot. Belinda’s interactions with the staff are less than illuminating; no one she speaks with seems to have any real complaints.
Even the anxious hotel manager, who has his faults, seems basically well-intentioned. One employee seems free to party with guests whenever he chooses. Another routinely abandons his post and barely gets a reprimand. The only overt sign of exploitation comes thanks to Chelsea, who checks in with a clerk who survived a robbery, and reports back that she wasn’t even given the day off afterwards.
In fact, the weirdest thing about this iteration of White Lotus is that virtually everyone turns out to be a little bit better than they initially seem. While it’s superficially similar, little of the misanthropy animating the first season remains.
When the second season aired, White said the first season covered class, the second sex and that the third might focus on spirituality. That tracks; there are a surprising number of speeches that sound rather like sermons. There’s an obvious interest in the bankruptcy of desire, and in repetition, redemption and release. The trouble is that the characters who seem to be headed for a spiritual shake-up are so shut down they barely speak.
It’s fascinating to watch Goggins in particular, who’s usually such a scamp, in this subdued mode, but I do wish the show had let him start thawing earlier. As it stands, three-quarters of the way through the season, so little has happened that the show’s cheesier, more propulsive “bait” plot seems poised to take over.
I don’t know that I wanted a healthier, kinder, more virtuous White Lotus. The new season is slow. It’s not nearly as sharp at picking apart contrarian impulses among wealthy tourists – or at articulating the malaise of the present moment. But it has moments of leisurely, contemplative beauty that remind me a great deal of Enlightenment, White’s earlier series for HBO. And, this being his project, it’s still pretty darn fun to watch.
The White Lotus, season three, premieres Sunday on Neon.
