The White Lotus is back, and it’s time to check in. Although this is only the third season of Mike White’s HBO anthology, its opening movement is already so familiar it verges on ritual: a violent death is foreshadowed, although both victim and perpetrator remain a tantalizing mystery, then we flash back a week to watch another flotilla of the privileged arrive at an impossibly high-end resort, their superficial ease and attractiveness clouded by a hint of unhappy tensions beneath. The new characters rotate in the replacement cast of a long-running play: the wealthy middle-aged couple with their variously stunted offspring; the old friends reconnecting for an overdue reunion that will end up severing their bonds rather than renewing them; the dysfunctional lovers who can barely stand the sight of each other (although fortunately, they are, every one, very nice for us to look at). Chances are not all of them will end up dead, although the ominous preamble this time features enough distant gunshots to suggest a mass shooting, or at least a protracted firefight. But those who survive will be condemned to an even worse fate: being themselves.
Just by virtue of being able to step off the boat and onto the soft sands of a remote Thai island, you know these people have it all: the high-powered financier whose grandfather was a state governor; the famous actress; the middle-aged man with a girlfriend two decades his junior and no discernible occupation beyond spending the money he’s already got. This particular branch of the White Lotus chain specializes in wellness, both physical and spiritual. You can test your hydration levels, get a lesson in posture correction, or take a meditation class that turns into a therapy session. But though Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), a flouncy, gap-toothed Englishwoman, begs her older boyfriend Rick (Walton Goggins) to get a facial so he looks more like her partner than her father, and Saxton (Patrick Schwarzenegger), the steroid-addled narcissist who’s followed his father into the money industry, pesters the front desk until they bring him a blender for his protein shakes, the new season’s characters don’t show much interest in deeper forms of self-improvement. They’ve got money and looks and friends—what could possibly need fixing?
If there’s any hope, it’s with Piper Ratliff (Sarah Catherine Hook), who has dragged her family—money-managing dad Timothy (Jason Isaacs), mom Victoria (Parker Posey), and brothers Saxton and Lochlan (Sam Nivola)—to Thailand because she wants to interview a resident of a nearby monastery for her undergraduate thesis on Buddhism. (She’s the Season 1 Fred Hechinger of the bunch.) Her parents are rich but thoroughly provincial; their most pressing dilemma is whether Lochlan, a high-school senior, should go to Duke or UNC Chapel Hill. So they’re baffled and scandalized that their daughter would seek a source of enlightenment outside the boundaries of their circumscribed existence. “Why couldn’t she write her thesis on her own religion?” Victoria frets, in what might be the most protracted Southern drawl Posey has employed since Waiting for Guffman. The way she stretches three syllables in the word “tone” suggests her character, for all her cosmopolitan accessories, has rarely ventured more than a day’s journey from Durham.
It’s an immutable tenet of the Extended White Lotusverse that all Americans are Ugly Americans. Like the animated tableaux in its opening credits, the show provides the illusion of movement, but it’s drawn in two dimensions. Their pettiness and venality don’t have the weight of tragic flaws, so rather than root for them to escape their natures, we just watch them get knocked down one by one, like targets in a carnival booth. Among the guests this time are a trio of childhood friends whose lives have taken them in different directions—TV star Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), lawyer Laurie (Carrie Coon), and society woman Kate (Leslie Bibb)—and though they act like an inseparable trio, you know the instant two of them break off to gossip about the third that we’ll see every two-against-one permutation by the time the season is over. The show has the shape of satire, but it’s an ideological slasher movie at heart.
Perhaps that makes Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) the Final Girl. Returning from the show’s first season, she’s recovered from getting jilted by the late, lamented Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), who casually offered to help her launch her own business and then just as casually withdrew the offer. Belinda has come to Thailand on a work exchange as a pupil, not a client, to study with the resort’s wellness practitioners, but she occupies an uneasy place between guest and host that only exacerbates her feeling of being out of place. “I saw two Black people tonight,” she tells her son after awkwardly waving at a couple across the dining room, “and they weren’t staff.”
Although Belinda is ostensibly there to learn, she comes in as much a blank slate as the paying guests, with little more to offer her Thai co-workers than a stiff khàawp khun. White isn’t much more generous, or more interested. The White Lotus began as an Upstairs Downstairs parable of economic exploitation, with a little postcolonial critique, as a treat. But the third season’s native characters are barely an afterthought, especially Tayme Thapthimthong’s Gaitok, a sweet-hearted, simple-minded security guard who’s barely qualified to wave cars through the front gate. While the series has always both reflected and embodied its characters’ insular surroundings, the third season is especially uninterested in the specifics of its surroundings. White, who has said that Buddhist self-help books got him through a breakdown in his mid-30s, seems to have picked Thailand mainly for the opportunity to riff on the religion’s ideas about desire and the self. Saxton, whose only aim is to add to his bank account and his body count, rebuffs the idea of giving up grasping (or at least his dopey understanding of it), because “It’s good to want things, as long as you can get ’em.” (Those things, by the way: “pussy, money, freedom, respect.”) But his younger sister gets closer to the truth when she reads from a Buddhist monk’s book: “Identity is a prison.”
Although The White Lotus’ characters are possessed of large amounts of money and privilege, the show is almost anti-aspirational: You do not want to be these people. You can look at it as an act of class revenge, but as with Succession or Big Little Lies, there’s a faintly palliative quality to the series’ ongoing assurance that the rich and powerful are all secretly miserable, and that they’ll get what’s coming to them if we just wait long enough. The only truly unsettling moment in the first two seasons is when Jon Gries’ scammer walks away with Tanya’s fortune—the rare acknowledgment that justice, if not karma, often leaves the most privileged unscathed. True, sometimes ordinary folks get caught in the crossfire, both metaphorically and otherwise. But at least we get to sit at home, removed from the fray, and watch schadenfreude doled out in weekly installments.
Like the branches of any high-end chain, the White Lotus’ outposts play up their flashes of local color, but underneath that is a promise that the experience will be fundamentally the same wherever you go. The show has fallen into the same trap, switching up the scenery but retracing its steps. It’s a beautiful prison, but that doesn’t mean the walls aren’t there.
Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.
