After two triumphant series, we know what to expect from The White Lotus’s sharp-eyed puppetmaster, Mike White. Another group of rich and obnoxious Americans will arrive by boat at an island resort whose waving staff proffer first garlands, and then the golf buggies in which they’ll be transported to their adult playgrounds (believe me when I tell you that the words en suite hardly touch the sides of the bathrooms here) – cue more trouble in paradise. Somehow, though, this has surprisingly little effect on one’s relish for what lies ahead. As I watched, I caught myself gleefully rubbing my hands together. Part of the show’s intense satisfaction has to do with schadenfreude, and having just shelled out for a new boiler, I can hardly wait for them all to get it.
Cartoonish though it may be at moments, The White Lotus is more subtle than I’ve made it sound, and herein lies its brilliance. If there’s a glib simplicity in insisting that money cannot buy happiness, its interest lies in delineating with utmost precision the highly particular discontents of the wealthy. Lying on their loungers, surveying perfection, its characters experience their anhedonia at its most intense. Some tiny thing is inevitably wrong; the bat squeak of disappointment may always be heard.
We’re in Thailand this time, at a resort dedicated to wellness, which is something of a problem given that such fractiousness works against relaxation even when it is expensively prescribed. Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs), a businessman from the Deep South, will not permit the locking away of his mobile. When his wife, Victoria (Parker Posey, on great form), goes for a massage, she has to swallow two tranquillisers first.
I’ve seen two episodes, and it’s a slower burn than before. The mood is fat with foreboding – monkeys screech constantly in the trees, foretelling death like banshees – but so far, White is only creeping through the undergrowth. After all, he has a full panoply of new roles to establish, including the hotel’s personnel, the most mysterious of which is its flamboyant owner, Sritala (Lek Patravadi). Only two characters return from previous series. One is the big-hearted but naive Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), who worked at the spa in Hawaii. She’s on a job exchange, learning new skills from her Thai counterparts. The other, I won’t name. Best not to spoil things. Not even Belinda has recognised him yet.
“We’re just a normal family,” drawls Victoria Ratliff, her words slurred with a cocktail mix of blitheness and effort. The Ratliffs are travelling with their three more-or-less adult children, the oldest of whom, Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), is a repellent jock who favours porn-induced masturbation over any treatment (“What am I supposed to do here all week without my phone?”).
But he and his parents feel too familiar to me, stock characters in the White plutocracy. I’m more interested in the grim-seeming May-December couple, Rick (Walton Goggins) and Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) – as someone observes, Thailand is full of bald white men like Rick, otherwise known to locals as LBHs, aka Losers Back Home – and in a trio of frenemies, Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), Kate (Leslie Bibb) and Laurie (the wonderful Carrie Coon), who met at junior school and now see each other only rarely.
Jaclyn’s a big TV star, and she’s funding the other pair – literally, buying her friends – though all the cash in the world won’t untie this knot of vipers. “I love you!” two of these women will call to a third as she staggers off to bed, after which they get down to whispered bitching. Their competitiveness takes the form of a horrible hyper-vigilance, their virtues and vices laid out like a 24-hour breakfast buffet, there to be greedily revisited whenever any of them is experiencing self-doubt.
How White does it, I don’t know. As the titles rolled – refreshed, they’re as weird and jarring as ever – I wondered if I was really in the market for another luxuriant helping of emptiness and greed. I mean, look at the White House if that’s what you’re after. But of course I was wrong. Whether he’s inching along or not, we trust White to give us a good, albeit twisted, time. Scatter the rose petals, and light the scented candles! The games are about to begin.
The White Lotus
Sky Atlantic
[See also: Bridget Jones after Mr Darcy]
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This article appears in the 12 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Reformation