The first season of mystery comedy series The White Lotus should have landed at the perfect moment. Debuting in July 2021 and set at a five-star resort in Hawaii, it delivered the things many of us had been missing for a year and a half as we still felt the lingering effects of the winter-spring lockdown: sex, drama, hot climates, holiday. But the aesthetic was supported by something much meatier: an upstairs-downstairs commentary, a thematic exploration of marriage, sexuality, misogyny, race, power and wokeness.
But something was amiss. The show delivered on glamour, but its politics were lip service. “By the end of The White Lotus, the guests are still cardboard embodiments of wealth and whiteness, albeit with views on homosexuality, colonialism, Black Lives Matters and feminism,” wrote Nathan Ma for The Financial Times in August of that year, arguing that the show rarely stretched beyond TikTok politics: “These conversations don’t add depth to a character or their motivation – they simply trace the outline of a certain type of person that we might recognise as a colleague, a friend or a celebrity.” This issue was somewhat rectified in its second season, released in January 2023, which prioritised fewer social media-derived storylines and gave us better acting, better humour and a more complicated sexual mystery. It felt like maybe this hollowness had been resolved and it was announced that the show had been renewed for another two seasons.
The problems that were present in its first season and, given the relative improvements, ignorable in its second have come crashing back into The White Lotus season three, the dullest and most diffuse iteration of the concept yet. Set this time at a resort in Koh Samui in Thailand, this season centers around a North Carolina financier’s family of five, three high school girlfriends now in their forties with diverging ideas around politics and beauty, a transatlantic age-gap couple, as well the hotel’s staff. It tells us almost nothing about these characters you couldn’t guess from reading these basic descriptions. The financier’s up to no good; one of the girlfriends is a workaholic, another a Republican sympathiser. The older man in the age-couple is dismissive and distant; his younger female partner energetic and adoring. The staff (who have been given the least attention of any in previous seasons) are dismissed.
These dynamics are borne out in over-long scenes over-boring conversations. Even its best moments so far this season – such as a tense conversation between three girlfriends about one’s move to Texas and Trump-voting husband, which only really shines in the context of the show’s wider blandness – still are written as an impression of how these conversations might go from a liberal’s perspective. In another scene, the financier’s wife – played by Parker Posey – says of her daughter, who is considering moving to Thailand to study Buddhism: “She needs to learn to fear poverty, Tim, like everyone else we know.” This is hardly a believable line to be uttered by an actual millionaire about herself and her peers, but it certainly sounds like what someone critical of this type of wealth thinks the upper classes say to each other.
It suffers from “eat the rich” syndrome. Shows and films like Glass Onion, Triangle of Sadness and The Perfect Couple pitch themselves as illuminating and transgressive but struggle to say more than that rich people are… selfish? Rude? Bad? Defenders say it’s not trying to say anything at all. That it’s just luxury escapism. But it is obvious that The White Lotus is chasing something that looks like social critique. And in trying to be both mass market and “political” at the same time it fails on both counts. Despite its shocking subject matter this season – an embezzlement scandal, a robbery, escaped venomous snakes, dramatic infidelity, even incest – it is managing the remarkable feat of being forgettable, two-screen viewing. No amount of Posey doing a funny accent can save the fact that this middling space fails to create intrigue.
The season has thrived from a viewership perspective. Its sixth episode, which premiered on 23 March, was reportedly its most-watched ever, drawing in 4.2 million viewers in the US; in general, this season is currently pacing more than 5 million viewers ahead of what its second had in the same amount of time. These metrics will be used as evidence of a show that’s working. Viewers can continue to tell themselves they are getting something out of watching privileged characters in paradise having a less than perfect time, but it’s increasingly difficult to say that it is anything close to good.
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