Television dramas always reflect the mores and preoccupations of their eras. A few boast strong enough plots or performances to endure; most are soon outdated. “The White Lotus”, a hit that returned for a third series on HBO on February 16th, is ostensibly about the spite and delusions of rich American tourists. At heart, though, the show and its popularity are artefacts of the pandemic, with all its anxiety and itchy-footed frustration. What made it a sensation has become a drag.
Filmed in Hawaii in lockdown conditions, the first season was released in 2021, when overseas travel was still onerous. Staying at a luxury hotel in the titular chain, the characters bickered about privilege and inequality; both the right-on youngsters and complacent oldies were nicely insufferable. Set in Sicily and out in 2022 as the world opened up, series two focused on sexual urges, insecurities and betrayals, featuring a pair of improbably happy hookers.
The latest instalment moves to Thailand. After the trademark kooky theme tune and credits, it again combines satire with the arc of a murder mystery: gunshots ring out in a flash-forward opening before the story rewinds a week. This one is about sex, too. Another theme is religion and spirituality, from the hypocrisies of avowed Christians to wellness babble and Buddhism, with its apt teaching that greed is no path to happiness.
Once more Mike White, the writer and director, assembles an ensemble cast of haves, have-nots and have-yachts. The guests include a middle-aged actor and her two childhood friends, a misanthrope and his younger, chirpier girlfriend, and a high-rolling couple from North Carolina with three grown-up children. The credo of their eldest, Saxon, a resplendent jerk played by Patrick Schwarzenegger (pictured), is “Get laid—get everything.” Lalisa Manobal, a K-pop star, perks up a thin romantic subplot.
Superficially, then, the action bears no trace of the coronavirus. Yet it is still detectable in the setting, rhythm and mood.
First, the claustrophobia. Established in the first season, the hotel format retains a whiff of lockdown (even with a side-trip to Bangkok). As people did in quarantine, guests get to know each other better than may be advisable. Stripped from their usual routines, they stand exposed, sometimes literally. Affection curdles into annoyance, then hostility. The three friends’ mutual barbs are more venomous than the Thai snakes.
As well as too little privacy, characters in “The White Lotus”, like people in lockdown, have too much time on their hands, too much of which they use thinking about the past. Old sins and grudges rise up and gnaw them. Timothy (Jason Isaacs), the Southern family’s patriarch, is stalked by shady business dealings. Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), a sweet spa manager from season one, turns up on an exchange junket. She is haunted by a guest she dimly recognises. Belinda knows what he did last summer.
Alas, the viewer’s experience also mimics lockdown. In “The White Lotus” formula, each episode rotates among different configurations of holidaymakers, as in a soap opera or a reality-TV contest that plonks buff strangers on a tropical island. In this season the repetitious dialogue—about phone addiction, tranquillisers and a noisy kitchen blender—reinforces the circularity, as do the endless cutaways to monkeys and statues. The sense of moving forward while going nowhere recalls the woozy timelessness of the pandemic.
Above all, “The White Lotus” is stamped with the ambivalent view of travel that covid-19 cultivated. With those infinity pools and azure lagoons, the exotic resorts are alluring. Yet they are also perilous. In this series, as before, motives for murder proliferate, as do guns. Secrets emerge with the bare flesh. (Since almost no one uses sunscreen, you worry about sunburn as much as death.) You want to escape to a White Lotus—and avoid them like a plague. This one-two of fantasy and fear encapsulated the queasy yearning of audiences caged by the virus. Now it feels tired.
The drowsy pace picks up in the middle of the season; risqué stuff happens, not all of it predictable. The first two series were so popular that this one may yet become water-cooler TV, a feat in an age of fractured audiences and half-deserted water coolers. The story shows, once again, how flawed and fragile seemingly golden people, families and marriages can be. Underneath it is a monument to the era it emerged from, with all its longings and longueurs.■
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