Smash-hit limited series The White Lotus delivers well the message that its characters embody: meaninglessness. The limitless options that streaming services provide for entertainment viewing, create a never-ending list of shows to catch up on. I like television shows that hook me in from the outset. The first episode should pique my curiosity about a character or story arc. HBO’s overly hyped and much raved about The White Lotus is not one of those shows.
I sat through the first installment of what is being called an enjoyable and entertaining watch with excitement that dissipated quickly during the first episode. Eye-rolling and sighing to myself through a total of six episodes can’t be the worst experience to live through these days. The first season was successful in setting up season two for disappointment. This is good always because when the bar is low, you look for redeeming points to discuss. I relapsed into painful tedium and streamed season 2 for the sole purpose of reviewing it for these pages. A quick scroll on the internet tells me I suffer alone in this pain.
When the show aired in 2021 it was the most-talked about that summer, receiving high ratings and critical acclaim for its creator Mark White. It bagged the most Primetime Emmy nominations that year and this year received top honours, including the Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe awards for season two. The eponymous White Lotus, as we know now after the recent season, is a chain of boutique hotels where the only semblance of economic disadvantage that can enter is by imagining the lives of the hotel staff. The patrons are the rich and the very rich. The setting for the first season is Hawaii and the second season takes us to Sicily. In both seasons, a handful of the guests are the major characters and there are side stories of one or two hotel staff thrown in the mix.
Jennifer Coolidge, a familiar face in American comedies, is surfing the White Lotus wave with great luck for her role of Tanya McQuoid. She gathered more awards this award season for her supporting role in the comedy drama than she has in her decades-long career. Tanya, an heiress searching for ‘meaning’ and stability I suppose, is the only recurring character from season one. Last time, in Hawaii, we saw her carrying her mother’s ashes, unable to let them go in the sea as she had planned. She clings on to this symbol of her toxic relationship with her mother as she clings on to other people. In Hawaii, she wore her loneliness in shades of inebriated pity and dottiness. A masseuse at the resort’s spa is turned into her emotional crutch. Tanya flashes her wealth for the struggling woman’s company and shows the latter a pipe dream of investing in her holistic practice. Until, that is, she meets a shady old man with bouts of unexplained coughing. The masseuse is then immediately disposed by Tanya as she preys on her new object of obsession. In some ways, Tanya sets herself apart among the rest of the disparate guests, by being a smidge human and not overtly selfish. However, this season she is nothing but blatantly self-centred. She has come to Sicily with a young personal assistant. The shifty cougher is now her husband who wrestles out of her clingy painted nails and jilts her in the hotel. If Tanya was imploring others to fill the void in her life, she now commands it unremorsefully. Her role has assumed completely the proportions of a caricature and one begins to wonder why she had to reappear. Her role is there to further explore the opulence and scenery of Italy through a terribly ludicrous plot line. There is even a trite night-at-the-opera scene thrown in, which does not contribute to plot movement or pace at all but is rather included as a box to checkmark when deciding ‘how to depict Italy’.
Trying hard to enjoy the same Mediterranean sights and delights are a young couple staying at the same hotel, played by Aubrey Plaza and Will Sharpe. Sharpe plays an elusive, self-effacing Ethan who has hit jackpot in Big Tech, Plaza is his grounded and educated wife Harper. At the end of it all, it is Sharpe who is the compelling surprise this season. Ethan is just a vanilla guy who doesn’t want trouble. Whether it is with his wife who is perpetually bored or the other couple who has invited them to this vacation at the White Lotus in Sicily. He’ll go for his morning runs and keep his head down and out of awkward conversations at dinner. But finally – finally – something makes him tick and it has to do with not just his wife and sketchy friends but seems to affect the core of his own personal world presumably.
Plaza won an award for her role as Ethan’s wife, Harper. I found her wardrobe and sunglasses to be more outstanding than what she brought to the role. Perhaps because what shot her to fame previously is the unforgettable sitcom Parks and Recreation, and even her little-known Netflix alt-comedy film The Little Hours was more watchable for its quirky humour than this bland season of WL. Plaza and Coolidge are both essentially typecast actors. Even though WL offers Plaza a nuanced role, the world cannot go beyond calling her ‘acerbic’ and ‘caustic’, which is a hangover from her Parks and Rec role and as many reviewers admit that’s just how reviewers and audience now describe her face.
Anyway, together as a couple grappling to find comfort and passion in their marriage, both Harper and Ethan lend some pathos to the mural of unstable relationships tying other major characters together. In their attempts to deepen their bond they are a foil to their ‘hosts’, a wild and manipulative couple, also American, the husband being Ethan’s college buddy. They occupy the room adjoining Ethan and Harper’s, with an interconnecting door between them. This innocent door causes much aggravation for husband and wife in the first and then final episode – first when Harper becomes suspicious of their friends and cracks start to appear in the veneer of the other couple’s lovey-dovey marriage and finally the existence of the door wracks Ethan’s imagination and causes his world to collapse.
Then there is the trio of Di Grasso family men if Italian descent who have come to Sicily in a quest to find their roots. Well, that’s the plan for the senior Di Grasso. His middle-aged son is unmoored because of his recent divorce on the basis of sex addiction. His grandson is a clean-cut Stanford preppie with feminist views and develops a crush on an escort who works the hotel. Nothing of significance happens to them, other than the fact that they just have a lot of money. The youngest Di Grasso blackmails his father to forward 50,000 Euros to his bank account in order to help his lady friend – because that amount of money “it’s nothing for you,” he claims. That’s just the Pakistani in me fixating on the conversion rates – my point was that they are losers albeit rich losers of the highest order and they fail on their family tree hunt.
The two older men are insufferable, wealthy fixtures of patriarchy who redeem their ubiquitous sexism in the feeblest attempt to save a damsel in distress from being apparently abducted. Again, they totally fail in that too. The damsel is the sex worker employed by the middle-aged Di Grasso for one night and who is now showing the youngest heir of the Di Grasso fortune around town. Hateful and irrelevant this family evokes nothing but irritation. Giving the senior Di Grasso lines like “In our time, we respected the old, now we are a symbol of a disgraceful past” makes you want to wring the scriptwriter’s neck for trying to be adroit.
The sound editing/ sound design of the show is slick and noticeably catches one’s attention in the first season as well. The weird yodeling and EDM mix that is the theme song has apparently haunted all WL fans. The colours are warm and fuzzy for the Hawaiian resort setting and sunny and vibrant for the Sicilian setting. Along with the sumptuous Italian architecture, high fashion and flowing wine, it is the Italian actors who breathe some warmth and life in season two. The sex worker Lucia, her friend Mia, who aspires to be a singer, and the taskmaster hotel manager Valentina have screen presence. They did not make me roll my eyes once. They bring the Italian passion and a gregarious sweetness in their navigation of the White Lotus world. Their delivery of comedy and drama is spot on and in comparison makes the rest of the cast look one-dimensional.
In the first season, a high-profile businesswoman and her husband exhibit shameful tone-deafness to the plight of the native Hawaiians whose ancestors were colonized by white capitalists; they look upon the indigenous culture and people as exotic objects there to entertain the affluent holiday-goers. Their teenage son and daughter see the world a tad more consciously but are ultimately comfortable in their privilege just like their parents. The daughter’s friend is travelling with the family. Tired of the family’s entitled worldviews, the said friend plots a burglary with her Hawaiian romantic interest in a symbolic attempt to return to him what was taken from his ancestors by white power. She gives him the code to the family’s suite safe so he can nick a bracelet worth 75k dollars. However, the heist is foiled.
If season one was about white privilege and power, the second season explores deception. Tanya is ensnared in a complex plot of deceit for the sake of her inheritance. A covey of gay drifters sweep her away insisting on showing her a good time in Sicily, entailing the usual debauchery, in order to disarm her. The person behind the prolonged and painstaking plot is the big twist, if one is not overcome with yawns by then to react to the big reveal. If Hawaii was about callous tourists taking from the natives who earn from tourism, Sicily is about natives taking from the tourists under the guise of merriment. Although the Sicilian band of revellers duping Tanya meet a dismal end, Lucia scores big time from her young and very green American victim.
The takeaway from WL is negative. There is literally no feeling it evokes. As I said it does well in that aspect. It is a study in emptiness, meaninglessness and absurdity of the affluent lives. The closest emulation in reality to the show is the real-life court dramas involving Hollywood celebrities we read about. This week, retired US actor Gwyneth Paltrow’s trial over a ski accident in an elite Utah resort is a real-time case study on the unreal lives that the world’s richest stars lead. She dodged a case suing her for some three million dollars while she sought one dollar in damages in a countersuit. Most significantly, the internet was abuzz with memes about the total lack of relatability with the Oscar-winning actress and wellness guru. Similarly, last year all eyeballs were fixed on how Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard played out, the court drama being even closer to tropes seen in WL complete with defecating in a bedroom as Heard allegedly did upon one occasion.
Yes, in season one, the hotel manager of The White Lotus excretes his feces in a suitcase full of clothes of a hotel guest he particularly despises. And that, folks, is The White Lotus in a nutshell when you strip it off the exotic settings and inane hype.