When the first season of The White Lotus arrived, it took a while to notice how dazzlingly political it was. The director, Mike White, has since congratulated himself about that little hook at the start: before we know anything, we know that someone is going to die. He has said that he wishes he had started all his shows that way. It is so simple yet so effective. You meander into it thinking it is a whodunnit, with a side order of who-did-it-get-done-to? Then there are some beautiful beaches, and there is some astronomical wealth. By necessity, there are some characters who are not wealthy, since who else is going to fetch the drinks?
It is not until around the seventh minute that it becomes obvious how catastrophically unhappy all the characters are, how horrible they are to one another, how disappointing and thin their existences. It had started off looking like wealth porn – the term affixed, post-Big Little Lies in 2017, to any show that was mainly about rich-people-problems and their gigantic kitchens. (In the US, with their peculiar coyness around saying “wealth” like it was a bad thing, they always called it “lifestyle porn”.)
