Mike White's sorrows-of-the-rich comedy "The White Lotus" returns Sunday to HBO with a second season, set in Sicily. The first won some Emmys, for limited or anthology series, for White as a writer and director and for actors Jennifer Coolidge and Murray Bartlett. The tissue connecting that year and this is the eponymous White Lotus, a worldwide luxury hotel chain, and the presence of Coolidge, back as Tanya.
Like the first season, the second begins with an unidentified dead body before jumping back a week. Here, in a scene that plays like a tip of the fin to "Jaws," a guest of the hotel is found drowned just off the beach. (It's suggested that there may have been "a few" more.) This injects mystery into the story — not a murder mystery, necessarily, since we don't know if murder is involved, or, for that matter, if the body or bodies belong to anyone in the main cast. As only five of seven episodes were offered for review, I have no idea — but, you know, probably murder and probably someone we know.
It's easy enough to forget this future fatality, once you're in the meat of the tangentially connected stories, especially since nothing in those first five episodes is setting you up for a death. None of the principals seems at all a danger to others or themselves, however poorly they get along or whatever darkness they might hold inside, or however much the viewer might want to do away with one or two himself.
