I’ll admit that when Mike White’s slicing social satire “The White Lotus” debuted on HBO in the summer of 2021, I didn’t see it becoming such a critical and commercial and awards-buzz favorite. In my mixed, two-and-a-half-star review, I gave the series props for being occasionally intriguing but said the characters in the darkly twisted murder mystery were “a colorful bunch of blithering, privileged dolts — most of whom are so obnoxious you’d want to move away from their table if you were stuck next to them at the restaurant.”
For the hotly anticipated Season Two of an anthology series that could continue for years, with a new cast and a fresh locale each time around, White returns to the same formula and we’re once again introduced to a colorful bunch of blithering, privileged dolts and they’re plenty obnoxious, to be sure — but this time around, if I were stuck next to them at a restaurant, I’d actually want to inch closer to eavesdrop on their lives. They’re just a little more interesting, a little more fascinating in a human train-wreck kind of way, a little more … wonderfully awful (in most cases).
