The White Lotus season 3 will be hitting screens in February 2025, with newly released footage showing the show’s usual mix of glamorous rich tourists behaving badly in beautiful locations around the world.
This time around, the hotel – White Lotus is the fictional chain, standing in for Six Senses – is in Thailand, and for all the brilliant unpredictability of the show, you can be sure it’ll continue to contrast the spoilt, mostly American, tourists with the ‘unspoilt’ paradises they’re visiting.
And as much as we revel in the grotesque behaviour of these characters, and the unravelling of the crimes they become caught up in, part of the appeal of the show is drooling over the very lifestyles it seeks to satirise.
Series creator Mike White, fully knows this too. It’s reflected in everything from the lingering over body beautifuls like Alexandra Daddario in season one and Theo James in season two.
In locations like the ancient ruins and spectacular villas of Sicily, we are given access to the privileged world of hedonism where sex and drugs are all part of the holiday experience for those with the money and power to grab it without a care in the world.
On some level, we all want this. Certainly those of us in Western societies built around aspiration and the religion of money. It may be a particularly American obsession but in the UK we are hardly resistant. A taste of luxury is the goal. And holidays can often give you a taste of that, at least for a week or two.
We watch The White Lotus in the same way we watch Succession: on multiple levels. Of course we know the Roys are horrible rich kids, yet we are still spellbound by the helicopters, the penthouses, the clothes, the parties, the devil-may-care bad behaviour because their father might just be the actual devil.
The same goes for Rivals. The adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster may revel in its Eighties bad taste excess, but it also makes it seem like the best fun in the world. All the wife swapping and affairs would seem tawdry if set in a Sheffield council estate. But in the manor houses of the Cotswolds? Well, we may morally sneer, but we wouldn’t mind one night or three in that world.
This is the new world of TV series which try to have their cake and eat it. To expose their corrupt worlds whilst also being in love with them.
Rivals, by the close of its run of episodes, runs out of steam due to a certain lack of conviction: whether it wants to condemn Rupert Campbell-Black or celebrate him. The surface charm is somewhat scratched in this lead character and the wider show, but not too much. In the end, there is no great satirising of Eighties culture and Thatcherism.
In contrast, The White Lotus in its two previous seasons, has managed to pull apart the fabric of the American sensibility and social stratas, and how the American way sees itself in contrast to the rest of the world.
It is more devastating: a condemnation – and of us viewers, too. Roll on season three.
