You do not need Britain’s greatest TV previewer to tell you to watch the new series of The White Lotus (Monday, 9pm, Sky Atlantic) Come on, zoom out: you are reading TV coverage in the Guardian. There’s no way you’re not already excited for an intricately spun, coolly observed, wealth-puncturing, class-unveiling hotel-based farce – an anthology series, no less! – with the broad and adult remit that being an HBO vehicle allows. It will be smart without telling you anything you can’t figure out yourself, you will see at least one actual human breast, and Jennifer Coolidge is back, tottering about, aggravating the concept of gravity every time she stands up. So far, so perfect.
We’re in Sicily, then; specifically Taormina, behind the purring threat of a volcano and near the same village where Michael Corleone took refuge in The Godfather. History! It’s right here, in the soil and in the murals and in the stone busts of long-forgotten courtiers. If the broad theme of the first series was “colonialism”, then the second’s focus is the great Italian tradition of “sex”, either having it or not having it, or feeling guilty about it or not feeling guilty about it, or seeing how many people you can have it with at once.
