There is a scene in the new season of The White Lotus that will make you squirm. Actually, there are several – such is the excellence of Mike White’s writing in the follow-up to his razor-sharp 2021 satire about a batch of badly behaved and very wealthy holidaymakers. This one, though, is particularly agonising. Because it’s about sex.
Employment lawyer Harper (played with astute severity by Aubrey Plaza) returns from breakfast to find her husband Ethan (Will Sharpe) masturbating. She is surprised. “You know I sometimes get horny after I run,” he reasons. When Harper asks why he didn’t wait for her, Ethan replies: “You don’t like morning sex.” It’s tense, particularly when the issue resurfaces later over dinner with Ethan’s nauseatingly smug friends, Cameron (Theo James) and Daphne (Meghann Fahy).
