The problem with watching television as a job is it can begin to feel like work. Not so with The White Lotus. When the first season of Mike White’s ensemble black comedy aired last summer, it caught people off-guard, elevating its trashy premise (murder! at a luxury resort) to the status of satirical masterpiece. Now it returns with an almost entirely renovated cast and the action moved from Hawaii to the sunny shores of Sicily, but don’t worry: this is every bit as dark and delicious (and unpacific) as its Pacific counterpart.
The premise of The White Lotus is simple: something terrible, involving multiple deaths, has happened at a five-star hotel. Now we rewind a week and watch different families and couples descend into chaos, always with an eye as to who will end up a cadaver. You might call the genre a whosnuffedit. At the heart of this season are two sets of yuppies: Cameron (Theo James) and Ethan (Will Sharpe) are college roommates turned successful businessmen, vacationing with their wives, perma-smiling Daphne (Meghann Fahy) and chilly, neurotic Harper (Aubrey Plaza). But they are by no means alone at The White Lotus. Three generations of Di Grasso men (F Murray Abraham’s flatulent grandpa Bert, Michael Imperioli’s sex-addicted Dominic, and Adam Di Marco’s “nice” Stanford grad, Albie) are reconnecting with their Sicilian roots, sampling the local, um, culture. And then, of course, there’s Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya. “Whenever I stay at a White Lotus, I always have a memorable time,” she announces, ominously.
Tanya, who also appeared back in Hawaii, is still dragging around Greg (Jon Gries) to whom she is now unhappily married, and a scathing Gen Z assistant, Portia (Haley Lu Richardson). I’ve wasted half my word count by now and not even mentioned the locals: Simona Tabasco as Lucia (a very Italian take on the “hooker with a heart of gold” trope), her singer friend Mia (Beatrice Grannò), and formidable hotel manager Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore). And breathe. It’s a brilliant cast, one that mixes undoubted comedic clout with dramatic chops. The highest possible compliment to offer The White Lotus is that it never matters to the viewer which of these threads is on-screen. Whether it’s under-sexed Harper and Ethan (“What’s with the boner?”), Bert talking about geriatric intimacy (“It’s a penis, it’s not a sunset”), or Valentina chasing Lucia through the hotel (“She’s one fast slut!”), the show is a sheer joy.
The White Lotus represents almost a genre unto itself, at least in modern TV. There are notes of Alan Ayckbourn in the way a comedy of manners descends into farce. And this new season embraces its Sicilian landscape to laudable effect. How many passive aggressive ways are there to say “prego”? Does prosecco cause more trapped wind than champagne? Is there anything more Italian than Jennifer Coolidge choking on a bug, riding on the back of a Vespa snaking through the Sicani mountains? The show is the best satire we have of our present times: from the confusing sexual politics of twenty-somethings (“I don’t think you could ever make someone feel uncomfortable,” Portia tells “nice guy” Albie, “you could probably go a little bit in the other direction”) to climate change paranoia (“We’re all entertaining each other while the world burns,” says Harper), via welcome insinuations that Ted Lasso is for idiots. Nobody captures the absurdity of modern discourse better than White.
Put simply, there is nothing more enjoyable to watch on television right now than The White Lotus. Whip smart, sexy and with an artistic sentiment as relentlessly focused on audience gratification as the lowest-denominator reality TV: this is as moreish, and mouth-watering, as a big bowl of spaghetti alle vongole. Grazie (prego).
