Over three seasons, The White Lotus, HBO’s acclaimed limited series-turned-anthology, has specialized in a particular type of scene: a group of American characters on vacation abroad – always rich and usually white, as per the real patrons of international luxury resorts – engage in conversation with the veneer of politeness but intent to draw blood. None of the players are considered “good” – in the world of the show, not too far removed from ours, to be rich enough to vacation at the White Lotus implies some level of moral rot that blossoms like black mold – but one has leverage over the other in the small-scale arena of taste. Think Sydney Sweeney’s terrifyingly gen Z dismissal of Alexandra Daddario’s journalist in season one, or Aubrey Plaza’s blase assurance that she “doesn’t watch Ted Lasso” in season two. Though distinct from the its viral moments – “these gays, they’re trying to murder me” rightfully lives on and on – these cringe-inducing send-ups of the privileged’s code of conduct are the engine of the show.
Yet it took until the third episode of this season, set in Thailand and maintaining the vague whodunnit setup of the first two, for the set-up to finally click. Three childhood friends now in their 40s – Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), Laurie (Carrie Coon) and Kate (Leslie Bibb), all bottle blondes simultaneously entreating and competing with each other – are having dinner at the hotel’s restaurant, one of the show’s consistent set pieces. LA-based Jaclyn and New York resident Laurie press Kate, who lives in Austin and is the least self-absorbed friend to date, about the fact that she regularly goes to church with “conservative” people. Wait … she didn’t vote for Trump, did she? “Are we really going to talk about Trump tonight?” Kate replies, eyes crinkling, lips pursed in a smize universally recognized as the suburban white woman’s sign of judgment.
It’s a serrated, loaded exchange familiar to anyone who’s attended a dinner party outside of New York or LA in the past year; creator Mike White is the star student of human denial and delusion, and of white women’s foibles in particular. It was the first moment I felt the show’s signature bite: the hair-bristling, too-close-to-home dialogue that has become White’s signature. And it stood in noticeable contrast with the rest of the season, which has spun its wheels around a repetition of theme that has grown stale. Once again, The White Lotus revolves around a cast of miserable rich people: the aforementioned friends; an insular UNC-Duke family with the douchiest eldest son of all time (a too-good Patrick Schwarzenegger); and a sourpuss rich floater up to no good (Walton Goggins) and his younger girlfriend (Aimee Lou Wood). And once again, all hijinks, entanglements, betrayals and misunderstandings will culminate in the violent death of someone at the resort.
But whereas previous outings conveyed strains of delusion with clear visual motifs – the self-justifying allegiance to wealth and status rotting like Hawaiian fruit in the season one title sequence, the wandering eyes and creeping lust of season two in Sicily – season three has an emptier stare. It has interstitials of a churning sea, a lush jungle, a Buddhist temple conveying … trouble in paradise?
The show, also directed by White, is still gorgeous to look at. It’s still achieved moments of appointment television virality – Parker Posey’s extravagant North Carolina accent (Piper, nooooaaughh!”), pissing off Duke University, the incest storyline. It’s sticking to the form, playing the hits, but to diminishing results. Three seasons in, The White Lotus finds itself in a similar position to its oft-compared prestige HBO brethren Succession, another satire of wealth and privilege (though of the most extreme kind) that found itself stuck in a rut in its penultimate season, the same characters cycling through the similar beats and always landing in misery, thus continually lessening the stakes. The White Lotus’s characters are new, with a few nagging exceptions (does anyone want Tanya’s sinister ex Greg back?), and its locale far from Hawaii or Sicily, but its players sub into the same game with the same result: rich and unhappy, doomed to be themselves.
White billed this season as exploring eastern spirituality – or, more pointedly, white westerners’ Orientalist conceptions of spiritual enlightenment in Thailand. And while there are hints of it: Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) naively committing to a year in a Buddhist monastery to escape her family, Goggins’s Rick admitting his revenge plot to healer Amrita (Shalini Peiris) in a confession so bald I thought it had to be a joke. But any statement on foreigners’ attraction to eastern religion takes a backseat to the machinations of a mystery with minimal dramatic engine; complicated whodunnit with a dose of financial crime is not White’s strong suit as a writer, and I mean that as a general compliment.
And the show’s operating logic for locals – embodying the attitude of the guests by keeping them mostly tangential and outside the frame unless directly related to the action – was, I’d argue, justifiable for the first two seasons, and sputtering in this one. Tayme Thapthimthong’s sweet but simple-minded security guard Gaitok acts purely as a sympathetic plot mover. Why cast Blackpink’s Lisa, one of the most popular and charismatic pop performers in the world, yet barely feature her? (It should be noted that the series was made in conjunction with Thailand’s ministry of tourism.)
The stasis – the staff used, the guests using in a vicious cycle – has the feel not of satire but, in its third outing, a sitcom of self-repeating structure. Or, as Slate’s Sam Adams argued, a slasher movie, with every character set for self-inflicted, blindspot-ridden downfall other than Natasha Rothwell’s Belinda, a recurring character given little to do besides maintain connections to prior seasons. As the Final Girl, Belinda remains impervious to The White Lotus’s ethos: a deceptively cynical view on the human capacity for progress, enlightenment or marginal betterment, particularly in the face of potential material sacrifice or social discomfort. In other words, a resistance to change.