Carnival of awful people we can’t look away from
IT TAKES true perversity to programme The White Lotus, a new HBO miniseries about tourists whose expectations for their stay at a luxury Hawaiian hotel fall far short, at a time when Americans can finally travel in mass-vaccinated safety.
What more relatable fantasy is there right now than the one of quarantine-induced marital or familial tension dissipating in the island breeze or under the sway of a mai tai on the beach at sunset?
But creator Mike White (Enlightened) isn’t interested in dreams so much as the nightmare of reality. His shots of Hawaii’s palm trees, shorelines and sunrises should please the state’s tourism board, but their tropical idyll only underscores the fact that hardly any of his characters are able to appreciate the lush nature they presumably came to experience. The sun-dappled White Lotus Hotel, too, is the kind of secluded, opulent retreat that the closest most of us can get to is through Instagram. But its guillotine-worthy guests spend most of their time convinced that they’re not being pampered and catered to enough, goading the hotel manager, Armond (Murray Bartlett of HBO'S Looking), first into small rebellions against a customer, then a full-blown spiral in a textbook case of trickle-down callousness.
It’s hard to imagine The White Lotus on a network other than HBO, which has recently cornered the market on terrible (mostly) white rich people through such shows as Succession, Big Little Lies, Veep, The Undoing and The Righteous Gemstones. (Depending on your tastes, Entourage and Sex and the City might belong on that list, too.)
Is there anything left to observe about the trail of casual destruction the moneyed and connected can leave in their unhappy wake? For White, who wrote and directed all six episodes, the answer seems to be no. But his characters and the performances from the cast – which, largely pulled from other shows on the network, comprises a kind of HBO troupe – make for a twisty, queasy, sweatily claustrophobic drama.
The series’ satirical mordant wit is typified by college friends Olivia (Sydney Sweeney of Euphoria) and Paula (Brittany O’grady), sarcastic, know-itall teens whose holiday reading list of Freud, Nietzsche and Butler unnerve those around them. (Their extremely “Daria” energy carries through in White’s delightfully mean use of books to help flesh out his characters. If you’re a Malcolm Gladwell stan, be prepared to take offence.)
On the boat ride from a larger island to the more exclusive one the White Lotus occupies, Olivia and Paula size up, with rough precision, the other guests headed to the hotel. The attractive honeymooners with their arms around each other? He’s (Jake Lacy) a Dartmouth type; she’s (Alexandra Daddario of True Detective) pretty enough to work in fashion or marketing. The solitary older woman (Jennifer Coolidge) whom they guess is meeting her friends on a girls trip?
“She gets on their nerves but she pays for everything so they put up with her.”
The photogenic middle-aged couple (Steve Zahn of Treme and Connie Britton) whose outward ease may conceal an everyday sort of insidiousness? Olivia’s parents, who badly want to reconnect with her and her 16-yearold brother Quinn (Fred Hechinger), not least because one of them is nervously anticipating a phone call with an oncologist about some test results.
The trollish timing of the show’s premise, that holidays are wasted on those who least need it, certainly deserves some grudging admiration. | The Washington Post
¡ The White Lotus (six episodes) is
streaming on Showmax