Summer lusting: The White Lotus turns its sharp eye to sex

To stay at The White Lotus in Sicily, the fictional hotel at the center of the HBO show’s second season, is to feel exposed. Caught alone, several characters meet the stares of Renaissance-style wall paintings. Each room contains a statue of a man’s head that, as a hotel staffer explains, honors a Sicilian legend of a beheaded seducer. A disguised door connects two married couples’ rooms. The visual motif of the first season of The White Lotus, set at a Hawaiian resort, was rot – molding fruit in the title sequence, tropical leaves crawling across the bedspreads, the stench of moral corrosion – but the second season’s is more vigorous: wandering eyes, backdoor arrangements, creeping lust.

As in the first, the second season, again written and directed by Mike White, kicks off with a dead body (actually, several) then jumps back a week. But the real mystery is how tangled the erotic web will get. Sex is both undercurrent and tidal wave: suggested with a glance; debated at the dinner table between three generations of DiGrasso men (F Murray Abraham, Michael

Imperioli and Adam DiMarco); bared by Cameron (Theo James) to his college roommate’s uptight wife Harper (Aubrey Plaza) in a swimsuit change ripe for internet chatter; sold by local sex worker Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and her friend, aspiring singer Mia (Beatrice Grannò).

By the fourth episode (of seven), which aired on Sunday, both marriages – Harper to Ethan (Will Sharpe), newly rich after the sale of his company, and Cameron to Daphne (Meghann Fahy), consistently rich based on Cameron’s vague finance job – are strained. Lucia and Mia have visited four-ish rooms. Characters in a chain of attractions stemming from Albie (DiMarco) make out on opposite ends of the bar. These characters want to feel alive, and to be