The White Lotus Season 2? Oh Noooo!

The White Lotus on HBOMax is a silly show about silly people. When I heard there’s going to be a season 2, I thought: Oh Noooo!

If I want to watch another TV show about rich assholes behaving badly and being unhappy with their lives while surrounded by all of life’s comforts, I’ll wait for Season 3 of Succession.

Undeniably, the setting of The White Lotus is gorgeous. Filmed at the real-life, five-star Hawaiian resort of the Four Seasons on Maui, the scenery, scenes and depictions of the resort are stunning; the music is equally so. The actors are perfectly cast; one or more of them will probably get Emmys. But the show is less than enthralling.

Ignoring Writer’s Cardinal Rule

Like the never-ending memes depicting the people of Walmart, the six episodes of White Lotus simply serve to make us cringe. What’s more, unlike what we’ve seen so far in Succession, creator/writer/director/Mike White appears to have ignored a cardinal rule of creating a successful TV series: you need complex characters and rich storylines to carry a six-parter. The White Lotus has neither.

There are no real plot lines in The White Lotus — unless you count the escalating feud between Shane, the honeymoon hubby and Armond, the resort manager. But really, how many viewers even considered that this would lead to a body in the casket. (Okay, I hear you, Pam, buddy and tennis partner!!)

Contrived Feud

Let’s be honest: If you paid for the honeymoon suite with a private patio and plunge pool  and then arrived — after a 14- hour or eight-hour flight from the mainland — and discovered you couldn’t have it because it had been double-booked, what would you do?

You’d be pissed, I think.  And, the resort should have taken care of it. Not like Armond, the hotel manager, who admits it was his mistake, but who sets out to get the better of this hotel guest.

In most five-star resorts — and I’ve stayed in a few — this would have been settled fairly swiftly by offering you the next best suite in the resort, and comping you until you could move into the suite you’d booked.

Anyway, in a real five-star resort, Armond would never have exhibited his sneering, condescending attitude. Because –hello!–he would not have been on duty 24/7 and there would have been another manager or even a supervisor to whom Shane could have complained, and gotten a better response. A resort like White Lotus cannot possibly run with only one manager on duty for an entire week.

So, it’s a somewhat contrived storyline. In any event, while the casket being wheeled onto a plane offers up a mystery and question, neither are really at the forefront of any of the episodes leading up to the finale. There is no foreshadowing and there are no cliffhangers. And, we know it can’t be Shane’s wife, Rachel. That would be too predictable.

Detestable Guests

There are no satisfying narrative arcs, either — except maybe for Quinn Mossbacher who realizes there is more to life than staring at his iPhone screen. Duh!

Nothing really holds this show together. Other than the detestable behavior and attitudes of the guests.

There’s Rachel, Shane’s bride: and what a sorry excuse for a journalist she is. The least she could have done to show some journalistic chops, if not support for her new husband, was to use her Twitter account to publicize the resort’s incompetence and Armond’s bad attitude.  But she doesn’t –which makes her sudden rebellion against being a trophy wife all the more laughable.

Then, there’s the Mossbacher family: Dad Mark who starts the vacation fearing he’s got testicular cancer; Mom Nicole who is a high-powered tech company CEO and who is never seen without her laptop, or zooming with associates in China.

Besides son Quinn, there is vacuously woke daughter, Olivia who is a total pain in the ass and compares her mother to another “achiever” Vladimir Putin!!!  And, Olivia’s friend, Paula who is a person of color and the foil to this family’s total tone-deaf comments about racism and social injustice.

As Dad Mark responds to Paula at a luau complete with native dancers: “Yeh, it’s horrible, we killed them, stole their land and then made them dance.”

Half-Hearted Plotline

A possible plot line could have been developed between Paula and Kai, a Hawaiian, who works at the resort. After becoming romantically involved, she encourages Kai to rob the Mossbachers’ hotel room safe. She gives him the combination to the safe and persuades him it’s the right thing to do: He’ll be able to raise the money to pay for a lawsuit to reclaim the land that was stolen from islanders like himself and used for developing luxury resorts.

But that story seemed only a half-hearted attempt to inject some suspense into the series. In the last episode, Nicole Mossbacher is told that the thief of her humongously expensive bracelets has been caught and that she’ll get back her stolen property. No explanation of how Kai was caught or what will happen to him. Or, if Paula will ‘fess up to her role in the robbery.

Best Line In The White Lotus

Paula, I think, also has the best line in the series. It’s in a scene where Shane, honeymoon hubby swims across the pool where she and Olivia are on chaises reading a couple of books that look like they’re from their required reading list for a college course.

Shane remarks on their choice of reading material where one day they are reading Freud and Nietzsche, the next Camille Paglia and Frantz Fanon. He asks : “Are you actually reading any of these books?”

“No” replies Olivia, “they’re just props.” Then, Paula adds:

Tanya: A Privileged Lush

Finally, there’s Tanya: Entitled, privileged, and a big drinker, sucking the air out of any space she’s in. I would have pushed her overboard the hotel’s charter boat with her mother’s ashes — if I could have gotten away with it.

How could The White Lotus creator Mike White put together an ensemble of characters without one redeeming feature between them? Not a single one is empathetic or even relatable. Quite honestly by the time we got to the last episode, I didn’t care who was in the casket — so long as it wasn’t Belinda, the spa manager.

This may have been Mike White’s objective. Still and all, did he have to make each one of them so vile? Was it so the rest of us wouldn’t miss the point? Hey, rich, white people are disgustingly racist and elitist????

Shocker Scenes

When a TV series like this falls down in the plot and character departments, then it has to make up the slack somewhere. In The White Lotus this comes in the shock-value department. We are treated to a view of Mark’s testicles (when he thinks he may have testicular cancer and asks wife Nicole to take a look); We also get a scene where Armond gets caught with his nose in employee Dillon’s butt. Finally, the piece de resistance: Armond defecating  into Shane’s suitcase.

Have we become so inured to all manner of porn depicted on screen that, in the interests of one-upmanship we have to view scenes like this?

I’m not a prude, but I’ve seen enough testicles in my lifetime to know that I’d die happy if I didn’t see another pair of them–on screen or IRL.

Photo Credits: HBO