The white lotus
Welcome to the weekend frenzy. Each week, we’ll bring you a compelling title designed to keep you from going too crazy. Check back throughout the weekend for even more gloriously queer entertainment.
The dream landscape: the white lotus
Leave Mike White, the brilliant and hilarious mind behind Chuck & Buck, to imagine a comedy set in Heaven… which could also be hell embodied. The White Lotus follows the crossed lives of a group of tourists at a luxury Hawaiian resort. In short, they are: Shane (Jake Lacy) and Rachel (Alexandra Daddario), the legitimate son of a wealthy real estate agent and honeymooner journalist; Tanya (National Treasure Jennifer Coolidge) a woman mourning the death of her mother; Nicole and Mark (Connie Britton and Steve Zahn), CFO of a multinational company and her husband with swollen testicles; Mark and Nicole’s self-centered daughter, Olivia (Sydney Sweeney), and also self-centered best friend Paula (Brittany O’Grady); and Quinn (Fred Hechinger), Mark and Nicole’s teenage son with a chronic masturbation habit. The cheerful and tense Armond (Murray Bartlett) oversees the resort, relying heavily on Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), the spa manager, and Dillon (Lukas Gage), a young and handsome bell boy.
Do you have it all? Amid the idyllic vacation scenery, each of the guests falls into a fit. Tanya can’t stand the idea of spilling her mother’s ashes. Rachel begins to wonder about the loss of her career. Shane and Armond fight over a description of the room. Nicole can’t stop working. Mark is concerned that his swollen balls indicate cancer. Quinn loses her phone. Paula begins an affair with a handsome member of the staff at the resort, whom Olivia plots to ruin. Armond battles drug addiction along with his desire for Dillon, and Belinda plots to escape it all by accepting huge sums of money from Tanya.
Do you have it all?
Like all great satires, The White Lotus wins very big laughs to the detriment of its characters. These people have everything, but still manage to make themselves miserable. And, like all of Mike White’s best work, the series also generates laughs through awkward human interaction while offering insightful observations on American culture. For example: Mark learns that his father died of AIDS and was secretly bisexual. He confesses this to Armond, who thinks Mark is asking him for sex. It’s that kind of show.
The White Lotus accuses all of his characters of their self-obsession on some level. Even ambitious Belinda has her own share of cynical movements. In contrast, young Olivia presents herself as a true sociopath, torturing her brother, ignoring her parents, and yearning to hurt her best friend in the name of her own ego. Mike White, who wrote and directed each episode, also shows enough artistic wisdom to realize that he doesn’t know the causes or solution to these personality flaws, or the larger societal issues they point to. . Rather, he and his camera just watch them, factoring in the absurdity of each situation for all of its laughs and horrors. The performers all dive into their characters with utter abandon, led by Daddario’s melancholy writer, Coolidge’s ditzy heiress, and Bartlett’s horny boss. A sex scene between Bartlett and Gage has become the topic of conversation on Twitter with very good reason.
Comedy doesn’t get any more sophisticated or biting than The White Lotus, and streaming series rarely get any better. With HBO just greening Season 2 and the finale set to air this weekend, we recommend taking a trip to this resort. It won’t be the one that no one will soon forget, no matter how hard they try.
Aired on HBO. The final will air on August 15.
