I have to admit for the past few months I’ve had little reason to watch any of HBO’s scripted series with any urgency. I thought THE PENGUIN was fine, but it was a short season and ultimately, at least for me, not zeitgeisty enough for me to feel a need to set an alert or record it on my DVR (yes, some of us still have that).
But as of last night my personal “boycott” has ended, because after far too long a hiatus a new season of THE WHITE LOTUS has finally opened, and it’s as entertaining and WTF-y as ever. The show was initially supposed to be a one-off that due to it being set at an isolated tropical resort made it both affordable and producable during the COVID-challenged year of 2020, and it immediately became appointment viewing as the number of backlogged originals dried up and new episodes of other shows were increasingly impossible to make. It was a welcome diversion and was both critically acclaimed and saw significant ratings success as the so-called “Summer of Love” of 2021 failed to materialize. HBO was then able to talk creator Mike White into revisiting it as an anthology series, relocating it to Sicily for a second season that cemented its malleability and essence as it became a weird, black comedy mashup of elements that once made FANTASY ISLAND and COLUMBO so compelling–stunt casting and a whodunit, with more than a little bit of lunacy attached.
Season 3 now takes the franchise to Thailand and ramps up the star power and the stakes. As VARIETY’s Ethan Shanfeld shared mere nanoseconds after last night’s premiere had concluded:
As is tradition, the third season…opens with a mysterious dead body, shown in a flash forward that takes place one week after the vacationers arrive on the Thai island of Koh Samui. A young man’s meditation session is interrupted by gunshots, some of which pierce the windows of the wellness center. He ducks for cover and then jumps into a pond, praying to a Buddha statue for the safety of his mother. (We piece together that his mom is Belinda, the Season 1 spa manager who traveled from Hawaii to learn the tricks of the trade in Thailand.) As hotel guests panic, he sees a dead body floating in the water, face down.
One week earlier, a boatful of American tourists heads toward the island. The parties are introduced one by one. There’s the young and bubbly Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) with her grumpy older boyfriend Rick (Walton Goggins), who is inexplicably miserable (and smoking). There’s the Ratliffs, a Southern family who traveled to Thailand so one of the kids can interview a monk for her college thesis paper. And there’s Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), Kate (Leslie Bibb) and Laurie (Carrie Coon), childhood friends on a reunion trip.
Each group of travelers presents interesting dynamics and tensions that will surely be pried open, explored and — knowing White — taken to disturbing extremes in future episodes. For example, it’s not yet clear why Rick is so irritable, but he keeps inquiring about one of the owners of the resort. The owner’s wife, the glamorous Sritala (Lek Patravadi), is the face of the resort as her husband recovers from a stroke in Bangkok.
Disturbing extremes have already been exploited, as (SPOILER ALERT!) FORBES’ Paul Tassi lamented in the recap he dropped early this morning:
No, you are not alone if you picked up on the weirdest vibes the series has ever seen, courtesy of Patrick Schwarzenegger’s Saxon Ratliff, there with his rich family and two siblings, Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) and Lochlan (Sam Nivola). Saxon has graduated, his sister is in college, his brother is a senior in high school. From here, a content warning for some ickiness follows. We have seen dysfunctional families in the series before, but there was an overwhelmingly unsettling layer of, I don’t know how else to say it, potential incest in many of the interactions here. This is almost entirely on Saxon’s end:
- He comments that his sister and brother can’t share a room because of their “genitals” now that they’re both older.
- He comments that his sister is “hot” and speculates that she hasn’t had sex yet.
- He talks to his brother at the pool about how horny the trip is making him.
- He’s in bed nude talking to his brother about getting laid, asking him what his favorite porn is as he pulls it up on his iPad.
- He wonders aloud where he can masturbate in the room, and walks naked into the bathroom with his porn.
- This is met with…a look by his younger brother at his body that is unsettling in its own right.
Icky? Of course. But do consider Schwarzenegger’s DNA. Conan The Barbarian and the Kennedy family. Surprised?
And it may just be that he’s ultimately going to work his way through those “childhood friends”–all prime candidates for such an oversexed beefcake, as INDIE WIRE’s Proma Khosla teased:
Kate (Leslie Bibb), Laurie (Carrie Coon), and Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) have known each other since childhood and are grateful for a weekend alone together after too long – but Jaclyn is now a famous actress living a life that her friends can never understand, and funding the trip for all three of them. “It all goes the White Lotus way,” Monaghan told IndieWire. “It devolves quickly.” Bibb said that even though Jaclyn is paying for the trip, she thinks it was Kate’s idea as a way to reclaim their youth: “‘Hey, maybe we do Cancun, 40s style!'”
“Kate is a bit of a perfectionist and desperate for this trip, desperate to be seen by these two women,” she said. “She gets a lot of self esteem from their gaze. I feel like she’s constantly looking to have some status – even though she has it at home I think the status she wants to have is with these women. It’s very important for her for this friendship circle to make it through this trip.” Coon was quick to cut to the heart of Laurie, “a New York based corporate lawyer who did not get a promotion, who is failing as a mother, and whose marriage is falling apart, and she’s not telling her friends about any of it. And an alcoholic.”
What could go wrong?
But there’s way more talent and even more familiar faces. One of my personal favorites, Walton Goggins, is on hand; as FIRST FOR WOMEN’s Raquel Levic teased, in the role of Rick…a man visiting the hotel with his much-younger girlfriend. Parker Posey is downright hilarious as the embattled alcoholic mom of Schwarzengger and his conflicted siblings, not to mention the spoiled and overly protective spouse of someone whose own world may be crumbling at that very moment. And White being White, as it turns out Belinda may not be the only familiar face from past seasons that’s turning up, as THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER’s Josh Wigler dished two minutes earlier than Shanfield did (in other words, right around the time the supertease began):
By the end of the premiere, we’re reunited with another familiar face: Greg (Jon Gries), Tanya McQuoid’s widower who arranged his wife’s death last season, and now apparently lives at the White Lotus’ Thailand locale.
And as MASHABLE’s Sam Haysom mused:
Greg is now the only character in The White Lotus who has appeared in all three seasons. And despite hiring Quentin (Tom Hollander) to kill Tanya in Season 2 to inherit her money, he clearly hasn’t faced any consequences for conspiracy to murder. So what exactly can we glean about what’s happened to him from this first interaction?
Dunno. But I’m certainly gonna stick around to find out. And at a time when the very existence of HBO may be in the process of being determined now that the guardrails on Yosemite Zas making some sort of alliance have been taken off by the current administration’s leniency, bringing back folks like moi to a level where we have to figure out ways to stay awake on a Sunday night to find out has benefits far greater than the ones that Saxon Ratliff may ultimately be able to take advantage of.
Season 4 is already assured. Who knows what kind of plot line vacationing media moguls fresh from a billion dollar writeoff might provide?
Until next time…