The most prescient television show for the absolute absurdity that was 2021 wasn’t about the pandemic or politics at all. It wasn’t Succession, the Shakespearean fictionalization of a right-wing media empire ran by a Rupert Murdoch-esque patriarch, a plum program for our obsession with the press. It wasn’t The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian theocracy that seems less relevant than ever given the number of liberal predictions about the tyranny of former President Donald Trump that failed to materialize in reality. And it wasn’t even Ted Lasso, the Apple+ comedy that was arguably the best of this rotten year.
The year began with a sitting president siccing an armed mob on the elected body attempting to certify the victory of his successor, and it was capped off with said successor presiding over the steepest escalation of the pandemic he pledged to end. The only show that really captured the reality of the moment was HBO’s freshman hit, The White Lotus.
The coronavirus does not exist in The White Lotus, but The White Lotus would not exist without the coronavirus. Filmed in the forced isolation of Hawaii during the height of the pandemic, the comedy was specifically conceived as a stand-alone series capable of being produced quickly and with a limited cast, crew, and, most importantly, set. The eponymous resort and its immediate surroundings serve as virtually the only setting, pitting the increasingly, and at times, justifiably, resentful help against the cluelessly privileged guests, and perhaps to even greater comic effect, those guests against each other.
Connie Britton’s #GirlBoss tech CFO clashes with her leftist daughter over the question of Hillary Clinton. Alexandra Daddario, a “journalist”-turned-trophy wife spends most of her honeymoon immediately regretting her marriage to her petty, frat bro husband, only for her lone encounter with Britton’s matriarch to result in her erstwhile berating an article the millennial once wrote on her. In the finest trick of the show, a rich black college girl grows so contemptful of the rich white college friend who invited her on vacation that she convinces her vacation boy toy, an island native who works at the resort, to steal from a wealthy guest, for which he immediately gets caught. The real privilege, the show allows, is not race but class.
Those on the help do not wear masks in the show, but the point is no different than masked minimum wage staffers hiding behind maskless billionaires and members of Congress at the Met Gala: Rich people can come, colonize native land or a publicly funded museum, terrorize the help with class-coded rules, and pretend they have the moral high ground with the ridiculousness that is wokeism.
With even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now adapting to the public outrage, it’s pretty clear that we’re not extending the pandemic into year three, but the ramifications of the two-tiered rules are likely, and sadly, here to stay. Hopefully, The White Lotus proves little more than a novelty, a capsule back to an odd time in which we silenced the serving class into serfdom, but should the public health regime continue its crusade, the comedy may remain sadly relevant.
