Though not quite a household name, writer-director Mike White has had the kind of varied career that brings to mind a postmodern Orson Welles. Having cut his teeth penning episodes of Dawson’s Creek, White acted in such films as School of Rock and Chuck & Buck before premiering his directorial debut, Year of the Dog, at Sundance. The executive producer of both a soap drama (Pasadena) and an acclaimed if little-watched HBO comedy (Enlightened), White took a series of sabbaticals from 2009 to 2018 to appear on The Amazing Race and Survivor, the latter of which he very nearly won. Given its creator’s idiosyncratic resume, there was little chance that White’s newest HBO program, The White Lotus, would fail to be interesting. The question was whether it would approach the heights of the cable channel’s other satirical dramedy, Succession, a prospect that, through four episodes, appears highly unlikely.
Set at a Hawaiian resort and unfolding at a vacationer’s stately pace, The White Lotus is not so much plotted as populated. Hotel guests plunge into and out of each other’s affairs, passing pointed judgments and conducting the occasional argument. Staff, led by the supremely unhelpful Armond (Murray Bartlett), drift ineffectively through a squall of double-booked rooms and disagreeable clientele. Though smartly written at times, the series suffers from what is perhaps best described as a crisis of identity. Neither fish nor fowl, The White Lotus is at once a joke-free comedy and a drama without obvious stakes. While the show periodically hits the mark as a satire, even this comparative strength is undone by an insurmountable confusion regarding White’s intentions.
To the extent that The White Lotus exists to lampoon its ultrarich ensemble, its ideology is clear enough. Shane (Jake Lacy), the pampered scion of plutocrats, has forced a pre-nup on his wife but can’t understand why she wants to hang on to her career in journalism. Rachel (Alexandra Daddario), Shane’s put-upon bride, might be a figure of sympathy were it not for her clickbait “profiles” of such luminaries as Nicole (Connie Britton), a neurotic search-engine magnate. Trailing in Nicole’s wake are her ineffectual husband, Mark (Steve Zahn), and her phone-addicted children, Olivia (Sydney Sweeney) and Quinn (Fred Hechinger), a passive-aggressive trio of whiners and scolds. Rounding out the guest roster are Olivia’s pill-popping friend, Paula (Brittany O’Grady), and quivering basket case Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), whose attempt to befriend a beleaguered spa manager (Natasha Rothwell) provides the show with its requisite racial unease.
If, as previously hinted, nothing much happens over the course of the series’s first several episodes, it is at least the case that White has peopled his project with entertaining lunatics. Having complained about their inadequate drug supply, Olivia and Paula shake out their purses to find not only weed but Ketamine, Adderall, Ambien, Xanax, and Klonopin. (“I need them for my panic attacks,” a fretful Paula reports.) Lounging by the pool, Rachel can’t help asking Nicole for marital advice despite having portrayed her as a “Machiavellian gorgon” in a recent article. It is in these and other moments of dramatic irony that White is at his acerbic best. A court jester with a natural eye for upper-crust cluelessness, White strikes with a surgeon’s precision when Shane wants to move from one luxury suite to another, or when Mark struggles to bond with his misanthropic son. Where the show loses its nerve is in its forays onto ground that the Left is inclined to protect. To ridicule a hapless father is one thing. To challenge contemporary orthodoxies of race and sexuality is quite another.
Unhappily for White and company, it is in The White Lotus’s heftiest storylines that its unsteadiness of approach is most evident. The first, concerning the relationship between Tanya and spa manager Belinda, presents viewers with what sounds like an obvious farce but turns out to be something far less determinate. Visiting Hawaii to scatter her mother’s ashes, the absurdly overwrought Tanya so enjoys Belinda’s “cranial sacral” treatment that she offers to fund the young woman’s wellness venture. The procedure in question, a preposterous call-and-response, featuring such lines as “I am my own phallic mother,” practically begs to be mocked. Bizarrely, however, White plays the therapy straight, with staging and acting that suggest seriousness rather than scorn. Given the silliness of Belinda’s work, this decision feels puzzlingly discordant with the rest of the show. If Belinda, a black woman, is too “oppressed” to be teased for her anti-rationalism, then why is her work so plainly ludicrous? Why, for that matter, should viewers care whether Tanya will really fund so outrageous an enterprise?
As sometimes happens, confusion in one realm leads to uncertainty in another. Upon learning that his deceased father was secretly gay and passed away of AIDS, Mark is understandably distraught. Confessing his feelings to his daughter, however, he is sprayed with so powerful a torrent of wokeness (“Dad, why are you so upset, though?”) that he can barely stay on his feet. The most likely reading of this subplot is that White is skewering Olivia for her callousness. Yet can a show that lets Belinda skate by without disparagement really mean to criticize a viewpoint with which the bulk of HBO viewers have been taught to agree?
This question, concerning not only sincerity but the bounds of humor in 2021, is at the heart of The White Lotus’s failure to cohere as fully as it might. However impressive its acting or writing, one is often unsure what, exactly, it means to say. While comparisons to Succession, the best show on TV, may be unfair, they are nevertheless instructive. A saga as fearless as it is hilarious, Succession snarls at the woke and the regressive with equal ferocity. Despite its relative tentativeness, or because of it, The White Lotus ends up being the less likable series.
None of this is to say, of course, that White’s latest effort is without its pleasures. But no one should expect this Hawaiian vacation to be perfect.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
