The White Lotus Review: a Malicious HBO Show Like Succession and Parasiteion

The six-part miniseries from HBO Max The white lotus begins with the end of a decadent Hawaii vacation. While Shane (Jake Lacy) waits to board a flight, looking shaken and taciturn, he tolerates small talk from other vacationers – just enough to learn that there has been a death at the White Lotus Hotel and Resort and that the body is with theirs is airplane. As the story cuts back to the start of Shane’s vacation, with a great shot of VIPs arriving on a boat, viewers will mostly be looking for clues as to what is going to go wrong. The yellow cast of the scene looks less like a sun-drenched glow, but more like the oppressive glistening sun. The approach of the boat feels like an invasion. Staff waves on the shore and waits for everything to go right during guests’ stay, but the facility makes the trip itself feel wrong.

Like Mike White’s former cult classic HBO series Enlightened, his new series indulges in making viewers uncomfortable. The white lotus is six episodes of ultra-rich, confident whites pushing resort employees around while whining about their low stakes problems. Sometimes the series stays with the VIP guests for too long, at the expense of employees and supporting characters who could be explored more extensively. Still, the show is a must see on TV, a succinct look into the psyche of the rich and the damage they leave behind.

With The white lotus, White has put together a stellar cast of HBO alums and prestige actors. VIPs include the Mossbacher family, consisting of tech CEO Nicole (Connie Britton), husband Mark (Steve Zahn), college daughter Olivia (Sydney Sweeney) and teenage son Quinn (Fred Hechinger). Olivia brings along her college friend Paula (Brittany O’Grady) who serves as her drug use and parental antagonization pals, leaving Quinn the loner wandering the hotel with his Switch in hand.

There is also Shane, the real estate brother on his honeymoon with journalist wife Rachel (Alexandra Daddario). And solo traveler Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge) is looking for a place to disperse her mother’s ashes. These VIPs arrive at White Lotus to be served by resort manager Armond (Murray Bartlett), spa manager Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) and the rest of the resort staff comprised of native Hawaiians and non-natives.

The show spends a lot of time getting into the minds of guests and how they think about each other. It not only looks at the relationships between families, but also how the groups interact and make assumptions about one another. It’s an interesting illustration of how personal egos lead in conversations with strangers, but at some point it becomes a chore to watch the guests talk to each other. The interactions between the VIP guests and hotel staff are the best part of the series as White forces the audience to think about what the White Lotus staff must sacrifice in order to comfort the disgusting VIPs.

This sense of sacrifice is strongest in Armand’s action. The series begins with the hotel manager in control and showing a trainee (Jolene Purdy) the ropes of duty with a smile. Armand compares the work of the employees with “tropical kabuki”, which hides behind a constant, plastered smile. He’s effective at his job, but when he puts on the mask and zooms in on the needs of his guests, he lacks perspective of the world around him. An incident in the first episode in which Armand missed something big shakes him deeply and it is the beginning of a mental decline exacerbated by Shane who escalates an overbooked room into all-out war. Bartlett (Search) performs excellently as a tormented man struggling to hold it all together.

In a smaller, but no less skillful appearance, as spa manager Belinda, Natasha Rothwell (Unsure) must draw Tanya’s attention. After an intensive holistic treatment, Tanya becomes dependent on Belinda, returns to her for a massage and invites her to eat together. It’s a cutting depiction of a white woman relying on a black woman for emotional support, one that could be gritting when Rothwell and Coolidge (American Pie, legally blonde) weren’t masterful at handling the nuance. Coolidge’s insightful performance has received rave reviews, and Rothwell deserves as much recognition as an actor best known for comedy but with nuanced dramatic performance.

The show could stand spending more time with Paula (Brittany O’Grady, of.) Little voice and star), a figure caught in a fascinating mid-point between the staff and the guests. She’s not a hotel worker, but she’s there to meet Olivia’s needs. She spends much of her vacation behind a mask that matches Olivia’s intonation and facial expressions. She is also the guest who is most sympathetic to the staff and sometimes seems like a wobbly bridge between two worlds. With no further information on Paula’s background, the show misses fertile ground for observational satire.

There has been a successful microtrend lately of putting the mega-rich in the satirical spotlight in movies and shows like parasite and Succession. The white lotus tells a succinct story of how much the rich carelessly ask for the less fortunate, but it focuses more on the VIPs than the staff, to its own detriment. It’s a show that raises more questions than solutions and offers more horror than laughter. It could even make people rethink the urge to travel to the tropics after vaccination.

The first episode of The white lotus is now on HBO Max. New episodes come on Sundays.