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White’s signature tone is sardonic and sincere at the same time. He has
an ear for how people can weaponize idealism; he understands how the
language of self-care and self-help can gussy up plain old self-interest.
The flip side of this is that he is a generous enough writer to find the
vulnerability in even his most grating characters.
By James Poniewozik
In the first of six episodes, Armond tells Lani to make each guest feel like
the “special chosen baby child of the hotel.” These baby children include
the Mossbacher family: Nicole (Connie Britton), a Sheryl Sandberg-like
tech C.F.O.; her beta husband, Mark (Steve Zahn); their porn-addicted
sixteen-year-old son, Quinn (Fred Hechinger); and their daughter, Olivia
(“Euphoria” ’s Sydney Sweeney, once again playing a parent’s nightmare),
a bitchy, performatively woke college sophomore, who has brought along a
friend, Paula (Brittany O’Grady). There is the obligatory newlywed couple
—Shane (Jake Lacy), a real-estate scion in a Cornell baseball cap, and his
wife, Rachel (Alexandra Daddario), a clickbait journalist who, hours into
her honeymoon, is starting to have second thoughts. There is also Tanya
(Jennifer Coolidge), a lonely alcoholic who carries around her dead
mother’s ashes in an ornate gilt box. The chief coddlers are Belinda
(Natasha Rothwell), a soothing, long-suffering spa manager, who is
perhaps the only truly likable character on the show, and Armond, a
mustachioed dandy and a recovering addict whose sobriety is tested by his
stressful job.
The Guardian's Lucy Mangan also gave the series full marks, labelling
it "a magnificently monstrous look at how the other half live".
"None of the guests is wholly villainous," she said. "White is too good to
make it that easy for us: the entire point has to be their horrifying
relateability.
And money defines the character relationships, not just between the guests
and staff but among the guests. There’s the Mossbacher family: Nicole
(Connie Britton), a high-level executive; her husband, Mark (Steve Zahn),
who seems to feel emasculated by her success (he’s having a health scare
literally involving his testicles); their son, Quinn (Fred Hechinger),
alienated and living inside his phone; and their coolly terrifying daughter,
Olivia (Sydney Sweeney), whose sidekick Paula (Brittany O’Grady) is
bound by the unwritten rule that she must never have anything that Olivia
doesn’t.
Also poolside are the newlyweds Shane (Jake Lacy) and Rachel (Alexandra
Daddario), on a honeymoon that his wealthy family paid for. While she
wonders if she’s rushed into a marriage in which she’s a second-class
citizen, he becomes obsessed with the suspicion that Armond has put them
in a premium suite that’s slightly less premium than the one they booked.
You can see this in Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), who steps off the V.I.P. boat
in a depressive haze, with a plan to scatter her dead mother’s ashes at the
resort. She could easily tilt into a ditzy-rich-lady caricature, but instead, she
has a damaged authenticity and flashes of self-awareness. You feel for her
— yet this doesn’t excuse the emotional-vampire bond she develops with
the spa manager, Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), another one-sided
relationship dominated by the person paying the room charges.
White, 51, does not look like a man who benefits from extended equatorial
stints. “I’m not tannable,” he said, a friendly ghost in the Zoom window.
“I’m albino, practically.”
Though he made time for the occasional poolside cocktail, White mostly
spent the long tropical days shooting and editing “The White Lotus,” the
six-episode limited series that debuts on HBO on July 11. It is the first
show White has created since the canceled-too-soon “Enlightened,” which
aired about a decade ago, and it shares that earlier series’s conviction that
living your best life usually pushes a lot of other people into living worse
ones.
A spiny satire of privilege set almost entirely at a luxury resort a lot like the
Four Seasons, “The White Lotus” scrutinizes the interactions between
guests and staff, most of them as toxic as a blowfish liver. Following a year
in which few people could safely and sensibly travel, the show offers the
consoling thought that maybe tropical vacations were never that great
anyway.
About 10 years ago, White bought a writer’s retreat on the Hawaiian island
of Kauai. He often spends half the year there. He has read up on Hawaii’s
history, particularly the wounds U.S. imperialism has inflicted. And he has
thought about the ways in which people like him keep those wounds from
healing. As a kid, he loved luau night, when hotel employees would don
traditional dress and dance for the guests. He thinks about that experience
differently now.
These guests include the Mossbachers - a tech millionaire mum who works
through the holiday, her chronically beta male husband, her son who won’t
stop looking at his phone and her performatively right-on daughter, Olivia,
and her friend, Paula, who both self-medicate their way through the
holiday.
They have alternately been compared to the Greek chorus, saying what we
really think about their holiday companions and also Macbeth’s witches. If
you have ever felt that teenage girls are terrifying, constantly judging you,
you will quake in fear watching this pair.