It’s easy to forget that the first season of The White Lotus — which, at the time, was the singular season of The White Lotus — was only six episodes. Series creator Mike White directed and wrote each installment, and the show unleashed its scathing satire and prickly characters so quickly and thoroughly that its effect was practically outsize. Each installment was like a snake rearing back and baring its fangs.
Season two, premiering October 30 and ordered after The White Lotus was critically and commercially well received, seems like it should be the same. White again holds all the cards as the sole writer-director — this time with seven episodes to work with, five of which were provided for review — and the narrative again follows a group of wealthy, self-involved people in a beautiful resort hotel that employs locals but frowns on cross-pollination between the visitors and the visited. Other elements are similarly parallel: The ensemble is sprawling, the couples are indulgently unhappy, the location is recognizable in some ways but foreign in others, the season begins with a dead body and then jumps backward a week, and Jennifer Coolidge returns as the perpetually neurotic Tanya McQuoid. But there’s also a new bluntness, and a noticeable tentativeness, that keeps this second season from hitting as hard and bruising as immediately as its predecessor.
In Hawaii, White put class criticism first and cis-het marital tension second. That allowed for characters like Sydney Sweeney’s Olivia and Brittany O’Grady’s Paula to emerge in all their corrosive glory while clutching Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism and for White Lotus employees Armond (Murray Bartlett) and Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) to give humanistic, relatable performances as resort employees pushed to the limit by nightmarish guests, like the disparate newlyweds Shane (Jake Lacy) and Rachel (Alexandra Daddario). White wasn’t necessarily aligning himself with Olivia and Paula, who eventually allowed themselves to be subsumed back into the cocoon of wealth and protection offered by Olivia’s parents. Yet the inverse relationship between the accumulation of assets and general human decency — and the emotional and spiritual debt such accumulation imposes on both the individual and society at large — was clearly on White’s mind.
In Sicily, White switches his prioritization of these ideas. Paramount now are the miscommunications, resentments, and competition that can develop between people who swear to love each other for richer and for poorer. And unlike Shane and Rachel, whose off vibes were tied to Rachel’s realization that her husband’s toxically gauche sensibilities were unshakably entrenched, White here centers infidelity, to diminished effect. The result is a portrait that feels like half–Tennessee Williams play, half–Men are from Mars, Women Are From Venus. The cast, in particular Aubrey Plaza and F. Murray Abraham, elevates the material’s gender-based clichés (women are shrews, men cads) with performances that are precisely bemused or aggrieved. And the reused murder-mystery framing, now amplified with multiple casualties, does add some simmering tension to the episodes, which pick up the pace as the season moves forward. But without a greater guiding thesis about why marriage reaffirms gender roles for people who otherwise consider themselves progressive, or a secondary plot focus to round out this vacillating heterosexual frivolity and panic, The White Lotus feels defanged.
The opening credits are the first tell, with pastoral images of Italian life suddenly interrupted by animated sketches of copulating bodies. The intention is naughtiness, but the impact is repetition. Sex is presented as shocking, transgressive, and interruptive of our naturally peaceful state, but White doesn’t push that idea, or its unexpected conservatism, any further. The White Lotus adds to this generalization with recurring imagery of the Moor’s Head, dotting the resort with ceramic folk art that tells the story of a woman who learned that her Moorish lover was married and cheating on her with his wife and cut off his head. (The racial and religious dynamics of this story aren’t interrogated at all; this is purely a women-versus-men rendering.) Nearly every suite in the Sicilian White Lotus is decorated with these statues, and White positions them as all-seeing voyeurs, their inanimate nature another seemingly unintentional reveal: We can watch as these couples feud and fuck, but our gaze is fixed and the interiority offered limited.
Gathering for vacation this time around are three groups internally bound by love, legacy, and money. (Describing them as “well-to-do” would be a disservice to how chaotic most of them act.) Tanya is now married to Greg (Jon Gries), whom she met at the White Lotus in Hawaii, but is no less insecure or overanxious. She channels all that smothering energy into her relationship with her assistant, Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), of whom she demands endless emotional labor. Portia catches the attention of Albie (Adam DiMarco), on vacation with his father, Dominic (Michael Imperioli), a Hollywood producer who has messed up his marriage, and grandfather Bert (Abraham), of the generation of men who constantly hit on every woman but swear that they love their wives. Albie vows to avoid his father’s and grandfather’s sexually voracious ways, but his nice-guy act doesn’t exactly secure Portia’s desire. White has written in an undercurrent of straight men having to play games because straight women aren’t honest about what they want, and it’s difficult to tell how much sincerity he wants to assign to that argument.
A grown-up version of this mismatched relationship plays out with the newly rich, previously nerdy Ethan (Will Sharpe), who accepted a vacation invite from his former college roommate and current finance bro Cam (Theo James). Ethan’s wife, Harper (Plaza), is fixated on Cam’s relationship with wife Daphne (Meghann Fahy) and is so bad at hiding her judgments about their marriage that she makes every activity the foursome share impenetrably awkward. Is she hiding an attraction to Cam and a jealousy of Daphne’s stay-at-home-mom lifestyle? How much of her antagonism is a projection, and how much of Ethan’s refusal to say anything about Cam’s womanizing is the cowardice of the “bro code”? The White Lotus fancies up these tensions with designer clothes, Jet Ski races, and overnight stays at strikingly bedizened villas, but peel away all those layers of affluent affectation and what remains is simple — perhaps overly so.
The season cycles between these three groups, mostly retreading the characters’ concerns about monogamy, desire, and deceit because the plot doesn’t have a strong secondary consideration as counterbalance. (Bert’s obsession with The Godfather films and his insistence that he, Dom, Albie, and Portia go on a tour of the franchise’s filming locations might be White trying to say American tourists are architects of imbalance in the countries they visit, or maybe he just really dislikes Francis Ford Coppola’s trilogy.) The closest The White Lotus comes to an elongated B plot this season is found in its Italian characters, who serve as both literal employees of the resort (Sabrina Impacciatore’s Valentina, the White Lotus’s brusque, misandrist manager) and as people who make their living there (Simona Tabasco’s Lucia and Beatrice Grannò’s Mia, sex workers looking to hook up with guests).
These three women ostensibly embody White’s response to criticism of how the series’ first season was unconcerned with Hawaiian people, despite its story broadly addressing the colonialism and classism affecting them, and his attempt to be more inclusive this time around is somewhat admirable. But like the visitors, the locals are constrained by the season’s aforementioned cautiousness. Valentina’s worst behavior is aimed at her fellow Italians, while Lucia and Mia go through a predictable story arc about young women, older men, the transactional nature of sex work, and the inescapability of Catholic guilt.
Lucia and Mia are used for humor in a way no one else in the season is, their embarrassments and debasements more unambiguous. Tanya, now more outlandishly monstrous, also delivers uncomfortable laughs, but they’re through her self-obsessed treatment of Portia. Her desire to surround herself with beauty and glamor is treated by the series as a valid aesthetic pursuit, her yearning for love as a sympathetic one. The Italians don’t receive the same soft touch and are instead limited to a series of sexualized scenes that, like the opening credits, are used for titillation instead of insight. If White’s framing is that certain rituals of heterosexual relationships — seductions and schemes — remain intact at any class level, it’s odd that the only people whose desperation he wants us to grimly laugh at are the poor ones.
Nevertheless, the ensemble does what it can. The trio of Abraham, Imperioli, and DiMarco are believably tetchy with each other, with Abraham’s tickled line deliveries sparking against Imperioli’s low-simmering resentment at his father for normalizing chauvinism. Plaza and James jab at each other like they’re out for blood, and their zeal helps hide how monotonous their arguments become; meanwhile, Fahy and Sharpe each get a standout scene that communicates how their relative happiness is a public-facing mask. Lucia and Mia are written as both unbelievably naïve and wearily jaded, and while that combination is untenable, Tabasco and Grannò sell their characters’ friendship.
Given less to work with are Coolidge and Richardson. The former is once more tasked with an elliptical odyssey of apprehension and emotional damage that relies on Coolidge’s kooky faces and keep-them-guessing pronunciations, and while her performance is pitch-perfect, her character feels stagnant. Tanya’s friendship with British expat Quentin (Tom Hollander), which seems like White mimicking gay men’s real-life embrace of Coolidge, opens up a compelling avenue but should have arrived sooner than the season’s halfway point. And although Richardson’s Portia is purposefully aimless because Tanya takes up all her energy, she’s thinly sketched outside of that relationship. (Her story could take a sharp turn in the season’s last two episodes thanks to a mysterious character played by Leo Woodall, but an unexpected development at the end episode five is a narrative question mark for now.) “I’ve gotta find another job,” Portia vows in one breath and in another considers settling for Albie because at least “he’s not nonbinary,” but if she was meant to be a version of Olivia and Paula, another young woman who is perhaps less open-minded than she thinks, she lacks the pair’s cunning bite.
Nearly all of this season is like that: hampered by a timidity that undermines its satire. What does The White Lotus want to voice about the dehumanizing uses of sex that it hasn’t already said about the dehumanizing influence of capitalism? And why the wariness in saying what it means — which is exactly what it criticizes its characters for not doing? Perhaps the point here is that the experience of being rich, being American, and being the dominant culture is so flattening that it forces men and women into performative personalities that are meant to comfort others and hide the benefits of privilege and capital. To be more blunt, maybe White wants us to know he thinks straight people are tedious. If that was the intention, though, The White Lotus didn’t have to be so literal.