Series Review: The White Lotus Season 3

The White Lotus: Season Three
Director: Mike White
HBO, Four Seasons
Full Series now Streaming on Max

The White Lotus is so formulaic that even casual viewers of the show know what to expect. Or  so we’re led to believe. We see the bespoke theme song lead into the season’s opening murder, we jump back a week where we meet the new crop of one-percenters arriving on their chartered boat. Settling into the comfort of familiarity, we embrace what we’ve come to know over the show’s first two seasons. And then Mike White pulls the rug out from under us. 

White — the show’s creator, writer and director — seems to draw immense pleasure from the hat trick he’s been able to pull repeatedly. White should be pleased. In less competent hands, The White Lotus could have easily fallen victim to its own rules. If White weren’t such a skilled translator of humanity, the show would most likely exist as some cheap who-done-it, a higher net-worth version of a dime store mystery. But that’s not it at all. Instead, each season’s murder is a bookend, quickly tossed aside for a more mundane set of problems. Mundane in this case is relative to murder, considering the problems plaguing the guests of The White Lotus in Thailand are all their own little nightmares. The conflicts in the show are modern allegories cleverly disguised as gossip: I can’t believe you said that about me. Did you hear who’s having money trouble? Oh my god, I can’t believe we went home together last night! We’re drawn in by the sensationalism of the world White has created, but there is so much more to see. Viewers begin each season looking for violence, but are reminded that The White Lotus is a soap opera reimagined for contemporary audiences. 

The ensemble cast is truly an ensemble, both too big physically and too complex emotionally to fit into such a short review. However, it is hard to imagine any of the characters in this season — or in any of the other seasons for that matter — being played by anyone else. White knows casting, or at least he understands his characters enough to find the right people to play them. While there may be fan favorites — and there certainly were this season — nobody oversteps. Each character exists in a larger ecosystem. There were of course characters I’d be remiss not to mention. Rick and Chelsea, played by Walton Goggins (The Righteous Gemstones, The Hateful Eight) and Aimee Lou Wood (Sex Education) respectively, are the not-so-predictable — but oh so loveable — archetype of the wealthy older man with a pretty younger woman. Parker Posey (The Daytrippers, Party Girl) enraptures viewers with the hypnotic — and heavily meme’d — twang of Victoria Ratliff, a North Carolina aristocrat. While Patrick Schwarzenegger (The Staircase) breaks through as her semi-incestuous giga-chad son. Carrie Coon (Gone Girl, The Leftovers) and Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Seven Psychopaths) both deliver captivating monologues on the nature of relationships — albeit on different sides of the spectrum, but on relationships nonetheless.

With The White Lotus, Mike White has done something truly extraordinary. He has not only kept the show fresh when it could have easily slipped into something far less watchable, but he has evolved what the show is. Season one of The White Lotus, as good as it was, existed as a scaled-down version of what the show is today. The relationships didn’t feel as deep and the majority of the drama existed within the bubble of the hotel itself and with the guests who stayed there. Flash ahead to season three and the drama unfolds on an epic, more complex scale. There’s a will-they-or-won’t-they between two hotel workers (Tayme Thapthimthong and the Thai musician known as LISA) that ends up unfolding into a subtle — and then not-so-subtle — conversation about what it means to be a man and the lengths people will go to for love. And there are the Russian immigrants who have fled the war to Thailand, just trying to make ends meet by any means necessary. These are massive steps beyond Jake Lacy’s character complaining to Murray Bartlett about the quality of his room in season one. If Mike White continues down the path of evolution, the only question we should have about season four is: When does it start filming? 


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