A boat ferrying a gaggle of rich American tourists makes its way toward a Hawaiian luxury resort. At the shore, the resort’s decidedly less wealthy, more ethnically diverse staff waits to greet the guests. The groups face each other, as if they were equal expressions on two sides of a mathematical equation, but the equivalence is just an illusion. “Wave like you mean it,” the resort’s manager, Armond (the Australian actor Murray Bartlett), instructs Lani (Jolene Purdy), a native-Hawaiian trainee. Armond explains that the guests expect a kind of pleasant blandness, or an “impression of vagueness,” from the staff. “We are asked to disappear behind our masks,” he says. “It’s tropical Kabuki!”
Welcome to “Upstairs, Downstairs,” Aloha State edition. The series, called “The White Lotus,” named for the fictional resort where the action takes place, is a near-note-perfect tragicomedy, created by Mike White for HBO. White has written mass-market Hollywood fare like “School of Rock,” but he is better known for his work on small-screen comedies such as “Freaks and Geeks” and, more recently, “Enlightened,” a short-lived cult favorite, also on HBO. Much like the latter series, in which Laura Dern plays an executive who tries to make a comeback after suffering a public nervous breakdown, “The White Lotus” is an examination of what happens when the veneer of conventional sociability dissolves and the power struggles stoked by race, class, and gender erupt from beneath the surface of everyday life.
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 White Lotus is a breeding ground for conflict, not unlike the Hell masquerading as Heaven in “The Good Place.” Nicole, who complains that her suite doesn’t provide “nice feng-shui” for her “Zoom with China,” feels attacked by her daughter’s mocking of her Hillary-style feminism, and insulted by Rachel, who once wrote a profile of her insinuating that she had capitalized on the #MeToo movement to climb the corporate ladder. (Rachel’s defense: “I was just basically repurposing the profile of you from the Post.”) Shane, who becomes increasingly consumed by his belief that Armond is cheating him out of the top-rate suite his mother paid for, feels that he is being unfairly persecuted for his privilege. “People have been coming for me my whole life,” he says. “I’m just playing the hand I was dealt!” The guests’ awful behavior is a vehicle for satire. “My mother told me I would never be a ballerina, and that was when I was skinny,” Tanya says, while attempting to scatter her mom’s ashes in the ocean. But White has an affection for his characters, who never feel like caricatures. When Tanya murmurs, “Oh, my mother, mother, mother,” we hear the call of a soul in true distress.
White’s greatest sympathy lies with those who have a more tenuous connection to power and money. One example is Belinda, who not only tends to Tanya in the spa but also tucks the grieving woman into bed when she is blackout drunk. Belinda hopes that Tanya will pay for her to open up her own wellness center. Rachel, meanwhile, is adjusting to the idea that being wed to Shane means being rich—a blessing and a curse. When she is offered a reporting assignment during their honeymoon, he tells her, “Whatever they’re paying you, I’ll double it.” Paula, one of the only nonwhite guests at the resort, has a fling with a native-Hawaiian employee, and is perturbed watching him do a traditional dance for the guests. “Obviously, imperialism was bad,” Mark tells her. “But it’s humanity. Welcome to history. Welcome to America.” One thing that White captures, through Paula, is what it’s like to be on vacation with your friend’s family—a tiresome experience of being dragged into tensions that are not your own and still being expected to perform gratitude, which ultimately ends with you despising everyone, including your friend.
“The White Lotus” is largely a character and relationship study, but it does have a plot. The series opens with an ending: Shane, sans Rachel, waits to board a flight back home as a box containing human remains is loaded onto the plane. Someone has died, but who? We are then hurtled, backward in time, to the beginning of the vacation. This makes the show one of many recent HBO series to use nonlinear storytelling (“Sharp Objects,” “I Know This Much Is True,” “Made for Love”). It is also yet another series on the network that seeks to unravel a mysterious death (“Big Little Lies,” “The Undoing,” “Mare of Easttown,” “Sharp Objects” again).
And one would be remiss not to mention “Succession,” given White’s focus on the wealthy ruling class. But, unlike that show, which relies on crowded plots and multiple locations to sketch out the lives of its characters, “The White Lotus” was shot in one place, the Four Seasons in Maui. The focus on a single site—apart from making filming easier during the pandemic—gives the show a Pinteresque airlessness. The guests and the employees crouch and circle one another like animals in a cage. Sometimes the characters have difficulty escaping White’s gaze. At breakfast, Rachel tries to talk to Shane about her career, and he abruptly leaves the table to chase down Armond. In a later scene, of the Mossbacher family fighting at breakfast, we catch a glimpse of Rachel, still alone at the table, staring down at her plate.
White is obsessed with reality television; he has even been a contestant on “The Amazing Race” and “Survivor.” Perhaps this is why “The White Lotus” is the most reality-TV-like scripted series I’ve seen in a long time. The naïvely blissful guests on the boat reminded me of the horny contestants on “Too Hot to Handle” docking at Turks and Caicos, not yet knowing that they’ve agreed to participate in a game of abstinence. The character of Tanya, in Coolidge’s hands, is as heartrending and unbearable as any Bravo housewife. And owing to a slew of rivalries, and a foreboding, tribal-drum-heavy score, composed by Cristobal Tapia de Veer, White’s show also has ample tinges of “Survivor.” After duking it out for a week on an island, who will come out alive?
“Is this like a kamikaze situation? Are you gonna take me down with you?” Dillon (Lukas Gage), an employee, asks Armond, who—spoilers ahead—has broken his sobriety and is in full fuck-it-mask-off mode. “What do you care?” his boss answers. “You make shit money. They exploit me, I exploit you.” (The actors are excellent across the board, but Bartlett, whose practiced amiability turns progressively feral throughout the series, is a revelation.) Later on, Armond, in a drugged haze, enters Shane’s room, drops his trousers, and squats, straining out a memento in his rival’s suitcase.
Watching this hilarious, horrifying moment, I thought of Jamaica Kincaid’s “A Small Place,” in which she derides the tourists who come to her native Antigua in search of a scenic vacation. “You must not wonder what exactly happened to the contents of your lavatory when you flushed it,” Kincaid writes. “The contents of your lavatory might, just might, graze gently against your ankle as you wade carefree in the water, for you see, in Antigua, there is no proper sewage-disposal system.” Staying at the White Lotus might seem like the most wonderful thing in the world, but don’t be surprised if, by the end of the vacation, you end up with shit in your luggage. You’ve more than likely done something to deserve it. ♦
