The White Lotus is the hottest thing in prestige television drama. The HBO series logged brilliant first and second seasons, and the fact that its just-concluded third season was a vacuous timesink has hardly diminished its prestige. Fans justly complained that nothing was happening, and worse, that if anything were to happen to these characters, we wouldn’t care. Critics (89 percent fresh as of this writing) call it “more patient in its storytelling than previous seasons,” but all the more profound for that. How did the show get so bad? And why are critics so reluctant to admit it?
“Prestige drama is not as good as we need it to be. Perhaps it never was.”
Critics want to maintain the prestige of prestige drama, for its sake and theirs. Sites like Vulture and The Cut accrue prestige by according prestige, and no other contemporary narrative form is such a plausible successor to the poem, the novel, and the feature film as an object of middlebrow attention. In the reception of this third season, political relevance has emerged as a basis for prestige, as qualitative elements falter. The brief life of The White Lotus as an actually good show—thirteen episodes across two seasons—suggests that prestige drama is not as good as we need it to be. Perhaps it never was.
The White Lotus exemplifies prestige drama, with all its “quality” traits of complex storytelling, dark matter, high production values, and indifference to commercial breaks. It is an anthology series with a sturdy formula: Each season’s opening scene indicates a homicide at some location of the White Lotus resorts; rewind a week to the guests’ arrival, and the ensuing action will reveal who died and by whose hand. The first two seasons, set in Hawaii and Sicily, were superb. Their dense and interwoven plots proceeded by action that revealed character and had moral stakes. The characterizations of guests, staff, and locals were acerbic but humane. Relationship dynamics—friendly, familial, erotic, professional—were rendered with indicting accuracy. All of this, amid lushness, luxury, and vacation blues.
The White Lotus exhibits another prestige-drama trait, which until now has been less remarked upon: relative indifference to liberal pieties. Lauded in Season 1 by Andrew Sullivan and others for being anti-woke, in this third season The White Lotus has launched a few right-coded memes. But prestige dramas have long been fairly unconstrained by liberal strictures in what they offer as admirable or interesting. The roster of toxic male antiheroes—from Tony Soprano to Walter White—is familiar. AMC’s Mad Men was ostensibly a liberal text, refracting the Sixties through “Now we know better,” but its pleasures—smoking, drinking, and inappropriate sex among the beautiful and privileged—were by that criterion absurdly compromised.
The one-percenters of The White Lotus are stylish and problematic, but the show’s critiques are not clearly leveled from the left. Season 1 was written and filmed during the covid lockdown, and though it makes no reference to the oppressive conditions of its production, it seems precociously over the progressive imperatives that were convulsing America in 2020. Campus progressivism is embodied by a rich white co-ed (Sydney Sweeney), whose enunciations of woke doctrine on sex or race, in the face of human realities, strike us as autistic if not sadistic. Postcolonialism takes a hit, as POC co-ed Paula, beautiful and scornful and allergic to everything, reads Fanon by the pool and schemes up a reparations heist for her working-class Hawaiian lover. When he goes to jail, she goes back to college.
The older style of racialism is not spared. The mechanical reverence of a rich white woman, Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge), for Black Lives Matter is sent up when she responds admiringly to a man who says he works with BLM, only to learn that he is employed by the Bureau of Land Management. Spa manager Belinda is a black woman who precipitates spiritual catharsis in rich white women for a living and is fully aware of the trope she is enacting. After wowing Tanya with her chanted scalp massage, she consents to be her bereavement coach, very nearly her therapy animal, while Tanya weighs funding Belinda’s startup therapy center for underprivileged women. Burned in the end, Belinda walks out on another rich white woman, a weeping bride: “My advice? I’m all out.”
LGBT icons are traduced in Season 1: Hotel manager Armond is literally Carrie Bradshaw’s GBF, set to self-destruct. But Season 2 is downright paranoid about the gays. Creator Mike White, who identifies as a “guy who has sex with men,” was canny in judging what viewers in 2022 were ready to see. Tanya, carried over from the previous season, becomes “the diva of Palermo,” admired by a circle of gay men. In due course she learns the absurd truth: “These gays, they’re trying to murder me!” Coolidge discussed the “evil gays” storyline with White and recalls that he told her, “gay men don’t always want to be the best friend. … Do you know how badly gay men want to play evil people?” He assured her that “people will like to see” a depiction of gay men as other than fabulous and harmless. Indeed they did—a million memes and counting.
White doubles down on anti-woke provocation in Season 3, perhaps because he has little else to offer. When a woman reveals that she is happy living among her neighbors in Texas and might even have voted for Trump, she attracts her girlfriends’ icy disbelief—and viewers’ sympathy. The implication that conservative politics are a normal American thing and that if coastal elites don’t like it they can sneer and go on losing was culturally startling. But it was dramatically trivial.
The same was true of Sam Rockwell’s four-minute monologue in Episode 5, his confessions of an autogynephiliac sex tourist. Less redundant than simply random, Rockwell’s tell-all was celebrated in The Atlantic for transgressively mooting “one of the most incendiary findings in sexology: that some otherwise straight men are aroused by the thought of themselves as women.” The relevance of this speech to real life was elucidated on X by sexologist Ray Blanchard. In the dramatic world of The White Lotus, it had no relevance whatsoever.
What if you go to break a taboo, only to find that it’s already broken? The non-liberal tendency of prestige drama is suddenly explicit, in part because it is no longer so costly to say out loud that we prefer scripts that haven’t been shredded to ribbons by sensitivity readers. But since it’s no longer so costly, it’s no longer worth much. Set aside the engagement farming, and Season 3 of The White Lotus appears full of activity and void of action. We see raves, boxing matches, snakepits, street parties, yacht parties, holdups.
For those who came for story, there is little to choose. The three girlfriends gossip, bicker, make up, shift alliances, start the cycle again—eight episodes of this. A rich girl plans a classic gap year at the nearby Buddhist meditation center, her mother hates the idea, the girl decides she’ll miss her creature comforts anyway—eight episodes of this. A man who learned upon arrival that his stateside business dealings had been busted by the FBI shoots his family and himself—just kidding, it’s a fantasy sequence, and we are treated to three versions of it. A man goes on a quest for the man who killed his father, only to learn a moment too late that—you’ll never guess—that very man is his father. Belinda, the masseuse from Season 1, gets laid and gets paid. In the most “happening” incident of the season, two brothers do drugs at a party and engage in an orgy. But in this scene, the taboos are piled so high—“incest, drugs, lack of consent, age gaps,” in Collider’s list—that we can neither take the action seriously nor parse it as satire, nor does it ramify except in one mildly testy exchange. Threads were drawn together, after a fashion, in last night’s 90-minute finale, but the end didn’t come soon enough. Less meaningful action occurred in the whole of this season than in any single episode of the previous two.
The “first great work of art in the post-‘woke’ era” is merely the era’s first conspicuous shark-jumping. Nothing daunted, HBO has ordered a fourth season. It’s enough to make one yearn for the days when Tony Soprano held court at the Bada Bing.
But think harder about the golden age of television drama, and weak spots appear. The mob-boss-goes-to-therapy conceit of The Sopranos was a gimmick. The Wire was excellent in odd-numbered seasons and inane in between. “Fly,” the most vaunted episode of Breaking Bad, was sheer bombast. Why did we think that all of this stuff was good? Did we think it was good? Prestige is a conspiracy between creators and critics: When the former falter, the latter prop them up. If prestige drama has not descended from its heights, that is only because it never really occupied them.