From Stagnant Storylines To Predictable Plots, How 'The White Lotus' Lost Its Magic
Something has gone awry at The White Lotus, and it's got nothing to do with the dead body floating in the lake amid the lilies. Nor has it got anything to do with the armed robbery of the Koh Samui hotel’s gift shop, or its frequentation by men darting and dodging American prosecutors. No, what appears to have gone wrong at The White Lotus has nothing to do with any of the above. What’s gone wrong at The White Lotus is that, perhaps fittingly given the premise of the social satire, the show appears to be cannibalising itself.
The White Lotus, which satirises the mannerisms, misgivings and misadventures of America’s 1% who flock to far-flung locations around the world to escape their lives only to be confronted with the fragility of their own egos, premiered in 2021. The series was a tongue-in-cheek riff on the oft-mocked, but rarely acknowledged, truth that the markers of material success that America rewards cannot inoculate you from pain, suffering or insecurities. It was an instant hit, pulling in 10 million viewers per episode, eclipsing Succession and garnering 20 Emmy nominations and 10 wins, including best limited series. What started life as a limited series soon became an anthology, and after a hit sophomore season set against the lapping shores of Sicily, The White Lotus returned for its third outing on February 16. Before the third season had even premiered, HBO had greenlit a fourth. A fifth is almost a given too after it was confirmed that The White Lotus contributed nearly $120 million (£105 million) to HBO in subscriber revenue between 2021 to 2024, according to Parrot Analytics. If Game of Thrones and Succession were once the jewels in HBO’s crown, now its prized possession, its North Star, was undoubtedly The White Lotus.
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So, given its cultural clout, where did The White Lotus go wrong? Not much has changed from the structure of its first two seasons after all; each season is framed in the same way with a violent foreshadowing of a body being found, and audiences being taken on a chaotic retrospective voyage to the point at which the dead body is found. It’s a dark comedy, a meditation on how privilege manifests in ugliness that makes you laugh out loud and roll your eyes, yet the third season's storylines of incest, money laundering and sex addiction have statistically performed but have also left audiences wanting more, and wondering why. In many ways, it feels like The White Lotus may have been de-railed by its own success. This season has lacked speed, specificity and suspense. There’s the same stable of wild, egotistical Americans, but without the same punch as in previous seasons. ‘The stasis – the staff used, the guests using in a vicious cycle – has the feel not of satire but, in its third outing, a sitcom of self-repeating structure,’ Adrian Horton argued in The Guardian this week. Writing in Slate, Sam Adams wrote: ‘The show has fallen into the same trap, switching up the scenery but retracing its steps.’ White reinvented the wheel with The White Lotus’ first season. Now it feels like he’s largely stuck in the machinations of his own making.
It’s been said that Mike White, the show’s creator, writer and director, is heavily inspired by reality TV. So much so that it has been suggested that his second-place win on Survivor is said to have sewn the seeds for the socially claustrophobic series. White isn’t the only TV writer to have drawn influences from reality television: Succession’s Jesse Armstrong has also credited the genre with inspiring much of his own eat-the-rich series' storylines. Yet, as any aficionado of the genre can attest to, all reality television shows implode eventually. When you spend so long trying to keep rich people behaving badly trapped in their gilded cages, it’s only a matter of time before they start to escape.
There’s a very real possibility that The White Lotus HBO machine began to overshadow the show itself. It’s understandable that the streaming service would expect to see a return on its investment — HBO is believed to have paid $3 million dollars(£2.6 million) per episode for the first two seasons alone — yet the proliferation of The White Lotus happened slowly, then all at once. Ahead of season three, The White Lotus was everywhere. The franchise had collaborated with Bloomingdale’s, H&M, Kiehl’s, Away, Abercrombie and Fitch, Supergroup!, Banana Republic, to name just a few. It was in seeing the show everywhere, that people started wanting it to be nowhere.
The White Lotus has stuck to its once-winning formula with its third season, but it feels like the wheels have fallen off, like it’s lost that which made it magic. The storylines are darker, and without the light that's balanced the shade in previous series. There are three friends who hate each other, a feuding family too delusional with their own self-importance to see clearly, and a series of couples so ludicrously mismatched it’s hard to believe they even like — let alone love — one another. White is a wordsmith, a satirical sorcerer, and the magic of The White Lotus has been undeniable. Let’s just hope that White can cast his spell successfully for The White Lotus’ future seasons.
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