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TV review
The White Lotus review – a magnificently
monstrous look at how the other half live
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Lucy Mangan
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Mon 16 Aug 2021 22.05 BST
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The White Lotus is Big Little Lies with another two and a half turns of the screw – an
equally sumptuously set miniseries with a mystery fatality at its heart. But this
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monstrousness of affluence rather than mere snobbery.

We open with newlywed Shane (Jake Lacy) batting away questions from a friendly
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couple in an airport departure lounge about where his wife is, as he gazes down at
cargo labelled “Human remains” that is being loaded on to their flight. Then we
flash back a week to his arrival (with his starry-eyed wife Rachel – Alexandra
Daddario) at the exclusive White Lotus spa in Hawaii, as part of a similarly Waspy
group of guests.

They include the well-intentioned but needy (and self-confessed “insane alcoholic”)
Tanya – spacily and brilliantly played by Jennifer Coolidge, at last being given
something meatier than the Stifler’s Mom-type parts she has been unfairly limited
to for years – and the Mossbacher family. The latter comprises Nicole, CFO of a tech
company (Connie Britton, scabrous and magnificent) and her beta-male husband
Mark (Steve Zahn), awkward teen son Quinn (Fred Hechinger) and highly
unawkward daughter Olivia (Sydney Sweeney) who is everything ever meant by the
arrogance of youth. She has brought her best friend Paula (Brittany O’Grady), who
has nearly as good a mean girl game, along for the ride.

They are met on the shoreline by the all-smiling hotel staff, led by manager Armond
(Murray Bartlett). He gives a last-minute pep talk about the need for his workers to
efface themselves at all times and become interchangeable units there to cater to
guests’ every whim. Creator Mike White’s story focuses as much on the have-nots as
the haves: it wrestles with inequality and the forms of corruption and suffering
(major and minor, insidious and blatant) it causes.

The guests disembark and the work begins. Tanya wants a massage but hasn’t
booked – and wellness consultant Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) must solve this
problem. In doing so, she becomes Tanya’s reluctant confidante for the rest of her
stay. Armond must deal with Shane’s complaint about not being put in the
honeymoon suite – a row that agonisingly escalates over the entire series. It’s Lani’s
(Jolene Purdy) first day on this much-needed job and she does her best to serve –
until her waters break early and give her secret pregnancy away.

The inequities and iniquities accumulate with every episode – as do the casual,
unthinking cruelties – as the backstories of guests and staff are filled in and they all
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begin to unravel. The power structures that shape our world so fundamentally as to
be almost
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woman and the other is a much less rich black woman, for example, is a distillation reporting. You
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of multiple injustices. Tanya’s lavishly professed admiration for Belinda’s healing
special edition, as we celebrate some of the greatest sporting moments over the last 32 Games.
skills evokes the “magical negro” trope, and her tantalising promise of setting
Belinda up with her own spa business is one the latter cannot afford to dismiss. It’s
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probably not a consciously manipulative move by Tanya to use her money to tie
Belinda to her and yet – what do we call it when someone is bonded to another and
not freea subscriber?
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Elsewhere, just about every other hot-button contemporary issue is held up to the
light through the prism of White’s seamlessly unfolding story and his plethora of
fully rounded characters. Nicole’s concern for her son Quinn – “so alienated”, she
frets, because there has never been a harder time to be a straight white male –
encapsulates endemic attitudes, and its veneer of maternal reasonableness
emblematises how they are maintained. That she feels able to say all this in front of
Paula, a non-white teenager, is an arrow that hits its mark, too.
None of the guests is wholly villainous – White is too good to make it that easy for
us: the entire point has to be their horrifying relatability. How they unthinkingly
accept services rendered. How they assume their money buys everything (and these
are but high-end middle-class Americans – nowhere near what you might call the
truly rich). How they metastasise their non-problems into catastrophes, while
others cling on to desperately needed jobs after they go into premature labour. How
they weaponise wokeness – especially Olivia – to chastise others instead of changing
anything yourself (or about yourself).

All this is delicately anatomised over the course of a strong story just soapy enough
to let it slip around easily but not so much that it doesn’t snag your attention. And –
no spoilers – it sticks the landing, too, cleaving to the very end to its underlying
truth that shit rolls inexorably downhill. Those at the top can just enjoy the view.

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during times of crisis, uncertainty, solidarity and hope. Support us by becoming a digital
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can help power our work for centuries more. Plus, get exclusive access to our Olympic legends
special edition, as we celebrate some of the greatest sporting moments over the last 32 Games.

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