TROUBLE IN PARADISE

Mike White's mischievous morality plays.

- KELEFA SANNEH

Mike White's first job as a television writer, in the late nineties, was on the teen soap opera "Dawson's Creek." It was a sentimental show, leavened by sharp, self-conscious dialogue; the titular character, Dawson Leery, was a film buff who worked at a video store, which meant that he could analyze the show's various narrative devices at least as well as viewers could. One of White's main tasks was to prolong the sense of romantic anticipation that sustained the show, and for a time he enjoyed solving this puzzle. But it didn't last. "I quickly couldn't keep interested," he said recently. "I always, whether intentionally or not, started burning down the house." It was a sticky spring afternoon in Phuket, Thailand, and White had summoned a few dozen actors and a few hundred crew members from around the world to shoot the third season of "The White Lotus,"his acclaimed HBO series. The show, which began as a rushed pandemic project in Hawaii, has expanded into a globe-trotting franchise, with a new setting and array of characters for each incarnation. "This is, like, my dream gig," White said. "Because I can burn down the house at the end of every season and start building again." White is fifty-four, with pale skin, pale hair, and a nasal, hesitating voice that disguises an implacable determination to do things precisely the way he wants. For most of his career, he was known for what he calls "oddball character studies" projects that were cerebral and a little weird. He wrote and starred in "Chuck & Buck," an indie movie that drew a small crowd but left a big impression: Entertainment Weekly named it the year's best film, and Roger Ebert called it "a fascinating study of behavior that violates the rules," although his reviewing partner, Richard Roeper, likened the film to "spiders crawling on my arms." White found broad success when he wrote "School of Rock," the Jack Black movie, which inspired a children's television show and a Broadway musical. His first HB