BLACK AND WHITE WORLD

Paradise comes with a price in these two returning series.

- SCOTT GARCEAU

Increasingly, we're shoved down various rabbit-holes in our interactions with the world. Things that are supposed to be luxuries or human improvements fail to satisfy us, and sometimes don't even make any sense. Say you go to an expensive, exotic resort, and within a few days, there's a pile of dead bodies scattered all over the docks. Or you try out a new health app and it makes you sleep longer every night while it harvests your human battery life.

Two popular series that focus on that tricky rabbit-hole dilemma are back, or have just concluded, and we find they're kind of opposite sides of the same coin: humans just a few careless thumb flips away from becoming beasts. Or possibly something much worse.

The White Lotus, Mike White's perverse inversion of Fantasy Island, just finished its third season on HBO with a bang (or several bangs), while Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror returns to sturdy form in its seventh season on Netflix. It's worth noting even the marketing strategies at play here: while White Lotus teases out each episode, building audience attention and social media memes, Brooker drops the whole season in classic binge fashion, ready for post-season discussion in an instant.

WORST. RESORT. EVER.

There's one thing we can agree on after viewing three seasons of The White Lotus: this luxury resort would not still be operating by now, not with Tripadvisor reviews and all the dead bodies they've piled up since season 1.

Take Fyre Festival and add Shakespearean bloodbath tragedy, and you get this season's flavor: an exotic locale in Thailand, attracting more rich, pampered people ostensibly searching for inner truth, but displaying only outer vulgarity. And yes, a few characters do come out with their souls (and bodies) relatively unscathed.