When Westerners Go East

Like his characters, Mike White's series cannot seem to shed its core identity or biases.

- KATHRYN VANARENDONK

EVERY FRAME OF The White Lotus’s Thailand resort induces a mix of envious longing and burbling queasiness. There’s the pool, glimmering and pristine, and the endless cocktails and piles of fresh fruit at breakfast. There’s hot-stone massages, private yoga, and also rude rich people chasing status and self-improvement, conscious of all flaws but their own. Unlike the Maui and Sicily of previous seasons, this White Lotus property focuses on wellness, giving creator and writer Mike White plenty of opportunities to tackle digital detoxing, westerners’ exoticization of Buddhist spirituality, and luxury tourism when it comes with a bodily agenda (such as sex work). It’s a novel device for fueling the show’s reputation as a complicated piece of travel promotion.

Despite all that promise of freshness, season three is most defined by all the ways the show keeps reaching back to what’s come before. Sometimes these moves feel necessary, the repetition of a series building itself into a franchise. Here we are again at the arrivals dock with the staff members cheerily waving at the disaffected wealthy people who’ve come to spend money on being happy. Here is the concierge, the water imagery, the slyly indicative paperback by the pool. These are often canny reworkings of previous themes and character types in new guises and winking reflections. The season is best when it’s playful and prickly about how nice it is to have expectations—but also what a burden those expectations can be.