At The Halfway Point of Season Two of The White Lotus

Monday is about movies. And sometimes TV. Today it's about Season Two of The White Lotus. Some thoughts so far...

There are so many great TV shows – too many to keep up with, and if you want to go back and rewatch a classic, there’s every chance you won’t be disappointed. Loads of people watch The Sopranos right through more than one time. And I’ve lost count how many times I’ve hoovered up The IT Crowd and The Thick Of It.

But so many of us are there, waiting to be pulled into something truly great, right? A new truly great show, please!

And when it happens it can feel like a long wait for the next season. There’s a trepidation around it not being as good too.

Succession has been the show of recent years that I feel has best delivered itself. Each season building on the previous, and yet it doesn’t feel like it’s going to go on forever, nor repeat itself. It’s just model TV writing and acting.

Last year’s top TV show for me – by miles – was The White Lotus. I even said so (pretty much). And then, I was even mildly outraged to find out there’d be a season two. Worry was it, basically. White Lotus wasn’t ever mean to be anything more than a limited season, the shiny new term for TV Mini-Series.

Sometimes a classic 80s/90s mini-series would be churned into sequels because of its success and it was always diminishing returns (I’m looking at you, Lonesome Dove!)

But, the one thing that made me hopeful with White Lotus was the fact that Mike White (the show’s sole writer and director, taking showrunner to staggering new heights) is a genius. If anyone could do it…

So, we are halfway through Season 2 of The White Lotus. Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya our only link back to season one. I like that bridging device. It’s an all-new cast and Tanya, a bored billionaire (depressed and lacking any ability to trust, whilst easily being sucked in) is on holiday in Sicily – she’s staying, again, at the White Lotus. That’s a clever way of resetting. Same, same, but different. All new players, all new levels of wealth and boredom and entitlement.

The White Privilege of The White Lotus is obvious. But for anyone worried that it’s one-note, that’s just a framing device. For the real story, the real theme, the real exploration is loneliness.

Mike White is an expert at exploring the shards of loneliness that pierce the sides of modern living.

In what now has to be referred to as season one of The White Lotus (it was only turned into a series because of the response to that show), Alexandra Daddario’s Rachel stays with Jake Lacy’s Shane out of fear. Not fear that he will end her, not fear that he will frame her, fear that she will be alone. The crushing loneliness of a life without anyone is worse than the decision she makes.

There’s a brutal, beautifully poetic grimness to the sleepwalking privilege that Mike White’s show skewers.

And so it is already with season two of The White Lotus.

I’m not saying it’s better. But I am saying I’m every bit as hooked. Anyone wanting the comic foil of Murray Bartlett’s venue manager, Armond, is not just missing the bigger picture, they can also find that rinse and repeat aspect in nearly every other show that gets renewed.

What is happening in this second season of White Lotus is every bit as sad, darkly funny and cruel as what went down in the first, if anything it’s darker because the twisted pantomime aspect – the lurid farce – is dialled down. Now we’re in the deep despair that White has mined before.

Go back to his show, Enlightened, a virtuoso tour-de-force created for and driven by Laura Dern, and you’ll see another version of characters scared to be alone.

This is the deep dive that drives Mike White. A deep dive of interrogation into the human soul.

I’m loving season two of The White Lotus. I’m curious to see how it ends. I mean, on a simple level, I already know. Misery. The opening scene of the show tells us something bad has happened (again). We’re now piecing it together in the old-school excruciating way of episodic television hinged to weekly delivery.

It's something to look forward to. And something subtly meta. We hang on, make it through the week, our reward being an hour to assess the misery of others. Glued to our seat.

Some people will tell you that season two is too slow. Impossible to say that when it’s only at the midpoint. It might well hurtle downhill from here. It might ratchet the tension and get even more excruciatingly slow-burn for an even bigger reward than we can currently imagine.

But it’s clearly doing similar numbers to the first – because now, at the same point in its run, The White Lotus has been renewed for a third season. And again, I think that might be too much. And I think again, that if anyone can hold the mirror up and show us the slow-grind torture of our exaggerated fear of loneliness it is Mike White.

TV is hardly ever this good.

But still I hope that season three is it.

It certainly adds a fun guessing game around who might survive through this series to anchor the third. Or will there be a new faming device?

Everything about The White Lotus is brutal, beautiful, and purposeful. It is deliciously shot and edited, its music hypnotic, and its characters’ existential loneliness such an oddly calming balm. There they are – tourists in their own demise. And we watch. And we comment. We sympathise in slight, we mostly condemn.

My favourite thing about the show is how it is about character studies. About relationship building (and crumbling) rather than the world-building that drives the big (ugly) franchise powerplays.

The White Lotus, yet again, features stunning performances. And creates star-turns by relative unknowns/lesser knowns as well as relying on some heavy-lifters. But really, it’s a show that celebrates writing. The power in the show is all Mike White’s vision. And his brilliant screenwriting.