(Bloomberg) — When The White Lotus aired its first season in the summer of 2021, it was a gift for the content-starved. Creator Mike White had gotten HBO to pay for a Hawaiian vacation in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, then came back with a biting social satire set at a high-end resort. Audiences ate it up.
Then the question became: Could he do it again? HBO quickly renewed The White Lotus for a second season, with the catch that White would be anthologizing his show, heading to a different resort locale with an almost entirely new cast of characters. (Obviously Jennifer Coolidge would be back, because why would you get rid of Jennifer Coolidge?)
So is The White Lotus season 2, premiering on October 30, as good as its predecessor? In short: Yes, but it’s not quite as spiky. The class commentary has been sanded down in favor of a dissection of sexual politics; the result may be less insightful, but it’s still very fun. And although the first episodes of this installment feel a bit familiar—are these monied, self-centered travelers just variations on what we’ve seen before?—the show eventually succeeds with a carnal plot that’s half-farce, half-tragedy.
This time the guests are stationed at the White Lotus hotel chain’s lavish outpost in Sicily. Michael Imperioli, F. Murray Abraham and Adam DiMarco play three generations of the Di Grassos, a miserable family with Sicilian heritage, who have traveled together to get in touch with their roots and get away from marital drama back home in Los Angeles.
Their comrades in gilded grimness include nouveau riche tech entrepreneur Ethan Spiller (Will Sharpe) and his employment lawyer wife Harper (Aubrey Plaza), who are traveling with Ethan’s college buddy Cameron (Theo James), a finance bro, and Daphne (Meghann Fahy), a glamorous stay-at-home mom. Harper needs an Ambien to sleep because of “everything that’s going on in the world”; Cameron and Daphne don’t read the news. Judgment oozes through every interaction this foursome has, as Plaza directs her finely tuned stink-face toward Fahy’s breezy chatting.
And then there’s Coolidge, back for seconds as the daffy, lonely Tanya McQuoid-Hunt (née McQuoid), now married to Greg (Jon Gries), whom she met at the White Lotus property in Maui in the show’s first season. Adding to Tanya’s ménage is her assistant, Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), who isn’t there to do anything specific (Tanya doesn’t work) but who is overburdened nevertheless.
The final part of the equation is two local girls, Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and Mia (Beatrice Grannò), who sneak around the hotel to the exasperation of manager Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore), who half-correctly assumes them to be sex workers. (Lucia has arranged to meet one of the guests; Mia is there just there as support.)
The show’s first two episodes are amusing without being thrilling. The characters make one another’s acquaintance, sip spritzes by the sea in the hotel’s baroque finery, form allegiances and make underhanded comments.
Portia, shunned by her boss, is adopted by the Di Grassos; Harper sneers at Cameron and Daphne’s put-on cheeriness; Tanya rides a Vespa. It’s not until the third episode that a fuller picture of the show’s erotic intrigue emerges. Characters’ masks begin to drop, and the guests’ lack of inhibition plunges us into the transactional nature of sex and desire. By then, we’ve already had a foreshadowing of multiple deaths; eventually, the plot boils down to a question of who is going to sleep with whom before the dying starts.
It’s pleasurable pulp, enhanced mightily by the introduction of Tom Hollander as a gay British aesthete who takes a shining to Tanya in the fourth episode.
Unsurprisingly, when you put a bunch of excellent actors in a beautiful setting and watch them emotionally annihilate each other, it’s great TV. But even if this was all an opportunity to hear Coolidge say the word “aperitivos” a few times, it would be worth it.
