Editor’s note: The following essay assumes familiarity with all three seasons of The White Lotus. Spoilers are included throughout.

I.

When it premiered in 2021, 55-year-old Mike White’s award-winning HBO black-comedy/drama The White Lotus was a river that carried its audience briskly along with tight and inventive plotting, lively characters, acerbic dialogue, and a lean cluster of ensemble performances. But by season three, the series had swollen into a Nile delta of sluggish distributary rivulets, most of which went nowhere and were populated by deeply uninteresting people. The show retained some vehement defenders among fans and critics alike, but by the time it lumbered into its finale in April of this year, many of those who stayed the course agreed that the third season had been a big letdown.

Which is a shame, because the opening season of The White Lotus, set on the Hawaiian island of Maui, was a triumph of artistic creativity over severe topographic and political constraints. Chief among these were the draconian pandemic restrictions that prevailed during the fall of 2020, which effectively forced White to confine all six of the season’s fifty-odd-minute episodes to the plush Four Seasons resort on Maui’s Wailea Beach where the first season was shot. Because everyone involved was essentially a prisoner on Maui owing to the quarantines, White’s crew had to abandon the usual money-saving practice of using far-flung exterior locations for establishing shots while shooting interiors on studio sets back in Los Angeles. However, this created a palpable claustrophobia that ensured the fictional White Lotus Hotel would develop a reality of its own as another character in the series.

White’s narrative structure also imposed quasi-Aristotelian unities upon the action. A prologue informs us that someone has died at the show’s eponymous resort, although the identity of the departed and the circumstances of their passing are not revealed. The story then flashes back a week (a format that would be rigorously followed by each successive season) and we are introduced to eight super-rich, super-dysfunctional hotel guests—strangers with nothing in common besides the wealth that allows them to afford a week in the White Lotus—as they approach the luxury resort for their super-expensive holiday, blissfully unaware of the unspecified tragedy to come. White then has exactly seven days to resolve this absorbing mystery in reverse—who will become the story’s cadaver and how?

The largest party is the Mossbacher family:

• The father, Mark (Steve Zahn), is an over-sharer with an inferiority complex about the success of his ball-breaking wife.
• The mother, Nicole (Connie Britton), is a tech CFO who bosses her family around and spends the entire week plugged into her laptop, emailing and video-calling her company’s Chinese overlords.
• Spoilt leftist college-sophomore daughter Olivia (Sydney Sweeney) has been allowed to bring her chippy leftist best friend Paula (Brittany O’Grady) along, and the two girls spend their waking hours taking recreational drugs and lounging in poolside chairs judging everyone else with haughty disdain. (Their Gen-Z stares and nasal tonelessness are apparently borrowed from Red Scare podcasters Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan.)
• Browbeaten younger son Quinn (Fred Hechinger) is a prisoner of his phone until the tide washes it out to sea when he spends a night on the beach.

Then there is honeymooning couple Shane (Jake Lacy), a vain and obnoxious real-estate bro, and his naive new bride Rachel (Alexandra Daddario), an anxious young internet journalist with a flailing career writing website listicles for peanuts. By the time the couple arrives at the White Lotus, it is evident that they are mismatched and that their marriage is already in trouble. Due to a booking glitch, the couple did not get the hotel’s coveted Pineapple Suite, and as Shane’s obsession with this error develops into a petty feud with the resort’s manager, it slowly dawns on Rachel that she ought to have done some homework on Shane’s personality before exchanging vows.

Finally, there is Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), a formidably overweight and recently widowed dipsomaniac and world-class neurotic with a gnat-like attention span and the biggest pile of money of all. Upon arrival, Tanya immediately latches on to the White Lotus’s overworked spa manager and unofficial psychotherapist Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), who daydreams about opening her own spa (“a holistic experience,” she tells Tanya, replete with “spiritual therapies and body treatments” where “women of all economic backgrounds would benefit, not just rich women. Not that there’s anything wrong with rich women!”) Tanya fawns over Belinda and even offers to fund her business, before promptly vanishing when she is asked out by a wiry middle-aged man named Greg (Jon Gries).

White’s superlatively clever plotting thrusts all these unstable characters into conflict at once. Olivia and Paula delight in snubbing Tanya and the painfully ingratiating Rachel during poolside encounters. When Rachel approaches Nicole for career advice she is humiliated. Nicole’s frosty marriage to Mark is complicated by Mark’s conviction that he has testicular cancer. That turns out to be wrong, but he then learns that the alpha father he worshipped had a secret gay life and died from AIDS not cancer as he has always believed. He then decides to confess an old instance of infidelity to his son, which mortifies and enrages his wife. Paula, meanwhile, takes up with Kai (Kekuo Scott Kekumano), a Native Hawaiian youth working as a busboy at the hotel. When Kai tells her that the hotel’s construction robbed his family of their land and heritage, she gives him the code to the Mossbachers’ hotel-suite safe so that he can help himself to some reparative compensation.

And at the centre of this Celtic knot of plotting is Armond (Murray Bartlett), the resort’s gay manager, whose job is to cater to the whims and moods of the White Lotus guests and see to it that the help’s personal troubles never reach their privileged ears. Elegant, literate, and dressed just this side of tropical garishness (colourful linen suits, spectacular Hawaiian shirts), Armond is the most fascinating character in season one, and indeed in the entire White Lotus series. A recovering alcoholic, he somewhat resembles Basil Fawlty with a large moustache and volatile temperament that flips unpredictably between obsequious and spiteful. The stress caused by his feud with Shane seems to send him into a tailspin, releasing a mess of injured pride and repressed rage. When Tanya hands Paula’s bag to him after she finds it on the beach, he plunders Paula’s ketamine supply and turns his office into a den of iniquity with the help of two good-looking hotel underlings, in violation of every sexual-harassment ban ever devised. So complete is Armond’s loss of control that it is hardly a surprise when he turns out to be the corpse mentioned in the season prologue—fatally (but accidentally) stabbed after he lets himself into Shane’s room to defecate into his suitcase.

All of this is nearly pitch-perfect. In the hands of a less sensitive director, the extravagant dysfunction on display might have become a tiresome exercise in misanthropic cynicism or monochromatic class satire, but White treats his characters and their manifest shortcomings with great generosity. Quinn discovers meaning outside his phone with a group of local canoeists who take him under their collective wing; Mark rescues his marriage and wins the admiration of his jaded kids with an impulsive act of courage; Paula, who has gravely betrayed her host-family, learns her lesson (sort of) and receives Olivia’s forgiveness; Tanya finds companionship with Greg and the confidence to finally emancipate herself from the memory (and ashes) of her overbearing mother; Shane probably doesn’t deserve White’s mercy, but he is permitted forgiveness and an uneasy reconciliation with Rachel even so. Even the reptilian Armando is not without a rickety, touchingly defiant dignity, glimpsed during occasional moments of poignancy.