The White Lotus Season 3 Review: It's Time to Admit This Show Is Not Good

When The White Lotus, Mike White's black comedy about a luxury resort vacation gone horribly wrong, premiered in July 2021, it felt like a breath of fresh air. As fans of his singular and short-lived Enlightened will eagerly remind you, White is an exceptionally talented writer, particularly adept at creating characters who feel just real enough to empathize with and just cartoonish enough to be entertaining. The White Lotus was imagined as a murder mystery-tinged limited series about the upstairs-downstairs dynamic between the titular resort's overworked staff and the wealthy, demanding clientele. It felt like something special.

The cast, now the show's defining characteristic, mixed established greats with younger actors on the razor's edge of breaking out. The White Lotus' first season was fastidious in its observations about the class divide and generous with doling out a number of jaw-droppingly outrageous surprises that felt uniquely White-esque. It became the rare example of a modern TV show brave enough to go there. In the early COVID era, it was fun to get absorbed in a series that felt "prestige" without being inaccessible, a series that functioned dually as a form of escapism and as a callout to anyone privileged enough to be in the position of using an HBO show to escape.

Season 2 suffered a steep decline in quality, due in large part to the loss of the unpredictability that underscored its first season. The location may have shifted from Hawaii to Italy, but everything else, from the sumptuous visuals to the oblivious guests to the crime presiding over all seven episodes, was more or less the same, just flavored a little differently. Techniques that once felt fresh — the overlapping storylines; the inevitable crescendo when the many disparate characters eventually come together; the eerie, lingering shots of the scenery — now felt gimmicky, while White's key observation — that luxury exists as a mask for societal evil — ended up feeling stale.

ALSO READ: The complete guide to winter TV

Jennifer Coolidge was the only original cast member to reprise her role from the first season, with her Tanya McQuoid ultimately receiving an absurd send-off: She fell off a cruise ship after killing a sinister group of gay men who lured her in by showering her with love. The White Lotus grew increasingly aimless in Season 2, treading water for several episodes before spinning toward an ending that offered nothing in the way of emotional payoff for its characters. It seemed abundantly clear that this was a show designed to last one season only, that it had grown high on its own supply, that White didn't have much else to offer this beast he'd created. Even still, the series was met with more praise, as critics and audiences adopted a tone of speaking about it as if it were HBO's answer to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And now here we are, just ahead of the premiere of its third season, with a fourth already on the horizon.

The third season of The White Lotus is, make no mistake, bad. The aimlessness that reared its head during Season 2 infects Season 3 like a virus. The six episodes provided to critics for review (there are eight in total; the series has made a habit of expanding its length with every season) are criminally inert. The plot just barely begins to pick up halfway through Episode 5, dips again for most of Episode 6, and spikes a bit again by the end. Most hours conclude with a version of the same muted shot of Jason Isaacs' rich and predictably unsettled Tim Ratliff staring silently into the distance, plagued by mounting problems only a rich man could ever have. I won't spoil the details of those problems here, but I also must warn you, they are simply not interesting enough to describe.

2.5

The White Lotus

at Max

Like

• At least the cinematography is nice

Dislike

• Some of our most talented actors are completely wasted
• We've seen all of this before

Tim is the patriarch of this season's vacationing family, joined by his pill-popping wife, Victoria (Parker Posey), and their three children, Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), Lochlan (Sam Nivola), and Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook). As we've come to expect with this show, the cast bursts with famous faces: Michelle Monaghan, Carrie Coon, and Leslie Bibb play a trio of lifelong frenemies on a girls trip; Walton Goggins plays a rich man hiding a dark secret as he vacations with his bubbly young girlfriend (Aimee Lou Wood); Natasha Rothwell reprises her role as Belinda, the spa manager from Season 1 whom the flighty Tanya screwed over. They all find themselves at Thailand's White Lotus resort, the staff of which includes Mook, played by Blackpink's Lalisa Manobal.

Considering that White has rounded up some of our most reliably excellent performers for this iteration (Posey, Goggins, Isaacs, Rothwell, and Coon especially), he must shoulder some of the responsibility for their lifeless performances. While these new episodes continue to indulge in the same beats and themes the show has always explored — the premiere opens with mysterious gunshots, of course followed by yet another dead body — the show also shrugs off the burden of creating new types of characters. The bloated ensemble has become a crutch to avoid actually developing anything in the way of character or plot, and a tactic to distract the audience from the fact that we've been watching variations of the same story for three seasons. 

We've seen all of these people before, and we know exactly how their relationship dynamics will play out. Victoria is this season's answer to Tanya; Saxon is a blend of Jake Lacy's obnoxious Shane Patton and Theo James' lecherous Cameron Sullivan. Tim and Victoria give Isaacs and Posey the chance to practice their Southern drawls and not much else, especially on Posey's part. Her character mostly exists to repeatedly ask her husband what he's so upset about — a problem that extends to how many of the women are written this season. Monaghan, Coon, and Bibb's friendship triangle feels the most unique, but their dialogue could've been ripped from any of the well-off white women who have populated this series before them. Meanwhile, Mook and her friend Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong), a kindhearted security guard who gets roped into the misdeeds of the guests, are nothing more than blankly happy locals with no interiority, their conversations almost infantilizing in their simplicity.

It's morbidly fascinating that White, who remains the series' sole writer and director, doesn't seem to have learned anything from the criticism of his portrayal of Season 1's characters of color, as well as how he crafted a story of classism that remained palatable to privileged white viewers. Three seasons in, the show is out of excuses for giving all the good stuff (speaking figuratively, of course, as not much about this season is actually very good) to the white characters, while the non-white characters remain as flat as they've ever been. Even Belinda, played with such hopeful guardedness by Rothwell in Season 1, isn't given much to do other than expand on the lingering mystery surrounding Tanya's death. White's interest in tourism as reinvention is what inspired him to create The White Lotus in the first place, but his introspection seems to have ended there. "My hope is that the critique of that is built into the DNA of it," he told Vulture in 2021. My hope is that a series like this would grow over time, if it does insist on continuing. Rather, White continues to insist that the audience do all the work. How long are we supposed to let him off the hook, exactly?

The absence of a propulsive plot or thoughtfully written characters means that Season 3 has the uncanny quality of relying on its reputation as a good television show to help it move forward. The series' dependence on the same long shots of the gorgeous exteriors, the same type of dialogue, and the same murder mystery seems like White reminding the audience of all the things they liked about Season 1 as he skates by. "Cast X in The White Lotus" has become a popular yet hollow phrase to apply to almost any actor people online generally like, repeated so many times it's grown devoid of all meaning. But what's the point of casting these greats when we know their talents will be wasted? If White is not interested, why should we be?

In the penultimate episode of The White Lotus Season 1, Murray Bartlett's doomed hotel manager Armond invokes a few lines from Alfred Tennyson's poem "The Lotos-eaters," itself cribbed from the Greek myth about people who indulge in luxury and pleasure, forgetting the world around them. I thought of that scene frequently while watching Season 3, a season of TV teeming with empty excess. The White Lotus has become its own lotus-eater.

Premieres: Sunday, Feb. 16 at 9/8c on HBO and HBO Max
Who's in it: Leslie Bibb, Carrie Coon, Walton Goggins, Sarah Catherine Hook, Jason Isaacs, Lalisa Manobal, Michelle Monaghan, Sam Nivola, Parker Posey, Natasha Rothwell, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Tayme Thapthimthong, Aimee Lou Wood
Who's behind it: Mike White
For fans of: The White Lotus, I guess
How many episodes we watched: 6 of 8