‘The White Lotus’: A Show To Gossip About

On Sunday night, my wife got an email from HBO, structured as an invitation to stay at The White Lotus Thailand, where Season 3 of the increasingly essential show takes place. We’ve never turned on the TV so fast. We wanted the dish. 

The White Lotus works for so many reasons. Mike White is the greatest writer/director working in TV. It has humor, pathos, and well-timed violence and action. The performances are phenomenal, the settings impeccable. It’s flat-out sexy, loaded with juicy eye candy for men and women, straight and gay, the absolute naughtiest show on TV. Most of all, it’s wish fulfillment, a literary-tinged Fantasy Island for the chattering class. We wish we were these people, and we’re also so glad that we’re not. They’re incredibly fun to gossip about, and gossiping about them does zero harm, because they aren’t real.

Almost immediately after the first episode aired, millions of people started gossiping about their imaginary frenemies from The White Lotus. What is going on with those siblings? Are they actually incestuous? How will the three hot cougar childhood friends turn on one another? Oh my god, what in the world is Greg doing there? Which one of those guns is going to go off? There was plenty of “can you believe she said that?” As always with White Lotus gossip, the most important question, already on everyone’s minds, is: Who is going to die this time?

This season’s cast already looks like the best Love Boat episode ever: We have Michelle Monaghan, Leslie Bibb, Carrie Coon, Jason Isaacs, and Walton Goggins, working in an ensemble and all looking fine. The show’s bench is so deep that Gen-X treasure Parker Posey is essentially serving as comic relief. If she’s the character who dies, I’ll eat my Dodgers championship beanie. Patrick Schwarzenegger made a huge impression as this season’s resident himbo, and Aimee Lou Wood and her magnificent British teeth stole every scene she was in as a kept girl with a good heart and a flea brain. Mike White also has a gift for cleverly integrating unknown actors as resort employees, and gradually making them part of the celebrity ensemble.

There’s so much going on in The White Lotus: Thailand, but we essentially know nothing yet about how it will all unfold. Season One didn’t quite break the same way. Because people discovered it gradually, it was available to binge. That’s how I watched it. By Season Two, it had a dedicated audience. But nearly 2.5 million people watched the season 3 debut, which is a ton for a non-Netflix contemporary streaming show. Like Severance, but much less weird and way more juicy, The White Lotus that benefits from a slower rollout, an unravelling of mystery, humor, and oh my god, they went there. It’s a cocktail that you savor at the bar, a dish best served steaming. We’ll definitely still be gossiping about it in April.