\n \n \n “. concat(self. i18n. t(‘search. voice. recognition_retry’), “\n
Haley Lu Richardson, left, and Jennifer Coolidge in The White Lotus season 2 Credit: Fabio Lovino—HBO
Mike White knows he has something smart to do in The White Lotus. “I feel like I’ve cracked the code,” he recently told a reporter. “And I don’t need to ruin it. ” Originally conceived as a miniseries, its original COVID-optimized concept (a one percent screen losing its mind in a luxury hotel) has been revamped for a moment after fitting into last year’s summer hit. Now, and especially since Lotus earned him an Emmy Award. Full of guns in September, White can continue to fly to stunning locations to satirize high society with the help of some of television’s most talented actors. Who wouldn’t hold on to a concert like that?
So, perhaps out of caution, White, who not only created the series, but also wrote and directed the episode, opens the season of the anthology series’ moment in Sicily on such a familiar note. Airing Oct. 30 on HBO, the premiere begins with a flash-forward, a corpse and a charged interaction between tourists. The B. ” You’re going to die. They’re going to have to get you out of here. White soon takes us back to Daphne’s first week at the resort, when she and her cohort of Americans arrive by boat and are greeted. on the dock through an army of uniformed personnel. It’s a fitting advent for The White Lotus, Italian-style: an upstairs and ground-floor ensemble dramatic comedy that feels a little too enthusiastic to reflect the beats of its predecessor, yet transforms into a deliciously terrifying snapshot of heterosexual r omance as practiced lately.
The cast of characters is rich, and not just in the sense that they can spend a six-figure vacation. Daphne accompanies her husband, finance brother Cameron (Theo James), on an extended double date with his schoolmate, Ethan (actor-writer and director Will Sharpe) and Ethan’s wife, Harper (Aubrey Plaza, gambling instead of a madman). Ethan just sold his startup for a huge sum, and he and Harper, a lawyer who helps staff sue abusive businesses, are experiencing obscene wealth for the first time in their thirties. He seems to have no qualms about his new life, however, for her it is surreal. She is the type of user who loses sleep over “everything that happens in the world. ” Cam and Daphne are the kind of other people who have no idea what you mean when you say this.
Arriving in the same boat as this quartet, a multigenerational extended relative of Sicilian-American men. Hollywood bigwig Dominic (Michael Imperioli) brought his elderly father, Bert (F. Murray Abraham), and his 20-year-old son, Albie (Adam DiMarco of The Magicians), to explore the roots of Bert’s side circle of relatives. Dominic’s wife and daughter intended to come too, before he did anything that alienated them both. A verbal telephone exchange ends with his wife yelling at him as if she was possessed by Juno, the angry goddess Roguy of marriage. Albie, who considers himself a fussy, pro-feminist Gen Z guy and helps remind others that he went to Stanford, promises to do more than his father and Nonno, who flirts with each and every kid he meets. “I refuse to have a bad date with women,” says Albie.
Therefore, with the utmost attention he begins to court Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), a depressed private assistant who has been asked by her employer to vanish. Fortunately for the onlookers, but unfortunately for Portia, this boss is the only one who returns. Season 1’s main character, Jennifer Coolidge’s raw, lonely and narcissistic heiress, Tanya. The White Lotus. Globe surrenders to its own feelings, an assistant is necessarily an emotional human being. It’s no wonder that Tanya’s mysterious new husband, Greg (John Lies), whom we saw her fall in love with in Hawaii, doesn’t need Portia to come between them. him and his histrionic fiancée.
In the first season of Lotus, which plunged into the inequalities created by elegance and colonialism, a cohort of predominantly white visitors thoughtlessly unloaded literal and emotional baggage on the station’s black and indigenous staff, like a privileged foreigner: Murray Bartlett’s gay Australian manager. Personality — ran the interference. When it comes to heterosexual love, of course, it’s women who remain, to a large extent, oppressed underelegance. Therefore, it is logical that, in this bilingual season, it will be the local workers, perfectly played through a trio of Italian actors. The hotel manager, Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore), is abused by visitors all day, but has to keep the constant attention away from the men on the street; No wonder it’s so spicy. But he also abuses his power. She is cruel to Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and Mia (Beatrice Grannò), two fun and productive brides who embark on high-level sex work.
The same audience that complained last season about White’s alleged failure to fully develop the characters of the show’s employees and Native Hawaiians would arguably object to his portrayal of those women. But I never agreed with this well-intentioned reading. Lotus wants to pay more attention to its relatively autonomous characters because, in life and in the series, they are those whose decisions, made for the sake of convenience and excitement rather than survival, have the greatest effect on the people around them. What unites in combination not just those two seasons, but virtually everything White has ever done (including his passages in Survivor), is an underlying suspicion that human civilization is a contradiction in terms.
This might be especially true in a capitalist society, although I would bet that, with enough time for observation, it would manage to locate the fatal flaw in any economic or political system. Certainly, in Sicily, the search for love under patriarchy is just. as poisonous as the pursuit of money. White addresses the question of whether typical gender habits and the expectations we assign to our love interests are innate or learned. And you need to know if we can get rid of this baggage by sheer force of will. The initial picture is bleak. Characters constantly say they need one thing and then do the opposite. They are often fully aware that they are preparing to harm someone or be harmed, but they cannot resist their instincts.
White’s lucid depiction of entrenched social structures is black magic at the center of any of Lotus’ seasons. In addition to the surprising performances (Imperioli and Abraham are very sharp together) and the attention to visual and auditory detail that are rare in character-based television (this is the series of the season’s name belongs in a museum), the series feeds on its insightful writing. Their discussion comprises layers of meaning in even the most mundane statements, such as Portia’s confession that “I’m in a strange place,” which is true either mentally and physically, given her presence in this melting pot of a beach resort. But it also excels on a giant scale. While gay romance goes beyond the scope of the season, queer asserts itself through scripts, as White cleverly explores the many tactics in which he may be close or even symbiotic with heterosexuality.
To the extent that it repurposes a successful version, The White Lotus isn’t as revealing in its current season as it is in the first. Individual episodes in Sicily, which get bigger for a day each, rarely succeed in the same chaotic momentum. as those taking a stand in Hawaii. However, the concepts remain new and provocative. When it comes to characters, dialogue, humanism, and thematic weight, the screen can still hold on to the most productive thing television has to offer, from Better Things to Call Saul better. Indirectly resting on White’s five-star vacation doesn’t hurt either.