The first season of White Lotus was something of a hail Mary for panicked HBO executives at the start of the pandemic; they needed content, author Mike White had made Enlightened, and the screen probably wasn’t intended to have a following.
But the elegance and wealth criticism was a wonderful success last summer, and it won a bunch of Emmy Awards, and now White has dropped the next episode into the sea along with other doomed 1% rich stories.
Like the pilot episode of the first season, the second season begins by pronouncing the death(s), leading to the unanswered question of why so many other people seem to be dying at this hotel chain. Season 2 takes place elsewhere in White Lotus along the Sicilian coast, providing a beautiful backdrop for sexual and emotional dysfunction. Tanya, played by Jennifer Coolidge, returns from season 1, a dark cloud still follows her, with her husband Greg (Jon Gries). Apart from them, we get a new set of imperfect guests.
Three generations of men, played by F. Murray Abraham, Michael Imperioli and Adam DiMarco, are in town exploring their Sicilian roots and reluctantly dealing with their legal troubles. The youngest, Albie (DiMarco), despises his father and grandfather’s perspectives on women. , however, he doesn’t realize how much his “good boy” character makes him seem righteous.
There’s a more poisonous masculinity in the form of Cameron (Theo James), a copy of Shane (Jake Lacy) from season 1, though after a few episodes, his rich, braying character starts to age a bit. Lovely wife Daphne (Meghann Fahy), but her best dates are apparently noticed apart through Harper (Aubrey Plaza), whose new husband Ethan (Will Sharpe) is a school friend with Cameron. But I didn’t think those two men would ever be friends.
Plaza is the star of his tough quadruple couple, suspicious of Cameron and Daphne and acts with his eyes, as he does, even as Daphne puts a new mind on marriage and money in his head. Unfortunately, those minds are so revolutionary.
Haley Lu Richardson plays Portia, Tanya’s reluctant assistant, and offers a truth check in a monologue about how other people come to lovely places like this just to take the same photos in the same places. Unfortunately, Tanya’s story is too thin, and we only laugh when she meets a homosexual organization run by Quentin (Tom Hollander), who shows her the beautiful things she aspires to.
Sex enterprise and iniquity may be the main theme of this season: season two’s hotel manager, Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore), gets far less attention than season and Armond, but the series distorts the narrative from the smarter part to the bottom with the addition. of two sex painters, Mia (Beatrice Grannò) and Lucia (Simona Tabasco). who rate the hotel in hopes of converting their fortunes. Lucia is a little more jaded and tells Mia the short story that “whores are punished”, because golden Italian art despises them. While White doesn’t delve too deeply into the implications of sex. paintings (and it’s probably rarely the user who does it), Mia and Lucia’s movements set several plot themes in motion, and the exhibit takes more tours outside the hotel this season, making it less claustrophobic. (And adding local hitale. )
At the end of the five of the seven episodes sent for review, you don’t know who might end up floating in the Ionian Sea, but I also felt less involved than in the first season. Although the writing is scathing and the characters interesting, the series is not so much a mystery as an instagrammable misery.