HBO's White Lotus

The Brilliant, Biting Social Satire of “The White Lotus”/ Naomi Fry (NYer)

Aboat ferrying a gaggle of rich American tourists makes its way toward a Hawaiian luxury resort. At the shore, the resort’s decidedly less wealthy, more ethnically diverse staff waits to greet the guests. The groups face each other, as if they were equal expressions on two sides of a mathematical equation, but the equivalence is just an illusion. “Wave like you mean it,” the resort’s manager, Armond (the Australian actor Murray Bartlett), instructs Lani (Jolene Purdy), a native-Hawaiian trainee. Armond explains that the guests expect a kind of pleasant blandness, or an “impression of vagueness,” from the staff. “We are asked to disappear behind our masks,” he says. “It’s tropical Kabuki!”

Aboat ferrying a gaggle of rich American tourists makes its way toward a Hawaiian luxury resort. At the shore, the resort’s decidedly less wealthy, more ethnically diverse staff waits to greet the guests. The groups face each other, as if they were equal expressions on two sides of a mathematical equation, but the equivalence is just an illusion. “Wave like you mean it,” the resort’s manager, Armond (the Australian actor Murray Bartlett), instructs Lani (Jolene Purdy), a native-Hawaiian trainee. Armond explains that the guests expect a kind of pleasant blandness, or an “impression of vagueness,” from the staff. “We are asked to disappear behind our masks,” he says. “It’s tropical Kabuki!”

Welcome to “Upstairs, Downstairs,” Aloha State edition. The series, called “The White Lotus,” named for the fictional resort where the action takes place, is a near-note-perfect tragicomedy, created by Mike White for HBO. White has written mass-market Hollywood fare like “School of Rock,” but he is better known for his work on small-screen comedies such as “Freaks and Geeks” and, more recently, “Enlightened,” a short-lived cult favorite, also on HBO. Much like the latter series, in which Laura Dern plays an executive who tries to make a comeback after suffering a public nervous breakdown, “The White Lotus” is an examination of what happens when the veneer of conventional sociability dissolves and the power struggles stoked by race, class, and gender erupt from beneath the surface of everyday life.

In the first of six episodes, Armond tells Lani to make each guest feel like the “special chosen baby child of the hotel.” These baby children include the Mossbacher family: Nicole (Connie Britton), a Sheryl Sandberg-like tech C.F.O.; her beta husband, Mark (Steve Zahn); their porn-addicted sixteen-year-old son, Quinn (Fred Hechinger); and their daughter, Olivia (“Euphoria” ’s Sydney Sweeney, once again playing a parent’s nightmare), a bitchy, performatively woke college sophomore, who has brought along a friend, Paula (Brittany O’Grady). There is the obligatory newlywed couple—Shane (Jake Lacy), a real-estate scion in a Cornell baseball cap, and his wife, Rachel (Alexandra Daddario), a clickbait journalist who, hours into her honeymoon, is starting to have second thoughts. There is also Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), a lonely alcoholic who carries around her dead mother’s ashes in an ornate gilt box. The chief coddlers are Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), a soothing, long-suffering spa manager, who is perhaps the only truly likable character on the show, and Armond, a mustachioed dandy and a recovering addict whose sobriety is tested by his stressful job.

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