The second season of The White Lotus follows a group of wealthy, self-involved people in a beautiful resort hotel that frowns on cross-pollination between the visitors and the visited.
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The ensemble is sprawling, the couples are indulgently unhappy, the location is recognizable in some ways but foreign in others, the season begins with a dead body and then jumps backward a week, and Jennifer Coolidge returns as the perpetually neurotic Tanya McQuoid.
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But there’s also a new bluntness, and a noticeable tentativeness, that keeps this second season from hitting as hard and bruising as immediately as its predecessor.
The White Lotus fancies up these tensions with designer clothes, Jet Ski races, and overnight stays at strikingly bedizened villas, but peel away all those layers of affluent affectation and what remains is simple – perhaps overly so.
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White has written in an undercurrent of straight men having to play games because straight women aren’t honest about what they want
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The closest the White Lotus comes to an elongated B plot this season is found in its Italian characters, who serve as literal employees of the resort and people who make their living there
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Valentina’s worst behavior is aimed at her fellow Italians, while Lucia and Mia go through a predictable story arc about young women, older men, the transactional nature of sex work, and the inescapability of Catholic guilt
