At first glance, Cameron (Theo James) and Daphne (Meghann Fahy) look the very picture of #couplegoals, with their sun-kissed good looks, photogenic designer outfits and cutesy habit of snuggling and smooching in public. But Harper (Aubrey Plaza) isn’t buying into their Instagram-worthy image of marital bliss. “It feels performative,” she scoffs to her husband, Ethan (Will Sharpe), once they’re alone. “No way. It feels fake.”
Because all of them are characters on The White Lotus, Mike White‘s spiky satire of the rich and miserable, it comes as little surprise when Harper is eventually proven right. Yet the real question, as Ethan points out, might be why Harper cares in the first place. In its second season, the HBO series makes Harpers of us all, casting a suspicious eye on the familiar trappings of courtship — and while the new installment doesn’t cut quite as close to the bone as the first did, it alights upon more than a few observations sharp enough to draw blood.
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The White Lotus
If season two’s findings can be summed up in a nutshell, it might simply be that the straights are not okay (though in fairness, the show’s non-straights don’t seem to be doing so hot either). In the five hourlong episodes sent to critics, out of a seven-episode season, the drama primarily revolves around the intractable divide between genders as played out on the battlegrounds of sex and romance, analyzed with the same anthropological precision White brought to matters of wealth and class in season one.
The new backdrop is a White Lotus luxury resort nestled along the Sicilian coast, and the players a mostly fresh crop of guests. There’s the aforementioned foursome, celebrating the sale of Ethan’s company with a couple-frenemies vacay; Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) and her now-husband Greg (Jon Gries), the only recurring characters from season one, traveling with Tanya’s existentially frustrated assistant Portia (Haley Lu Richardson); and three generations of Di Grasso men (F. Murray Abraham’s Bert, Michael Imperioli’s Dom and Adam DiMarco’s Albie) on a pilgrimage to their ancestral homeland.
Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore) serves as this iteration’s counterpart to season one’s beleaguered Maui hotel manager Armond, down to the interest in a comely younger employee (Eleonora Romandini’s Isabella). However, the staff mostly take a narrative backseat to two locals, Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and Mia (Beatrice Grannò), who lurk around the hotel looking to trade on their sex appeal for whatever money or favors they can wring from the well-heeled male guests.
After an Italian-ified version of last year’s tropical opening credits sequence, the season once again begins by promising death in a flash-forward, before jumping back a week to piece together the story of who’s died and how and why. The warning feels almost redundant. While The White Lotus goes out of its way to highlight the island’s breathtaking beauty — detouring off-property to visit majestic palazzos, charming vineyards and that one town where some of The Godfather was shot, like the world’s longest tourism ad — it also makes a point of explaining that Sicily is said to be where Hades raped Persephone. Romance and violence, be it physical or emotional, go hand in hand here.
In contrast to the first season’s takedown of cruel, clueless elites, the second lacks targets as obvious as Shane’s monstrous entitlement or Tanya’s selfish neediness. For one thing, the characters are, on the whole, rather nicer (though Cameron is very much cut from the same odious cloth as Shane, and Tanya is still Tanya). Socioeconomic class remains a going concern for The White Lotus, but as a complicating factor to the season’s central themes of gender, lust and love, in which the distinction between villains and victims is not so clear. The result is a set of episodes notably less mordant in their humor and less biting in their satire, even with Cameron’s tendency to spout alpha-male bullshit or Bert’s to shamelessly hit on every woman he sees.
Thankfully, the season is no less lucid in its observations or its sense of empathy. As a creator, White has a special talent for mining the gap between the people his characters want to see themselves as and the people they can’t help being. Here, he uses it to tap into a nebulous anxiety over whether it’s even possible to know what we truly want when we’ve spent our whole lives being told what to want. The question most clearly applies to the characters’ decisions over whom to fuck or flirt with, which are guided as much by a hunger for status or reassurance as they are by actual desire. (When a sex worker shrugs that “Having sex knowing exactly what you are going to get out of it is not so bad,” her clarity comes across as both unexpectedly refreshing and low-key depressing.)
But the aforementioned anxiety is also expressed in moments like Portia ranting about the disappointments of a world where even jaw-dropping views like the ones she’s enjoying in Sicily might yield not true wonder or pleasure, but just “some redundant content for stupid Instagram.” Richardson delivers the words with a misery so palpable you can almost feel it — especially if you, too, have experienced this very specific but difficult-to-pinpoint modern malaise.
She’s not the only one to benefit from White’s knack for crafting characters who feel achingly understandable, if not necessarily likable. Other standouts among a very solid cast include Plaza, who deploys her signature deadpan delivery to hilariously uncomfortable effect as a woman whose harsh judgments barely conceal her own insecurities. She is especially well matched by Fahy, who renders Daphne one of the season’s most fascinating characters by tapping into the vast reserves of steel and sorrow underlying her usual effervescent persona.
Despite the flickers of sympathy that pass between the two women over their shared experiences, The White Lotus has no interest in reducing men or women to essentialist notions about predators or prey, subjects or objects, white knights or damsels. Rather, it’s aware that this is the social framework all of its characters — and we, the viewers, as well — are operating within. They may embrace these stereotypes as “hard-wired” or reject them as “a construct,” as Bert and Albie do in an argument over The Godfather‘s macho appeal, or try to work them to their advantage, as Lucia and Mia do.
But none seem able to escape them completely in favor of pursuing their true wants and needs, at least as of episode five; we’ll find out in the next two whether there’s any way out that does not involve becoming a corpse bobbing in the Ionian Sea. Harper, as it turns out, did misread Cameron and Daphne’s lovey-doviness in one crucial way — by assuming they were the only ones making a show of their love and sex lives. The White Lotus‘ gift to audiences in search of absorbing drama, semi-scathing comedy and perhaps a bit of painful self-reflection is that it does not make the same mistake she does.
