‘The White Lotus’ Season 2 Review: A Resounding Triumph for HBO and Mike White

This week officially marks the triumphant return of one of HBO‘s best-loved franchises and I’m actually not talking about House of the Dragon. Season 2 of ten-time Emmy winning hit The White Lotus will premiere on Sunday, October 30 and it is everything fans of the first season could possibly want. Once again, The White Lotus delivers scathing class satire, brilliant performances, and a murder mystery set in paradise. The White Lotus Season 2 doesn’t just live up to Season 1’s greatness, but doubles down on what made it so great.

Originally envisioned as a one-off limited series, the first season of The White Lotus looked at life within the walls of a luxurious resort in Hawaii. We were told in the show’s cold open that one of the characters we’d meet would be shipped stateside in a coffin, lending the darkly comic show a shadow of dread and inkling of mystery. Creator, writer, and director Mike White follows muse Tanya McQuoid-Hunt (Jennifer Coolidge) to a new White Lotus resort in Sicily where she mingles with a whole new cast of fractured families, out-of-sync couples, and suffering locals. Once again, the season opens with a cold open teasing death. This time, though, it seems White is going bigger with multiple reported dead bodies to deal with.

Everything about The White Lotus Season 2 feels like an upgrade from the already spectacular Season 1. As idyllic as Hawaii was, Sicily’s locales feel like a golden reverie in heaven. Guest excursions go beyond scuba-diving and now include jet-skiing, yachting, and staying overnight in a palatial villa. Composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer rejiggers his Emmy-winning score and main title theme to add the epic drama of Italian opera to the dread. And fellow Emmy winner Jennifer Coolidge gets to explore not only Tanya’s hilarious lack of self-awareness, but the sorrow that stalks her pampered heiress. Key sequences for Tanya include a hysterical vespa ride, a trip to the opera, and her terribly strained relationship with new assistant Portia (Haley Lu Richardson).

The new cast of characters Mike White has assembled definitely echo characters we meet in Season 1, but many of them are even more layered and nuanced than the folks we loved (to hate) last year. Young, but weary Portia immediately connects with the painfully sweet Albie (Adam DiMarco), who is stuck on this fancy vacation with his philandering, sex-addicted father Dominic (Michael Imperioli) and woefully out of step grandfather Bert (F. Murray Abraham). When Dominic invites a local escort named Lucia (Simona Tabasco) to his room for the night, it soon spirals into a situation where Lucia and her bestie Mia (Beatrice Grannò) are running wild through the resort — much to the chagrin of bossy hotel manager Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore).

Adding to both the comedy and the drama are a pair of rich millennial couples (reluctantly) vacationing together. New money tech bro Ethan (Will Sharpe) and his self-made, ethically-upright wife Harper (Aubrey Plaza) find themselves measuring their own relationship against the picture perfect rich boy Cameron (Theo James) and trophy wife Daphne (Meghann Fahy). Of course, as this is The White Lotus, no one in the quartet is necessarily just what they appear to be on the surface. Indeed, every character in The White Lotus Season 2 sports the often contradictory layers that defined the cast in Season 1.

The White Lotus is interested in more than just social satire in Season 2. The prevailing themes this year have to do with sexual politics. Sure, you have the character of Dominic examining the role of infidelity in generational trauma and his father Bert grappling with his own inappropriate worldview, but The White Lotus Season 2 also questions the power dynamics within monogamous relationships, the value of sex work, and what stokes passion in the first place. At times, White flirts openly with the problematic. However, his voice of a writer is often as kind as it is caustic. If his characters are guilty of anything, it’s usually just being human.

While watching the five episodes of The White Lotus Season 2 HBO sent to critics, I kept being shocked by how much I liked the majority of the characters this season. Theo James’s Cameron seems to be the closest thing to a true villain, but even he is afforded moments of tenderness that prove his love for wife Daphne. Elsewhere, I found myself rooting for gregarious and sweet Italian locals Lucia and Mia, earnest and chivalrous Albie, and the naive young mess that was Portia  (played a luminous Haley Lu Richardson). The more I learned about Daphne, Ethan, Harper (a revelatory turn from Aubrey Plaza) and the rest of the Lotus’s guests, the more sympathy I felt for each. But that doesn’t mean I also didn’t snicker at any of these character’s out and loud foibles. That’s The White Lotus, baby.

Mike White wrote a critically-acclaimed, super popular, and wholly original season of TV with 2021’s The White Lotus. In Season 2, he doesn’t just recreate the magic of the first installment, but he stretches his own creative muscles. The White Lotus Season 2 is a resounding triumph.

The White Lotus Season 2 premieres on HBO and HBO Max on Sunday, October 30.