‘The White Lotus’ Season 2 Premiere Recap: A Sicilian Message

Have you enjoyed your stay at The White Lotus? No, seriously, I want to know: What did you make of the first season of writer-director Mike White’s anthology satire, about the trials and tribulations of the white upper class and their overworked, underappreciated servants at a luxury Hawaiian resort? Because here I am, filling out my comment card, and I’m just not sure what to write.

Of course I wish I loved the show. That’s easy: Don’t you wish you loved every show you watch? Particularly when you’re a TV critic who considers himself to be in the liking-things business, it’s always more fun to be over the moon for a series than to be left scratching your head. With a show as widely beloved and acclaimed as The White Lotus, that goes double.

But a part of me also wishes I hated the show. Hour-long comedy-dramas are the Coward’s Television: On a surface level they appear as character-driven and attention-demanding as your standard prestige-TV drama, but because the characters involved are joke-delivery mechanisms first and “characters” second, they are in fact neither. Unlike the people on, say, The Sopranos or Mad Men or Better Call Saul, their purpose is to be funny, which makes them a lot different than people who happen to be funny sometimes. You’ve met lots of people like the latter; people like the former don’t exist. 

But unlike, say, Succession — another widely beloved and acclaimed HBO dramedy about the rich and awful, which has somehow managed to convince the critical and awards establishment to let it have its cake (everyone telling variations of the same over-elaborate dick jokes season after season) and eat it too (sometimes characters get sad and, hey presto, Drama!) — The White Lotus tended to fall firmly enough on the black-comedy side of the spectrum to dodge that obnoxious neither-fish-nor-fowl nature. 

It took its time to get there of course, after an opening couple of hours so dry it wasn’t clear what the show was up to; and in its final episode or two it made sure to have several important female characters get really upset so you knew you were watching something real, man; but there was a sweet spot in the middle there where the assholishness and/or obsequiousness of the players just kept ratcheting up and up to such hilariously uncomfortable levels that it was hard not to root for the thing.

Which I suppose is where I find myself with Season 2, the first episode of which (“Ciao”) takes us to a new locale with an almost entirely new cast of characters, but with almost all the same thematic and comedic preoccupations. Everyone’s still rich, everyone’s still horny, everyone’s still either completely oblivious or so ostentatiously tuned into the world’s suffering that they’re oblivious to their own obliviousness, and the staff are still oh so happy to serve you.

To recap everyone we meet and everything they do in a beat-by-beat fashion would be, like, House of the Dragon–level length (hey, speaking of shows about oblivious rich assholes!), so a Cliff’s Notes version will have to suffice. This season is set at the White Lotus’s Sicily branch, managed by Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore), who relies in part on the language barrier between her and the English-speaking guests to be a much more uncensored critic of the guests and staff than her beleaguered counterpart Armond was, at least at first, back in Season One.

Returning from Season One are the inexplicably wealthy, unhinged Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) and her husband (!!!), Greg (Jon Gries), this time with Tanya’s put-upon assistant Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) in tow. Joining them on the boat to the resort are a pair of wealthy couples, Harper and Ethan (Aubrey Plaza and Will Sharpe), largely unhappy, and Daphne and Cameron (Meghann Fahy and Theo James), largely blissful; Ethan and Cameron are old college roommates turned business partners turned mega-rich once they sold their company, despite the fact that they’ve never had much in common and don’t actually seem to like each other that much. (Harper, befitting Plaza’s brand, has active contempt for everyone, which I think she blames on climate change. She likes Cameron’s body enough, though, that’s apparent!)

Also on the boat are the multi-generational family of Bert (F. Murray Abraham), his son Dom (Michael Imperioli), and his son Albie (Adam DiMarco). They’re in Sicily to visit the town Bert’s grandmother came from, though there’s an ulterior motive, and no, it’s not just the flatulent Bert’s desire to sexually harass every younger woman he sees: Dom is there to meet a much younger woman he’s been having an affair with online, to the vocal devastation of his wife. That young woman is Lucí (Simona Tabasco), a local who’s taken to sex work because it pays so well, and who’s sorta trying to talk her best friend Mia (Beatrice Grannò) into it too.

Writer-director White rolls all this out in much the same way he did with the zany gang from Season One. There are unhappy relationships between people who seem transparently unsuited for one another to the outside observer, most notably Harper and Ethan. There’s the specter of infidelity, hanging over not just Dom’s situation, but that of Harper (who seems interested in Cam despite her dislike of him) and even that of Tanya and Greg (Greg is almost certainly cheating on her if his surreptitious bathroom phone call is any indication). 

There’s class conflict, not entirely obvious among the hotel staff just yet but certainly present in the disconnect between the insular world of the resort and the invasion represented by Mia and Lucí (whom manager Valentina is constantly trying to chase away), as well as in an awkward conversation between Albie and Portia about where they went to college. (Albie, apologetically: “I…went to…Stanford…?”) 

There’s the occasional entertainment-biz low-hanging fruit in the form of shots at true crime and bingeing and Ted Lasso, the stuff tweets are made of. There are older men oversharing the details of their sex lives, like when Bert tells Dom and Albie that doctors say you should jerk off every day to “drain the sack” or something to that effect.

There’s racism, present not just in Harper’s feeling that she and Ethan are Daphne and Cameron’s token non-white friends, but also in the form of the ubiquitous “Moor’s head,” traditional ceramic sculptures of a North African merchant beheaded by his Sicilian lover. And that one gives you infidelity, unhappy relationships, and the threat of violence all wrapped up in the bargain; the last bit in particular is important, given how the show begins with several unseen guests turning up dead in the ocean before flashing back to the start of the vacation.

So never let it be said that Mike White, who partially titled the show after himself (and his race) for crying out loud, lacks self-awareness about his themes and how to tie them together tightly. Indeed, I think some of his sharpest work in the first season, the way two separate storylines involving wealthy white men resolve themselves in the form of violence committed to protect their property while feeling insecure about their love lives, gets to the heart of conservatism���s greatest-fear-slash-fondest-fantasy in a way that a lot of the more explicitly stated stuff didn’t. That wouldn’t be the case if he weren’t a very insightful writer, capable of layering his ideas and hiding some in plain sight.

Which is where hope for Season 2 ultimately lies. If it’s true that laughter lets viewers off the hook, hence the attraction to hybrids like The White Lotus and Succession, there’s no reason why a sufficiently motivated and perceptive maker of this material can’t see this coming and make an effort to avoid it. To me that would involve steering fully in a black-comedy direction, so no one gets distracted from the misanthropy by, like, rooting for Character X not to have her heart broken, but you might prefer a different approach. Let’s see who’ll be served in the end.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.