Mike White’s White Lotus (2021-) occupies HBO’s Sunday night slot, usually reserved for those guaranteed “watercooler discussion” hits, previously bestowed upon heavyweights like The Sopranos (1999-2007) or Game of Thrones (2011-2019). It has managed to fill those big shoes when it comes to sparking such discourse, by now largely on social media, with endless memes flooding Twitter/X and Instagram timelines and fan theories fueling YouTubers and TikTokers every Monday morning. The show has been a critical darling as well, holding a 78% on Rotten Tomatoes’ Popcornmeter (and a whopping 90% Tomatometer, the audience rating), and has won countless awards, including fifteen Emmys to date. Yet, its latest season that just concluded on April 6, 2025 has received a much more mixed reception. Famed TV critic Alan Sepinwall even went so far as to call the finale “predictable and nonsensical” in his review for the Rolling Stone – and I am tempted to agree. Perhaps at some point this alleged satire of the white and wealthy drank too much of its own Kool-Aid, or creator Mike White could simply do with a writer’s room or at least someone who occasionally gives him a note?
At a time when the United States has been fully taken over by oligarchs who are currently ruining the global economy, I expected more from a biting satire about the ultra-rich. Jason Isaacs delivers a brilliant performance as Tim Ratliff, a finance guy from Durham, North Carolina who brings his wife and three (almost) grown children to Thailand’s White Lotus hotel – only to discover a day into the family vacation that the FBI has uncovered his tax fraud and money laundering scheme. His arc takes him from increasingly frantic phone calls to stealing his wife’s Lorezapam to tune out, to actively contemplating suicide via stolen firearm. In the finale, Ratliff’s downward spiral leads to him planning to take out wife Victoria (a slightly unhinged Parker Posey), eldest son Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), and daughter Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) in a murder-suicide with the help of a toxic fruit. Tim decides to spare his youngest son, Lochlan (Sam Nivola), as he convinced his father that he could survive without their wealth. Before he can go through with it, Ratliff knocks the poisoned Piña Coladas out of their hands, only for Lochlan to use the blender for a protein shake in the morning – and yet, he, too, doesn’t die and instead has a near-death experience, in which he sees the shape of a Buddhist afterlife. Buddhism features most clearly throughout the Ratliff family’s plot, as daughter Piper’s secret plan was to spend a year in the nearby Temple and wants to convince her parents to let her – only to realize she isn’t cut out for it at all. Ironically, it is Tim himself who seems to experience true enlightenment, believing himself and his family to be strong enough to survive the massive change they are about to go through upon their return. While it is not directly spelled out, he is likely to face time in prison and they are bound to lose all their assets – and he, at least, is ready.
It is a weird redemption arc for the most obviously entitled characters this season had to offer. Saxon, who starts out as the epitome of toxic masculinity, is humbled by an incestuous hand job from his younger brother, as they end up having a drug-addled threesome with millionaire’s wife Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon). He, too, seems to realize his life is spiritually empty by the end of their fateful vacation. But are we really supposed to feel for these men—when even their younger sister, who meditates with her Diptyque candle, can’t find it in herself to live in austerity for just a year, why should we believe that the Ratliff men have turned themselves around and can contribute positively to society? The more fitting ending would have been Lochlan’s actual senseless death, particularly if it came while he was finally trying to emulate his older brother, by drinking that fateful protein shake. Unfortunately, Mike White seemed unwilling to go there, a puzzling choice among many.
The trio of entitled blonde women, old friends who can’t seem to stop badmouthing each other behind their backs, played by Michelle Monaghan, Leslie Bibb and Carrie Coon also never fully evolve past their blank canvases. Bibb’s Kate even admits to having voted for Donald Trump, but when she does the conversation turns away quickly; any actual discussion of the specter of MAGA that keeps haunting the White Lotus is seemingly not allowed. Instead, the narrative remains in safer soap-opera-esque territory throughout. Monaghan, playing an aging actress, cheats on her much younger (off-screen) husband with the hotel’s massage therapist Valentin (Arnas Fedaravicius), who she previously tried to set up with Coon’s Laurie. Laurie then goes off with his best friend only to realize that the Russian expats were hoping to use the women’s wealth to build a better future for themselves and their families still stuck at home. The men are even behind the armed robbery of the hotel store from earlier in the season— a plotline that ultimately doesn’t go anywhere—a desperate act to survive in a country where some of them can’t legally hold jobs. It is perhaps the most effective social commentary all season, especially as the United States and elsewhere grapple with how to address undocumented immigrants, and yet by the finale, amounts to hardly more than further illustration of Laurie struggling with her own inequalities amidst her richer, prettier friends. When we leave them, they are seemingly on good terms again – and even completely unaffected by the climatic shootout.
Interestingly, Laurie was originally supposed to have a nonbinary child, mention of whom White cut after Trump was reelected, as he found it “too political”. While he could have hardly done trans people justice by mere mention, it’s a massively telling cop-out, a cowardly pandering to conservative backlash. Meanwhile, Sam Rockwell’s much-discussed monologue about gender experimentation remains intact – and that is borderline fetishizing and played for laughs against Walton Goggins’s facial expressions. White Lotus does not have a great track record when it comes to queer representation: Season 1 had its murderous gays, Season 2 a closeted lesbian receptionist, and the sex worker that sleeps with her (a plotline that had shades of biphobia), and in Season 3, we are left with Rockwell’s ramblings about “ladyboys” and an incestuous hand job. All of this could have lent itself to more nuanced explorations of the messy realities of sexuality and gender, particularly in the context of rampantly transphobic ideology that helped white supremacists in the US and elsewhere get elected. As is, it seems like White’s carelessly left-open Pornhub tabs bleeding into his writing.
As the series has gone on, White has seemingly lost all interest in even attempting to give his few BIPOC characters, usually the hotel workers across his locations, more depth. Season 3 has Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) looking to climb the social ladder to impress his opportunistic love interest Mook (Lalisa Manobal, better known as singer Lisa from BLACKPINK), who get to converse in Thai, subtitled against an exoticized font. There is also Natasha Rothwell’s Belinda, whose several season-spanning arc culminates with her becoming newly rich, and abandoning her love interest, Pornchai (Dom Hetrakul), much like she was previously abandoned by Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya. Her son, Zion (Nicholas Duvernay)’s only narrative function meanwhile is to help her extort more blood money from Greg (Jon Gries). Money corrupts, is the clear message here, but it’s neither particularly original nor well executed.
The finale’s shootout ending in the deaths of Walton Goggins’ haunted Rick, and his partner Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), is tragic, but also almost borderline soapy: the big reveal that he killed his own father instead of who he thinks is his father’s murderer could be straight out of General Hospital. There is a lot of squandered potential here, overall, but mostly when it comes to social and political commentary in a show that received much praise for its so-far often subtle satire. But much like the “White Lotus effect” where tourists now seek out the exclusive resorts that the show has filmed at, it has somewhat ironically turned in on itself.
Over the course of the season, White Lotus gestures towards the myriad problems caused by capitalism, colonialism, and toxic masculinity – in short, white supremacy – but one wonders sometimes if that gesture is a wagging finger or an enticing invitation. HBO has greenlit a season 4, destination unknown. I am sure it will spark a lot of memes and Emmy-worthy performances, if perhaps not much else.
Featured Image: Credit HBO
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