The White Lotus Review

White's insight is that the rich are not villains so much as people who have never once been contradicted, and the show extracts enormous comedy and real cruelty from watching them collide with staff who cannot afford to disagree. The first season, made under pandemic restrictions in a single Hawaiian hotel, is the tightest, and Murray Bartlett's unravelling manager and Jennifer Coolidge's grieving heiress are both superb. The second, in Sicily, is the best written, threading a story about sex, transaction and inherited machismo through four couples without ever losing a thread.

Cristóbal Tapia de Veer's scores, chanting and percussive and slightly wrong, do half the tonal work. The weakness is the framing device. Opening each season with a death and then working back is a hook the material does not need, and it produces finales that must deliver a body, which occasionally forces a resolution the character work had not earned. The satire also softens as the show becomes the thing it describes, filmed in the resorts it mocks.