The White Lotus: Season 3

★★★★★ | Occupational hazards

Mike White struck gold with The White Lotus, his satiric series about privilege, narcissism, and purchased reinvention. If there are natural resources we’ll never run out of, it’s these. Returning for a third season in a new location, The White Lotus shows no signs of slowing down, either. If anything, it’s even more incisive and blisteringly funny than before, but also a whole heck of a lot darker as death hangs around like an uninvited guest from the first scene onwards.

Featuring another superlative cast of characters, season 3 picks up in Thailand, where the eponymous luxury resort prepares to welcome the next batch of ultra-wealthy Westerners. Among them are Kate, Laurie, and Jaclyn (Leslie Bibb, Carrie Coon, and Michelle Monaghan), three childhood friends with a boatload of baggage beyond their wardrobe. There’s the Ratliff (Jason Isaacs and Parker Posey) family, an assortment of dysfunctional one-percenters who can’t live without their phones. Scruffy and questionable sorts like Rick and Chelsea (Walton Goggins and Aimee Lou Wood), a tag-along girlfriend half his age, keep mostly to themselves. All the while as Mook (Lalisa Manobal), the local “health mentor,” tries to keep the veil of opulence held up in a place that’s falling apart at the seams.

None of them know one another, yet they know each other’s type. The first episode, which is mostly an act of observation of how these people treat the world and people around them, is particularly telling as everyone sizes up the other. It’s a terrific bit of physical comedy as Isaacs and Goggins square off in the most awkward posturing imaginable.

As the series progresses (based on the six episodes sent for review), The White Lotus expands into a biting collision between the East and the West and the fabricated luxury that bastardizes a culture so that the privileged can pretend they’ve gone someplace exotic.

The less said about the turns, the better. As with previous seasons, The White Lotus is at its finest as a surprise. White’s intricate plotting is as rewarding as ever. By the end, it’s a joy to revisit earlier episodes to see how much of the groundwork you missed the first time around.

There’s always a risk in this type of satire that the finished product comes off smarmy and self-serving. Luckily, The White Lotus avoids these pitfalls and remains shockingly self-aware, never unafraid to poke fun at itself and its audience. At times, it’s almost uncomfortable how unflinching White’s eye can be, especially as he leans heavily into the perils and immorality of tourist culture and spiritual colonialism.

The cast is uniformly superb, though the highlights belong to Goggins as the scheming yet hapless Rick Hatchett and Lalisa Manobal as Mook, who carries the series with a difficult part that she pulls off effortlessly. She’s both our guide to the world and an unfortunate victim of arrogant hubris, and Manobal navigates practiced niceties and inner rage beautifully.

Since the series is an anthology, newcomers can happily tag along even from the third season without losing much ground. Only a single character returns from the first series, and their role has enough meat for it to not be an obligatory cameo. As ever, White sees a bigger picture that we can’t, and it’s a joyful experience to go along unaware.

If you already love The White Lotus, you’re bound to love it even more. For everyone else, it’s finally time to see what you’re missing out on. This is some of the funniest satire around if you can handle the discomfort.