White Lotus Commentary: A holiday from hell inspires sharp comedy

People come for me all their lives,” Shane (Jack Lacey), the honeymooner, told his newlywed Rachel (Alexandra Daddario). “I’m just playing the hand I was dealt with. It’s like, yes, this is a good hand, but it’s not my fault.”

This is just one of the countless moments in “White Lotus”. It is almost painful to be keenly observed. The character of the creator Mike White has performed high-level psychological gymnastics, taking their obvious advantages-money, status, skin color- -Become a disadvantage.

This six-part series takes place in an upscale resort on Maui, Hawaii, where a group of hellishly wealthy guests colonizes a paradise whose sense of power is inversely proportional to their self-consciousness. At the same time, hotel manager Murray Bartlett said that hotel employees should be “ordinary, pleasant, and interchangeable helpers.” His journey from amiable monthly employees to freefalling men is a week-long show. The process of tightening the window is very compelling.

“Watch [the guests] Every night makes me want to goug my eyes,” he shivered happily in the penultimate episode. After spending a few hours with them, you will definitely sympathize-but it is impossible to look away from what might be This year’s best black comedy is removed. The show is mainly a series of character studies, but there is also a trivial introduction to an unidentified corpse. Lies big and small-Before we go back to the opening moment before the holiday.

Shane is a doted baby boy who still wears his Ivy League school merchandise a few years after graduation. He is convinced that Almond is “encouraging” him to accept a poor room (Bartlett managed to instill “you want Is the second toilet?” question) A passive aggression is so delicious that it can almost sing). His desperate mission to rise to the right place in the pineapple suite swallowed his honeymoon and quickly degenerated into a full-scale psychological warfare. As you can imagine, this may be the first time he was frustrated in Waspy’s life, and Lacy’s performance is more ruthless and effective in fighting the type completely-Shane is the evil twin of the charming and easygoing brother he usually plays.

No wonder Shane’s wife is a freelance journalist. She is not used to using piles of money to smooth the fringes of life, and she will reconsider now. Rachel may belong to the era of clickbait (her husband described her work as “disposable trash” rather ruthlessly), but Daddario made her more and more aware that she should be a smiling trophy wife. Similar to her mother-in-law (Molly Shannon) is like the heroine of Edith Wharton.

Also on holiday at the resort are tech chief financial officer Connie Britton, her beta husband Mark (Steve Zahn), college daughter Olivia (Sydney Sweeney) and aimless teenage son. Quinn (Fred Hechinger) and Olivia’s college friend Paula (Paula) Brittany (Grady). Every family dinner is staged in subtle embarrassment. Accusing the girls of ignoring Quinn, Nicole explained their behavior (again, mental gymnastics) as a symptom of the world’s lack of “sympathy” for “white youths”. “In a sense, they are weak now,” she said, causing Paula to roll his eyes deservedly. “I think he will be fine, Nicole,” she said, deliberately neutral. As one of the only black guests in the resort, she also painfully realized that her fantasy vacation was funded by a family she considered shocking. However, she was not immune to White’s scalpel: when she incited her lover, hotel worker Kekoa Scott Kekuman, to make a catastrophic major gambling, her own set of assumptions was cruelly exposed.

Then there was Tanya, played by Jennifer Coolidge, a self-proclaimed “total alcoholic lunatic” who planned to dispose of the ashes of her late mother in the Hawaiian ocean, and she soon targeted the empathetic spa manager Bei Linda (Natasha Roswell). Obviously, the weird Kaftan-ed Tanya is using her new friend as a useful but eventually discardable form of emotional support, but it proves that White’s skilful writing and Coolidge’s gorgeous performances can be parasitic at the same time. Sincere and sincere. Coolidge can turn anything into a comedy moment, from the pronunciation of her character’s last name to the tearful but very unflattering eulogy on the yacht, but she played Tanya with such deep sympathy So that she will never become an interesting character.

The horribly rich have produced wonderful TV shows (as proven by The White Lotus’ HBO stable partner Succession), but they rarely see their privileges and prejudices twisted with such ruthless precision. The characters in White’s pen may be scary, but they are carefully crafted (even the paperback they pretend to be reading on a sun lounger) that they feel pain.

The second series, set in another branch of the White Lotus franchise, has just been commissioned at an unannounced location. Thank God-because this is a holiday from hell, you really want to relive it again and again.

All episodes available from August 16 Sky atlantic And streaming services now