The White Lotus Seasons 1-3
Apr. 23rd, 2025 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rsadelleThis started with lakeeffectgirl asking if she should watch The Pitt or The White Lotus next. I offered to watch one of them with her, so we're now watching The Pitt together at a slower pace, but in the meantime, I binged all three seasons of The White Lotus in approximately a week. I'm not sure I liked it, but it is extremely watchable. Then I made the perennial mistake of reading Tumblr posts in the tag (instead of curated by people I trust) and now I have some things to say about it. I'm trying to just throw things out there instead of writing a full essay-style post so I can actually finish this, so if you don't know anything about the show, this probably won't make sense.
One of the nonsense Tumblr posts I saw said something like, "What if instead of anything supernatural happening, rich people are just Like That?" And, yes???? I would argue that's the entire point of the show. (Although, actually, I'm not sure it was quite outrageous enough for that. I had some "this is not a smooth enough experience for super rich people to be having" thoughts about the realism of how the staff operates.) It's a very visual show, and all of the shots that I guess could be read as representing magical realism or something supernatural instead function to either emphasize the feelings the character or comment on what's happening.
I told a friend I was thinking about watching it, and he asked me if I knew what it was about. Everything I knew came from what I vaguely remembered reading in Naomi Fry's review in The New Yorker in 2021, so I said, "Isn't it just rich people nonsense?" My friend said, "Not really. There's more than that," but having watched the show, I have realized that he wouldn't count it as rich people nonsense (side note: that is not necessarily a pejorative; I have enjoyed a lot of rich people nonsense fiction) because his family is rich (I don't know that he thinks of himself that way) and these are the kind of vacations they might take, although less dramatically.
The only other thing I knew going into it was that there was incest in season 3, which meant that I was watching for it. The three siblings are all weird about each other, and I would have accepted any combination of the three of them as the incest. And then we got to it and I had to laugh a lot because of how much fandom has affected my ideas about what's normal (I keep thinking about this xkcd comic about average familiarity), because I thought, "That's it?" It was so underwhelming compared to what I expect when I, for example, see the incest tag on fic. Plus, there was that whole setup of Saxon saying he was going to get Lachlan laid, and I was expecting that to end in him achieving that by doing it himself.
I saw another post talking about Frank in season 3 and going on about how if his story was a trans narrative, it was actually a detransition narrative and also there was some racist stuff in the way he talked about the people he was having sex with/wanting to be. And again, yes? Literally no one on any season of this show is a particularly good person; there is no such thing as positive representation of anything on it. And Frank's whole story of having these experiences in Thailand and then getting sober and finding Buddhism and then falling off the wagon as he was helping Greg is not supposed to be positive representation - it's just a thing that some white people do in Thailand, and it mirrors Piper's belief that she'll find what she's looking for if she joins the Buddhist community and her realization that she's not cut out for breaking from her life of luxury.
I did actually know a third thing about the show, which is that Meghann Fahy got nominated for an Emmy for her role. I love Meghann Fahy; when she was on The Bold Type, she was so much fun to watch, and even the Hallmark movie she was in was fun because of her. At the beginning of her season, I was thinking, "She got nominated for this?" But then she got to show more depth, and then there's the scene where Ethan tells her that Cameron cheated, and I thought, "Oh, she got nominated for this scene," because of what she does with her face. I don't know if other people appreciate this the way I do, but I really love it when someone is able to act so well using just the expression on their face. Also, Cameron was played by Theo James, so the combination of the two of them, plus Valentina and Mia's relationship, made season 2 probably my favorite. Although I was deeply disappointed that the boys night partying was Cameron having sex with Mia and Lucia and not Cameron and Ethan having sex, which was where I really thought it was going.
The thing I didn't love about season 2 was Tanya. I actually had some sympathy for her in season 1. She's obviously a rich person who doesn't get what the real world is like and thinks mostly about herself, but I found the way she was essentially a baby, both emotionally and in the way she behaved, interesting and charming, largely because she's not deliberately trying to hurt anyone, and she doesn't really harm anyone until the end when she abandons Belinda. (I loved that Belinda then turns around and does the exact same thing in season 3 - what a great bit of parallelism.) But in season 2, her storyline got more serious (and wacky), and the way she treats Portia seems more deliberate than her clueless carelessness in season 1.
The second to last thing I have to say is how funny I found two of the college conversations. In season 2, when Albie tells Portia he went to Stanford, she tells him she went to Chico State, which is very funny to me because I'm from Chico. In season 3, Victoria infodumps that she went to UNC, her husband went to Duke, one of their kids when to Duke, one is finishing up at UNC, and the third got accepted to both and has to make a decision so that's a whole thing in their family. As a person who got accepted to both Duke and UNC and went to UNC, I found that hilarious.
The last thing I have to say is that surely by season 3 there is internet chatter within the world of the show about the string of violent deaths at White Lotus properties that makes people skeptical of traveling there. I mean, I'm sure they have disaster PR keeping that sort of thing to a minimum, but there has to be some of it, and having a teenager telling their parents about it and about how that's why they don't want to go there while on the arriving boat would be very funny.
lakeeffectgirl asking if she should watch The Pitt or The White Lotus next. I offered to watch one of them with her, so we're now watching The Pitt together at a slower pace, but in the meantime, I binged all three seasons of The White Lotus in approximately a week. I'm not sure I liked it, but it is extremely watchable. Then I made the perennial mistake of reading Tumblr posts in the tag (instead of curated by people I trust) and now I have some things to say about it. I'm trying to just throw things out there instead of writing a full essay-style post so I can actually finish this, so if you don't know anything about the show, this probably won't make sense.One of the nonsense Tumblr posts I saw said something like, "What if instead of anything supernatural happening, rich people are just Like That?" And, yes???? I would argue that's the entire point of the show. (Although, actually, I'm not sure it was quite outrageous enough for that. I had some "this is not a smooth enough experience for super rich people to be having" thoughts about the realism of how the staff operates.) It's a very visual show, and all of the shots that I guess could be read as representing magical realism or something supernatural instead function to either emphasize the feelings the character or comment on what's happening.
I told a friend I was thinking about watching it, and he asked me if I knew what it was about. Everything I knew came from what I vaguely remembered reading in Naomi Fry's review in The New Yorker in 2021, so I said, "Isn't it just rich people nonsense?" My friend said, "Not really. There's more than that," but having watched the show, I have realized that he wouldn't count it as rich people nonsense (side note: that is not necessarily a pejorative; I have enjoyed a lot of rich people nonsense fiction) because his family is rich (I don't know that he thinks of himself that way) and these are the kind of vacations they might take, although less dramatically.
The only other thing I knew going into it was that there was incest in season 3, which meant that I was watching for it. The three siblings are all weird about each other, and I would have accepted any combination of the three of them as the incest. And then we got to it and I had to laugh a lot because of how much fandom has affected my ideas about what's normal (I keep thinking about this xkcd comic about average familiarity), because I thought, "That's it?" It was so underwhelming compared to what I expect when I, for example, see the incest tag on fic. Plus, there was that whole setup of Saxon saying he was going to get Lachlan laid, and I was expecting that to end in him achieving that by doing it himself.
I saw another post talking about Frank in season 3 and going on about how if his story was a trans narrative, it was actually a detransition narrative and also there was some racist stuff in the way he talked about the people he was having sex with/wanting to be. And again, yes? Literally no one on any season of this show is a particularly good person; there is no such thing as positive representation of anything on it. And Frank's whole story of having these experiences in Thailand and then getting sober and finding Buddhism and then falling off the wagon as he was helping Greg is not supposed to be positive representation - it's just a thing that some white people do in Thailand, and it mirrors Piper's belief that she'll find what she's looking for if she joins the Buddhist community and her realization that she's not cut out for breaking from her life of luxury.
I did actually know a third thing about the show, which is that Meghann Fahy got nominated for an Emmy for her role. I love Meghann Fahy; when she was on The Bold Type, she was so much fun to watch, and even the Hallmark movie she was in was fun because of her. At the beginning of her season, I was thinking, "She got nominated for this?" But then she got to show more depth, and then there's the scene where Ethan tells her that Cameron cheated, and I thought, "Oh, she got nominated for this scene," because of what she does with her face. I don't know if other people appreciate this the way I do, but I really love it when someone is able to act so well using just the expression on their face. Also, Cameron was played by Theo James, so the combination of the two of them, plus Valentina and Mia's relationship, made season 2 probably my favorite. Although I was deeply disappointed that the boys night partying was Cameron having sex with Mia and Lucia and not Cameron and Ethan having sex, which was where I really thought it was going.
The thing I didn't love about season 2 was Tanya. I actually had some sympathy for her in season 1. She's obviously a rich person who doesn't get what the real world is like and thinks mostly about herself, but I found the way she was essentially a baby, both emotionally and in the way she behaved, interesting and charming, largely because she's not deliberately trying to hurt anyone, and she doesn't really harm anyone until the end when she abandons Belinda. (I loved that Belinda then turns around and does the exact same thing in season 3 - what a great bit of parallelism.) But in season 2, her storyline got more serious (and wacky), and the way she treats Portia seems more deliberate than her clueless carelessness in season 1.
The second to last thing I have to say is how funny I found two of the college conversations. In season 2, when Albie tells Portia he went to Stanford, she tells him she went to Chico State, which is very funny to me because I'm from Chico. In season 3, Victoria infodumps that she went to UNC, her husband went to Duke, one of their kids when to Duke, one is finishing up at UNC, and the third got accepted to both and has to make a decision so that's a whole thing in their family. As a person who got accepted to both Duke and UNC and went to UNC, I found that hilarious.
The last thing I have to say is that surely by season 3 there is internet chatter within the world of the show about the string of violent deaths at White Lotus properties that makes people skeptical of traveling there. I mean, I'm sure they have disaster PR keeping that sort of thing to a minimum, but there has to be some of it, and having a teenager telling their parents about it and about how that's why they don't want to go there while on the arriving boat would be very funny.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-04-24 02:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-04-25 02:33 am (UTC)I also enjoyed that speech, and one of the Tumblr posts that made me laugh was that speech in the speech bubble, then you scroll down and it's a person at the drive-through window telling the cashier meme.