The Rich and Screwed-Up Bring Their Problems to Italy in ‘The White Lotus’ Season 2

In an upcoming episode of the new season of the HBO resort comedy The White Lotus, Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) theorizes that there is nothing interesting left to do in the world. You can go to a beautiful place and take a picture, she says, but so many others have already taken that picture, and you’re only doing it for Instagram content, anyway. “Is everything boring?” she asks.

The White Lotus Season Two is definitely not boring. Once again, it boasts a great cast — Emmy-winning returnee Jennifer Coolidge is joined by the likes of Aubrey Plaza, Michael Imperioli, and F. Murray Abraham, among others — gorgeous scenery, and the acidic wit of writer-director Mike White.

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But there are times when it’s hard to disagree with Portia’s larger concern that this has all been done before, and better, the first time around.

White created The White Lotus as a pandemic-proof way to get back in business, quarantining his whole cast and crew at the same Hawaiian resort for the production. Originally sold as a limited series, it became such a phenomenon that HBO quickly ordered more, with White moving the action to a different fictional White Lotus resort — this one in Taormina, Sicily — and flanking Coolidge’s impossibly wealthy, unspeakably needy Tanya with a new group of frustrated and frustrating one percenters.

Tanya has married Greg (Jon Gries), the man she fell for in Hawaii, but also invited beleaguered assistant Portia to accompany her to Italy as a kind of emotional support dog that can order its own room service. Meanwhile, Hollywood executive Dom (Imperioli) has brought his father Bert (Abraham) and son Albie (Adam DiMarco) for what was meant to be a once-in-a-lifetime family getaway to Bert’s ancestral homeland, if only Dom’s sex addiction hadn’t just estranged him from his wife and daughter. Smug money man Cameron (Theo James) has invited his newly-rich college roommate Ethan (Will Sharpe) and Ethan’s employment lawyer wife Harper (Plaza) to join him and his own wife Daphne (Meghann Fahy) for an awkward couples vacation. And orbiting all three of these groups are the resort’s abrasive manager Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore), as well as Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and Mia (Beatrice Grannò), two locals dabbling in sex work in the hopes of achieving larger dreams.

Though the new season takes place over 8,000 miles away from the previous one, Tanya isn’t the only carryover. White again opens things up with a flash-forward to the end of the story that promises at least one character will die before the week is up. There’s also the same old-fashioned Love Boat structure of three groups of guests spanning various age groups (even if they tend to be more toxic, like the passengers on Below Deck). And if there’s a bit less emphasis on the resort staff this time, Valentina, Portia, Lucia, and Mia combine to create a downstairs counterpoint to the obnoxious upstairs lives of Cameron and the others.

There are a few key differences. The first is one of tone. Part of what made Season One so special was how White managed to make characters feel simultaneously ridiculous and sad, or awful and at least understandable, if not sympathetic. (Think Sydney Sweeney’s mean girl Olivia, who was obviously a product of her terrible parents.) Nowhere was this more obvious than with Tanya, who on the one hand was a clear user of people, and on the other hand was suffering through a relatable trauma (the recent death of her mother), and who for a time made a genuine connection with Natasha Rothwell’s kind spa manager Belinda. This time around, Tanya is just terrible. She is still in crisis, as things with Greg aren’t going well, but we tend to see her through the eyes of Portia, who is understandably miserable to be stuck under this irrational person’s thumb. (Among other things, when Greg objects to Portia’s presence on a romantic vacation, Tanya tries ordering Portia to stay in her room the whole week.) Jennifer Coolidge remains a comic wonder, and now that White knows how interestingly she can cry, he asks her to do it a lot. But the character feels much less complex this time around. When she cried and bellowed like a whale last season while grieving her mother, it was both jaw-droppingly silly and poignant; when she cries here, it’s generally just played for laughs.

Yet despite leaning harder on Coolidge’s gift for hilarity, this is a substantially less funny season through the five episodes (out of seven) critics have been given so far. The thinly-veiled contempt of Murray Bartlett’s Armond (RIP) is very much missed this time around, even though Sabrina Impacciatore has her moments as Armond’s more openly hostile Sicilian counterpart. (When Tanya dons a pink dress as part of a fantasy to resemble classic Italian movie star Monica Vitti, Valentina suggests she looks like Peppa Pig.) The episodes are aiming for a more farcical approach, as Lucia and Mia move from guest to guest and room to room, but the comedy tends to feel more gentle than it wants to. The great F. Murray Abraham is having a fine time as the self-satisfied Bert, who doesn’t understand why his son should feel so guilty about having affairs, but both that story and the one with the two couples feel more sad than anything else.

That said, there’s some interesting material in both of those corners of the season. Harper struggles to disguise her dislike of people like Cameron and Daphne, who seem blissfully happy in part because they care very little about the world outside their tiny little bubble. (They don’t follow the news, and shrug off Harper’s references to the state of the planet being so fragile at the moment.) It’s yet another good showcase for Aubrey Plaza, who gained fame for deadpan comedy on Parks and Recreation and has now turned out to be a really interesting dramatic actor. White also does a fine job of peeling the onion of Cameron and Daphne’s relationship, which in time turns out to be much more complicated than Harper expects. And as Albie hangs out with Portia, we see how different generations of his family have related differently to women. Dom takes Bert’s philandering to new extremes, while Albie has gone too far the other way — imprisoning himself inside the persona of how he thinks a nice guy should behave, even though Portia is putting out clear signals that she wants something different.

With the pandemic easing, the new season is also more ambitious in scope. The guests frequently leave the resort. Bert insists on a group outing to visit locations from the Sicilian section of The Godfather, while Tanya befriends a group of gay men, led by Tom Hollander’s amused Quentin, who take her and Portia to Quentin’s fabulous home in Palermo for a few days. Even within the limited confines of the Hawaiian resort, White and his creative team had a real knack for contrasting the beautiful surroundings with the ugly behavior of the people who can afford to visit them; that aspect of the show feels bigger and even more potent in this more expanded setting.

While arguing with Albie about what has happened to their family, Dom insists, “I can change.” But The White Lotus has generally been about people’s inability to change, especially when they are so affluent and insulated that they have no real reason to. The question is whether seeing moneyed jerks ruin the lives of people around them, while remaining untouched by the damage they cause, becomes monotonous season after season, even when the locale and (most of) the characters shift from year to year. For the most part, Season Two is sharp enough to justify the series’ ongoing existence. It’s hard not to wonder, though, what might have happened if White had used the juice from Season One to talk HBO into letting him make something as wholly new as The White Lotus itself felt when it first arrived.

Season two of The White Lotus premieres Oct. 30 on HBO, with episodes releasing weekly.

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