The White Lotus review: Season 2 is a bit much but proves this franchise has staying power

Corpses, plural. Threesomes, plural. So many romantic triangles it's more like a pentagram. And friends who hate each other discuss the apocalypse at their first nice meal. Expect more everything as The White Lotus transforms from an acclaimed limited event into an ongoing series.

Season 2 of HBO's grim-bright comedy premieres Sunday with a very familiar mystery-teasing flashforward. "How many dead guests are there?" asks brusque resort manager Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore). An unknown number of bodies are floating along the beach of the Sicilian outpost of the White Lotus hotel chain. From that promise of mass something-cide, creator Mike White cuts back a week to a newly arrived cast of self-imploding rich beauties. So this new installment is too much right away, and not as special as the much-awarded Hawaiian season. It's breezier entertainment, though, practically a door-slam farce. Anyone might sleep with everyone, and someone could kill them all.

Once again, the arrival boat imports three separate tense ensembles. Lawyer Harper (Aubrey Plaza) travels with her husband Ethan (Will Sharpe). He just made big money selling his company, which suddenly puts them in same economic stratosphere as Ethan's college buddy Cameron (Theo James) and his wife Daphne (Meghann Fahy). The couples' interactions are multi-directionally awkward: Childless vs. two under 4, working woman vs. stay-at-home mom, tech nerd vs. investor bro. The problems are more obvious for the three generations of Di Grasso men, as horny grandpa Bert (F. Murray Abraham) visits his ancestral homeland with sex-addict son Dom (Michael Imperioli) and grandson Albie (Adam DiMarco) who went to college in Palo Alto. (Don't make him say where!)

Fabio Lovino/HBO Aubrey Plaza, Will Sharpe, Theo James, and Meghann Fahey in 'The White Lotus' season 2

Once again we meet Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), season 1's pouty breakout trainwreck. Her romance with Greg (Jon Gries) is now a troubled marriage, though more attention gets paid to Tanya's relationship with her confounded assistant Portia (Haley Lu Richardson). The vacation groups were mostly separate in season 1, but this time the subplots cross over. That's partly because of local friends Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and Mia (Beatrice Grannò), an escort and an aspiring singer who rarely sleep in the same bed twice. All the White Lotus tropes are on display — and are, suddenly, tropes. The luxuriant underwater cinematography still teases ambiguous threats on sumptuous coastlines. Each episode still roughly moves from early morning to very late at night. It's Italy, so nobody discusses systemic racism, but it's Italy, so everyone's a sexy sexist.

The last time HBO sequelized a finished tale of gorgeous privileged rot, the result was Big Little Lies season 2, which was bad enough to retroactively make season 1's ferocious feminist fun look like a clueless Karen kaffeeklatsch. And all TV anthologies are, immediately or eventually, bad TV anthologies. (For every American Horror Story: Asylum, there is most every American Horror Story since.) So I thought more White Lotus was a mistake and was nervous to see White wedge new characters into old roles. The Italian gal pals are Gen Z analogues to last year's Nietzsche-loving coeds. Imperioli's an expansion pack of Steve Zahn's flailing dad, now with more infidelity. Valentina is nothing at all like Murray Bartlett's Armond, but that's because this season barely focuses on the resort staff. That means none of the bubble-burst poignance that Bartlett and Natasha Rothwell brought as the servant-victims of getaway decadence.

I like this season, though. It's a hoot! In the five episodes I've seen (out of seven), the two couples zigzag together in never-expected ways. Coming off the travesty of The Time Traveler's Wife, James looks unleashed as a roving-eyed investor jerk. And Meghann Fahy is flat-out incredible as an Instagram-perfect megamom whose shallow outward serenity masks a complex inward serenity. (Imagine if Sansa Stark was also the Queen of Thorns.) Meanwhile, Richardson delights as the resident American non-kamillionaire, who's been "stuck at home just doomscrolling on my phone the last three years" and now wants something real.

She finds herself orbiting closer to Albie. How you feel about him may sum up your feelings about the season. While his elders represent two generations of problematic masculinity, he's a strenuous sweetheart who believes male romantic passivity is, like, a political act of self-retribution against the patriarchy. This attitude makes him a regular in the friend zone — a popular phrase in the 2000s, when Albie-ish nice guys became go-to romantic leads. When Portia starts wishing this sweet boy would cowboy up, you wonder if White's risking an incel fairy tale, or some lame Fight Club-by tract about why betas need to act more alpha. As a writer, though, the Enlightened creator still has a gift for complicating even the goofiest personalities with sincere weirdness. I called White Lotus a satire when it debuted, and I wonder if I was wrong about that. That word implies a comedic attack. White loves skewering the habits of the liberal wealthy, but he also genuinely loves these characters, filming his actors with a tan-at-magic-hour floral haze.

That complicates any easy burn-the-rich reading. It also makes this new season an involving soap, with characters who are endearing even when their dialogue pushes obvious buttons. The carnal activities of Lucia and Mia are played for laughs, complete with a bit of transactional intercourse in a deconsecrated church. But both performers make a serious impression as romantic strivers. That's especially true in the middle of the season, as the hangovers pile up and all the boozy brunches turn regretful.

You can graph season 2's progress on Coolidge's performance. She returns to her Emmy-winning part firing all her cylinders, demanding an "Italian dream" Vespa day and experiencing hallucinations mid-coitus. Then a sudden friendship with aristocratic expat Quentin (Tom Hollander) unpacks new emotional depths in Tanya's deep-pocketed wellness quest. "It's a good feeling when you realize that someone has money," she explains, "You don't have to worry about them wanting yours." It's a typical White Lotus line, at once oblivious and honest. Season 2 makes a convincing case that this heavenly-hell luxury franchise will be very pretty even when it's pretty familiar. Sicily looks lovely, but the tension is palpable. Are you looking at a postcard or a crime scene? Grade: B

Related content:

• The White Lotus feature: 'Sexier,' 'more sinister' season 2

• Jennifer Coolidge refuses to get cut off at Emmys, dances to play-off music instead

• The White Lotus' Murray Bartlett on playing a control freak who's 'lost his s---' and that shocking sex scene