Why the lockdown-born series White Lotus is your next binge watch

Holidays are not always what they’re cracked up to be.

How many times have you sat by the pool at a posh resort, book in your lap that you’re bored from half-reading, spending the afternoon people-watching instead?

Have you found yourself wondering, who are these other guests? What lives do they lead? The petty squabbles of the newlywed couple, the incessant demands on the wait staff of the overworked boss with a laptop sitting at the table, the frappuccino-sipping teenagers judging you just as hard as you’re judging them. How many times have you asked—are any of us having fun yet?

In the White Lotus, the latest series the world can’t seem to stop talking about, a picture-perfect luxury resort is no fun at all for its guests—leaving all the fun for us, the viewers.

It’s the latest series from creator Mike White, the guy behind Enlightened and School of Rock, and it’s a deliciously decadent satire available to binge exclusively on the OSN Streaming App in the region.

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In the first episode, a group of guests arrive at the idyllic Hawaiian resort, and it takes no time for each of them to begin finding fault with everything around them, everyone they are with, and everything within themselves. It’s got a star-studded cast—Alexandria Daddario (True Detective) Jennifer Coolidge (American Pie), Connie Britton (Friday Night Lights) and more.

Quickly, we learn how even the perfect getaway can’t fix what’s broken, especially when the people helping them fix it, beneath the smiling veneer, are broken themselves—headlined by Murray Bartlett’s Armond, the fastidious resort manager who quickly falls on a downward spiral.

“He’s basically me,” says Bartlett with a laugh. “The character is really brilliantly written. I am a people pleaser, but my character is a people pleaser in the extreme. I, like a lot of actors have worked in the hospitality industry, know what that feels like. And as you see what happens, the sort of the problems that that gets you into, it’s a fascinating thing to take these aspects of yourself or aspects that have a character that you relate to, and take them to an extreme, which is what I had the opportunity to do here.”

Creator Mike White was approached to do the show by HBO during the middle of lockdown, asking the creator of their previous cult hit Enlightened to come up with an idea for a show that wouldn’t get shutdown in the middle of a pandemic, something they could do all in one location. He was inspired, and wrote the entire show himself in two and a half months.

Having spent a lot of his life in Hawaii, he had the idea of following the ultra-rich on a holiday on the resort-heavy American state, and how unhappy they all are, and the darkness that leads to. But in a funny way, of course.

“I had always wanted to do a show just that kind of got into money and how money basically can like pervert even like our most intimate relationships and how money has such an influence within marriages, within the interactions with strangers and friends and loved ones, and I tried to get at that in different ways.”

What was important for White is that each of the characters, while flawed, was never completely to blame for their circumstances, nor completely blame-free.

“Even Armand, Murray’s character is put upon by all these demanding, entitled guests, but at the same time, he’s exploiting the people that work for him,” says White.

“I think that that was the fun part was exploring what’s bubbling under the surface,” says Daddario, who plays the newlywed bride Rachel, who is quickly realizing that her husband may not be what she’d hoped. “She’s really very, confused, and then very, very frustrated. But this isn’t the type of person to really be direct. When he won’t let go of the fact that they’re in the wrong room, she won’t say, ‘no, we’re staying in this room. This is a nice room, you’re being crazy’. That’s just not the dynamic that she has with her husband. And that was that was an interesting dynamic to play.”

For White, that’s the role of a great series—to hash out the water-cooler topics of the age while using character to show, even through stereotypes, that people are always people, at the end of the day, with layers, ridiculousness and pain, especially in a greatly flawed world.

“With a series, we can get an insight into all of these cultural conversations that are going on. But bringing in the human aspect to it the living flesh and blood reality of people in these kinds of power dynamics, as opposed to just kind of the essayist or the ideologues point of view on some of this stuff. That to me feels like a worthy role of fiction to explore that and remind people that we are humans and that that like that it’s difficult to put people into just boxes of victims or perpetrators, or, winners and losers in the cultural wars.”