The White Lotus, now back for a third series, could perhaps be best described as Death in Paradise for posh people. Most obviously, this is because its plots revolve around murders in an idyllic location – only with a far bigger budget, a much starrier cast and several episodes per story. But there’s also the fact that it follows the same pattern every time.
So it was that season three began this week, rather like its predecessors, with some lovely scenery, a dead body and a caption reading ‘One week earlier’. After that, we duly watched a bunch of rich, good-looking Americans arriving at a luxury White Lotus resort where they were welcomed by the resolutely smiling staff and a nervous manager, before gazing round and marvelling at the beauty of it all.
Following Hawaii and Sicily, the marvelling this time was directed at the beauty of Thailand, where the programme’s creator, writer and director Mike White turns his winningly satirical eye on the cult and jargon of wellness. Not that his latest group of guests needed much encouragement to ‘focus on self-care’ – because, again like their predecessors, they’re a complacently entitled lot. Indeed, when it comes to characterisation, the new series seems like variations on a well-established theme – not all of them major.
Jason Isaacs, for example, plays a driven plutocrat, somewhat incongruously called Timothy, who’s trying (and failing) to put work out of his mind temporarily in favour of some quality time with his wife and three children of varying degrees of social awkwardness. So far, these children appear to have only a single trait each, with one son priapic, the other introverted and the daughter moonily spiritual.
We also get a trio of glamorous middle-aged women, led by TV star Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), who constantly (and accurately) assure each other how great they look, while evincing an unmistakable brittleness. In the role of a couple inexplicably together are the raddled Rick (Walton Goggins) and his much younger British girlfriend Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), who he clearly didn’t pull thanks to his good-humoured charm.
The first episode felt mostly like an extended exercise in throat-clearing
There is, however, one difference from the previous series. Presumably (and understandably) confident that anyone who saw them is likely to trust him to deliver the goods eventually, White proceeds here much more slowly than before. As ever, these are obviously People With Secrets. Already, one of the middle-aged glamour pusses has developed a habit of retiring early to her bedroom with a load of wine and look of heartbreak. Timothy is now fielding calls from a nosy journalist apparently investigating some dodgy business dealings. Rick was last seen scrolling through photos of the resort’s elderly female owner on his phone. Yet in the past, setting up these little mysteries surely wouldn’t have taken White an hour.
As one of those trusting viewers, I’m in for the long haul. Even so, by the show’s admittedly high standards, this first episode was definitely disappointing. While The White Lotus’s customary qualities of visual splendour, top-drawer acting and beady observations of American smugness were gratifyingly in place, the result felt mostly like an extended exercise in throat-clearing.
Largely unnoticed by the TV commentariat, Channel 5 has been carving out a successful niche for itself as a broadcaster unusually content to serve a middle-aged, Middle-England audience. On Thursday, for instance, it brought us yet another of its gentle pictures of life in Yorkshire (a county it’s weirdly obsessed with); a documentary on the pros and cons of frozen food, with particular reference to the potato waffle; and Clare Balding taking a stroll along the banks of the river Dart. And all that before James May’s Great Explorers genially tackled Sir Walter Raleigh, setting out to explain how ‘one young Devon lad rose to dazzle Elizabethan England’.
By the end, the programme had served up a lucid, apologetically myth-busting biography of Raleigh as a man who didn’t put his cloak down for Queen Elizabeth, didn’t bring the potato to England and didn’t begin the British Empire. (‘Join me next week when I spoil Captain Cook,’ said the ever-affable May in closing.)
It was, though, in no rush to do so. Along the way, May stopped off regularly to investigate such Raleigh-related subjects as the astrolabe and the flintlock gun – which in practice meant that he met a series of middle-aged blokes with names like Alan and Charlie who’d made these things their hobbies and were more than happy to talk about them in some detail as they pottered about. Meanwhile, Raleigh’s sideline as a pharmacist allowed for plenty of cheerful jokes about haemorrhoids.
All in all, then, my advice for anybody looking to escape the moronic inferno of modern life would be not to bother with an expensive wellness retreat in Thailand. Just watch Channel 5 for a few nights instead.
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