HBO’s The White Lotus Season 2: Some excellent bodies cringe

White Lotus assume we will all fall for the same trick twice. Like its first season, the hit HBO comedy series begins with a corpse on the grounds of an idyllic resort before returning to show us the week leading up to this mysterious person’s death. Just like the first part of it, it’s all a ruse: Sure, you’ll find out who’s dead, but if you’re expecting a thriller or a mystery, you’d be wrong. Instead, it mainly focuses on the evil and self-destructive behavior of a group of wealthy tourists vacationing at the luxury hotel of the same name White Lotus as they drink, spend, game, and work their way toward some kind of oblivion. Eventually someone dies, but the first victim is always you. White Lotus always kill you, the viewer, first. With shrinking.

White Lotus is an anthology series, each focusing on a different location and cast. The first season is set in Hawaii; The new season, which premieres this weekend, will premiere in Sicily. While the two characters overlap, the hotel chain is all that ties the seasons together, and each can be enjoyed independently of the other. So far, both are very annoying.

Take a look at some of the people and changes introduced in the new installment of White Lotus:

• The Di Grasso Man: Dominic (Sopranos‘ Michael Imperioli), his Stanford graduate son Albie (Adam DiMarco), and his goofy father Bert (F. Murray Abraham). The trio seem to have come to bond father and son between generations, but their vacation seems to be talking about the downfall of Dom’s family – his wife is bailed on the trip and seems to hate him, and Dom has hires Lucia (Simona Tabasco), a local prostitute, to discreetly spend the night with him – a secret The White Lotus Hotel is simply too small to keep.
• Cameron (Theo James) and Daphne (Meghanne Fahy) Babcock with Ethan (Will Sharpe) and Harper (Aubrey Plaza) Spiller: Cam and Ethan are former college roommates who no longer have anything in common, but have decided to go rest with them wives. The two are immediately drawn into a tug-of-war over performative masculinity, when newly rich Ethan tries to pretend he’s comfortable with Cameron’s alpha-bro rich boy mindset, and when Harper battles struggling to understand why they were there and Cameron casually harassing her, naked when they had a moment.

Photo: Fabio Lovino / HBO

• Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) and Greg (Jon Gries), the only characters to return from season 1, arrive in Sicily when their happy love affair from the previous season begins to turn sour. In their room, a prolonged cycle of dissatisfaction caused by Tanya’s narcissism and Greg’s neglect leads to the third victim being Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), Tanya’s assistant, who is forced to hide in the dark. time they stay.

This sounds exhausting, and it would be, if it weren’t so funny. Creator Mike White is a writer known for his whole history as Survivor contestant (two of his fellow contestants, Kara Kay and Angelina Keeley, guests on the premiere), his incredibly empathetic storytelling (his previous HBO series, Enlightenis a work of reflection) and his sense of humor (“It’s a penis, not a sunset!” exclaimed one character while disparaging the look of his genitals).

All three of these aspects are present in White Lotus: Even at their most obnoxious, when they drag everyone around them down, the characters never seem to be written out of a place that is as despised, deserving as they could be. In a way, it makes their demise much more tragic, satisfying, or damning. Happiness is right there: in the partner they bring with them, the members of their family, the beautiful land they are fortunate to spend time in. However, they chose to turn away, and we were heartbroken because we knew they would.

In White Lotus, going on vacation is a revealing act. That’s what happens when people start consuming a place, and that place ends up consuming them. Here’s why it’s important that the story focuses on the ultra-wealthy: Money is an accelerator, like kerosene. Through this perfect vacation, they find themselves, like that one Stars songspontaneously ignited simply because there was nothing left to burn.