The White Lotus Season 3 Episodes 1-6 Review

The White Lotus premieres Sunday, February 16 on HBO and Max, with new episodes debuting each Sunday through April 6.

In The White Lotus’ first two seasons of rich people behaving badly in beautiful places, creator Mike White definitely proved his thesis that wealthy people make a lot of their own misery (and it’s pretty fun to watch them meltdown over it). Two years after the satisfying conclusion of the Sicilian-set second season, the series travels to Thailand for a new batch of episodes that start strong but quickly get too relaxed for their own good. Despite 10/10 casting that includes Carrie Coon, Walton Goggins, Parker Posey, Jason Isaacs, and the welcome return of season-one all-star Natasha Rothwell, there’s a surprising lack of engaging stories this year. After the proverbial table is set with the guest’s Fantasy Island-like arrival at the resort, White keeps them grousing in the same lane for hours without much forward progression. There’s a glacial pace to the season’s storylines, and when they do happen to commingle, nothing of note really happens.

As with prior seasons, season 3 opens with a shocking event before turning back the clock to chart how we got to that moment within the confines of a week of luxury vacationing. However, unlike its Maui and Sicily counterparts, The White Lotus’ Thai location doesn’t have a charismatic manager like Murray Bartlett’s Armond or Sabrina Impacciatore’s Valentina serving as the firm hand at the center of operations. Instead, the resort is owned by high-maintenance wellness guru Sritala (Lek Patravadi), who is catered to by an obsequious hotel manager/personal assistant played by a rather understated Christian Friedel. The members of their staff are portrayed as very sweet and kind. But they’re underwritten when it comes to giving us a taste of how their non-work lives might, or might not, dramatically butt up against those of their pampered clientele.

Unfortunately, the main cast of guests aren’t a particularly funny or charming group of characters to spend a lot of time with, either. There’s a trio of life-long, back-biting friends (Coon, Michelle Monaghan, and Leslie Bibb) reconnecting for a midlife adventure together; sour-faced and grumpy middle-aged Rick Hatchett (Goggins) who seemingly hates his chatty, clingy, half-his-age girlfriend (Aimee Lou Wood); the entitled, wealthy, and squabbling Ratliff family from Texas; and White Lotus veteran Belinda (Rothwell), who’s training in Thai wellness techniques for several weeks with her adult son, Zion (Nicholas Duvernay), in tow. By the end of the first episode, Jennifer Coolidge’s spacey, self-centered Tanya McQuoid-Hunt is sorely missed. Her antics and scene-stealing performance tempered the self-seriousness of many of the other storylines and characters in seasons 1 and 2. I had hoped the brilliantly unhinged Parker Posey would step into the void left by White’s comedic muse, but she’s stuck playing a pill-addicted Southern matriarch who isn’t big enough or weird enough. And frankly, that’s a national tragedy.

Without a well-drawn character in the manager’s office to ground or unify the plots with even a slight sense of kismet, this season of The White Lotus comes across as almost too disparate and laid back. The characters are left to marinate in their individual inability to act on the problems they bring with them to the resort – and frankly, it gets boring. The stakes and the personal drama barely escalate during the episodes HBO made available for this review. It got to the point where I was mentally heckling the characters to “Do something!,” and that’s nothing I ever felt watching seasons 1 and 2. There aren’t even any well placed cliffhangers to goose audience interest until episode 6 – and that one’s success entirely depends on whether you’ve somehow become invested in Rick’s personal backstory (and I had not).

The bright spot of the season is Patrick Schwarzenegger’s frat bro with daddy issues, Saxton Ratliff. He’s descended from the same lineage of awfulness as the characters played, respectively, by Jake Lacy and Theo James in seasons 1 and 2. Schwarzenegger’s commitment to his character’s assholery is rewarded with a real jaw-dropper of a storyline that finally gets cooking by episode 5. Otherwise, the rest of the cast is just fine. No one gets too big, or too off-the-rails to move the excitement needle. It’s a lot of vanilla, self-absorbed characters sleepwalking through their plots, with no one coming close to matching last season’s standouts of old letch Bert Di Grasso (F. Murray Abraham), withering Harper (Aubrey Plaza), or naive-to-a-fault Portia (Haley Lu Richardson). And the Thai characters are never set up to call any of them out on their behaviors.

If the chili paste finally hits the dish in the last two episodes of season 3, I’m not sure it’s enough to salvage the whole thing. Right now, rather than wondering how any of these people might factor into the catastrophe that kicks off the season, I’m distracted thinking of where I can plan a vacation to save myself from these people.