Horrible People I Couldn’t Stop Watching

A lthough The White Lotus turned up in the one real prestige slot in all of television — Sunday nights at 9 p.m. on HBO — I clicked on it without much interest. Indifference turned quickly into dislike. At first I considered the characters unsympathetic, but I was way off: They’re utterly loathsome. So why did I keep watching? The six-episode show’s writer-director Mike White kept slightly modulating his tone and focus in surprising, intriguing ways. What began as an apparent satire of new-plutocracy stereotypes turned into a hilarious black comedy, then a thoughtful study of disconnection and hollowness in a tech-obsessed era, and finally a tragedy about the slaughter of an innocent. It’s one of the best things I’ve seen on TV this year.

Now that the first season has concluded and a second is in development, I’ll assume you’ve seen it, so spoilers follow.

With each episode, White slyly adds nuance to his cast of horribles at a luxury resort in Hawaii — the role of the White Lotus is played by the Four Seasons Maui, where filming took place under lockdown. Behold, a spoiled rich bro (Jake Lacy) who clearly thinks of his new bride Rachel (Alexandra Daddario) as a sex doll. Over there: a humorless tech exec (Connie Britton) with a neurotic husband (Steve Zahn), a son (Fred Hechinger) who never removes his face from a screen and a college-girl daughter (Sydney Sweeney) who embodies smarmy, spoiled brattiness like a walking Instagram page. Oh, and there’s a silly old cat lady (Jennifer Coolidge) in a muumuu who is carrying around her mother’s ashes. In the background we barely notice the put-upon resort manager, Armond, who seems to exist only to say, “Yes, sir” and “Right over here, ma’am” and “I’ll attend to that right away.” Who notices servants?

Yet, as played by Murray Bartlett with a superb balance of repressed anger, naughty humor, and unexpected pathos, Armond turns out to be the main character of the whole twisted tale. We learn at the beginning of the series that someone has died, and it turns out to be poor Armond. He is the answer to White’s mischievous question: What if a mistake in a hotel booking led to someone being stabbed to death?

Armond is a gay Australian who epitomizes the friendly and helpful high-end servant class, but he makes two understandable mistakes that, in combination, cost him his life. It would be more exact to say that the demanding, haughty, despicable rich people unintentionally set a trap for him simply by being entitled jerks. Armond’s first mistake is to book the newlyweds into merely the second-most-dazzling suite you’ve ever seen instead of the slightly more fabulous one they had reserved. Shane feels so slighted that he presses for an investigation with an obsessiveness that makes Inspector Javert look chill. Armond’s other error is to look in a bag left behind on the beach by Olivia and her equally spoiled and languid college friend Paula (Brittany O’Grady). The bag contains drugs. Armond is an addict who has been clean for five years, but some temptations are too delightful — and too dangerous — to ignore.

White is an astute and probing screenwriter as well as a very funny one — his credits include the Jack Black comedy School of Rock and the underrated Ben Stiller dramedy Brad’s Status. He coolly ignores the clichés that would have grabbed a less interesting writer. Though two important characters are black, for instance, race plays no role here; White finds that class places a much heavier hand on the steering mechanism of our lives. Paula, who is black, begins an affair with a handsome young staffer, a native Hawaiian named Kai (Kekoa Scott Kekumano), but her whim leads him to ruin. Thanks to her, he tries to pull off a robbery, gets caught and arrested, and is never seen again. Oops. Rich people scheme, poor people pay. Drugs that strike the new aristocracy as harmless fun lead to uncontrollable addiction and death in less fortunate classes.

You don’t have to be Bolshie about class to appreciate what White has done here, because he is never thematically heavy-handed. He simply and plausibly lays out how the blitheness of today’s flip-flops-and-T-shirts aristocracy could plausibly destroy the lives of some of the proles who serve their every whim. And, given that virtually every character in this show seems to be the type of person who inhales champagne at Democratic Party fundraisers (Shane might be an exception), the show could also be described as a story of rich liberal hypocrisy. These people claim to vote for the interests of the working class, but then steamroll right over actual workers in their daily interactions with them.

What really sets White apart is the depth he reaches by putting himself on both sides of each conflict. He points out in interviews that he put his own surname in the show’s title as if to announce: I am one of these rich jerks the show is about. I am exactly the kind of lotus eater who stays in these resorts and barely considers how his actions might have unexpected repercussions on the staffers. He also puts something of himself into Armond — the grinning, servile sycophant who does whatever his social superiors demand of him until he breaks. (A lesser writer would, I think, have made Armond black, which would have placed race above class as the show’s animating force.) We laugh as Armond fights back, if only in the form of a practical joke, but it’s a lethal mistake. White observes that we all have to dance to somebody else’s tune sometimes, no matter how humiliating it may be to do so. He himself is the guy who did the bidding of the corporate blob when he wrote The Emoji Movie. Everyone wants to stand up for himself and declare: I’m a person, not just a cog in the economic machine. In a strikingly fresh way, White shows us just how risky it can be to do so.