The White Lotus is back - and it’s more delicious than ever

The White Lotus
★★★★½

The second season of The White Lotus wastes no time deep diving into the tension. In the opening scenes, we have a dead body on our hands. The only thing we know is that it isn’t Daphne (Meghann Fahy) because she’s the unlucky hotel guest who finds the body while swimming in the Ionian Sea, off the coast of Sicily.

In its first outing, Mike White’s delicious black comedy opened similarly: a dead body and, via flashback, the lingering mystery of whom it might be. Wrapped around that was a complex web of interpersonal tensions, hotel guests, hotel management, and the odd interloper. Equal parts soap opera and Shakespearean comedy/horror, The White Lotus 1.0 was an understandable hit.

Holidaying American couples Harper (Aubrey Plaza) and Ethan Spiller (Will Sharpe), and Cameron (Theo James) and Daphne Sullivan (Meghann Fahy) in The White Lotus.Credit: HBO/Binge

With the memory of the Hawaii-set first season in the rearview mirror, White has taken his travelling circus of romance and mystery to the south of Italy. This is the kingdom of hotel manager Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore), slightly neurotic and armed with a not-quite-lost-in-translation bluntness.

As the replacement for season one’s Armond (Murray Bartlett), she steps smoothly into his shoes. Armond was an almost alchemical creation. White’s fire starter who, when tossed into the garbage bin of eccentric, unbearable and even toxic guests, turned the lot into a mesmerising dumpster fire.

With almost Fantasy Island flair, the hotel guests file into reception in the opening scenes, alternately smiling and balking at Valentina’s unwitting (maybe?) insults. Meanwhile, two local girls, aspiring singer Mia (Beatrice Granno) and her working girl friend Lucia (Simona Tabasco), prowl the hotel’s grounds looking for a client for Lucia.

Beatrice Granno as Mia and Simona Tabasco as Lucia in The White Lotus.Credit: HBO/Binge

You have a slightly awkward group of four: Daphne, her husband Cameron (Theo James), Cameron’s college roommate Ethan (Will Sharpe) and his wife Harper (Aubrey Plaza). Then there are the three generations of the Di Grasso family: relentlessly farting grandfather Bert (F. Murray Abraham), son Dominic (Michael Imperioli) and grandson Albie (Adam DiMarco). And of course, the returning Tanya McQuoid-Hunt (Jennifer Coolidge), her now-husband Greg (Jon Gries), and her assistant Portia (Haley Lu Richardson).

The dramatic engine of The White Lotus is deconstructing the wealthy. Everyone here is exceptionally attractive (or at least meticulously groomed) and deeply dysfunctional. The only noticeable gear change from season one is a subtle transition for Coolidge’s Tanya, as selfish as she was anxiety-ridden when we first met her, who has shifted into a slightly more nuanced, more sympathetic character. A necessary note change, to be sure, as she emerges as the link between the two seasons.

The elegance of The White Lotus lies in its writing. White’s Enlightened, about a woman who tries to rebuild her life after a nervous breakdown, was almost like an appetiser to The White Lotus. This is a triumphant take-down of the darkest indulgences of humanity; deeply flawed people in toxic relationships who would, in such large numbers, be utterly unwatchable, if they were not knitted together so perfectly.

In its Hawaiian setting, The White Lotus played a slightly straighter line in tonal terms. In Sicily, however, White is writing a louder and clearer love letter to the country and its people, especially when it draws in tonal notes from Italian culture and mythology such as Sicily’s Moor heads, ceramic ornaments connected to a legend of romantic betrayal and revenge.

The second season of The White Lotus is delicious and like the first, full of the spirit of place. At times it feels like a living oil painting, or a postcard come to life, reminiscent of the geography-as-TV-porn masterpiece The Durrells. (And even its somewhat flimsy knockoff, Hotel Portofino.) But with next-level writing. And if you have to endure a punishing season in picturesque Sicily, there are worse people to do it with than Tanya McQuoid-Hunt.

The White Lotus is on Binge from October 31.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.