Sex and murder check in to The White Lotus

Racial politics is so last season. This time it's all about the battleground of the bedroom. The nihilism is on the house.

Mike White sticks the landing... again.

Your pleasure receptors will be working overtime when viewing the second installment of Mike White’s Emmy-winning tragicomedy, The White Lotus. This time, the anthology takes its circus of the elite and malcontent out of Hawaii, and into the gilded city of Sicily. 

Season one was always going to be a tough act to follow, but White, who acts as the sole writer and director on every episode of the series, sticks the landing and settles on brilliance. 

The framework is the same: once again, we open with death! (Multiple this time, oooh). A mysterious body is dragged from the cerulean waters of the hotel beach bar, as curt manager Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore) watches on. 

“It’s fine,” she says. “The ocean is not hotel property.” 

The series flashes back to the week prior. And much like the first season, you pretty much forget that this whole thing is a murder mystery within ten minutes of meeting the hotel's cast of pleasure seekers.

Sorry, a whodunnit will always fall short of the pleasure of fraught intimate relationships that aren’t your own and watching the lives of the wealthy unravel. 

A new hotel team awaits guests in The White Lotus season 2.

First, there’s the tense quartet of which season 2’s hinges. Ethan (Will Sharpe), the newly-minted, submissive, “original incel”, has accepted a vacation invite from his former college roommate Cam (Theo James), an alpha investor that’s part Patrick Bateman, part Love Island contestant.

They’ve brought along their wives. Ethan’s wife Harper (Aubrey Plaza) is a well-read, bolshy employment lawyer riddled with neurosis and skeptical of the shallow loved-up relationship between Cam and his blithe wife Daphne (Meghann Fahy), a glamorous, oblivious housewife. 

Dom (Michael Imperioli) Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and Mia (Beatrice Grannó) in The White Lotus.

Next we have the three generations of Di Grasso men, who have traveled to Sicily from Los Angeles to learn about their heritage. Grandfather Bert (played delightfully by F Murray Abraham) is an embarrassingly horny but undeniably sweet 80-something whose raison d'être is to flirt with every woman with a pulse. His son, Dom (played by The Sopranos’ Michael Imperioli) (who still has it by the way), is a sex addict that has made a pig's ear out of his relationship with his wife and daughter through his infidelities. Then there’s Albie (Adam DiMarco), Dom’s gentle Stanford-educated son, clued up on gender politics and terrorised by his elder's sexual insatiability. 

Sex, that’s what White is preoccupied with pronging at this season. Racial politics is last season’s tortured muse. 

 “I refuse to have a bad relationship with women,” Albie tells Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), his love interest at the hotel, who is the personal assistant to… Tanya McQuiod (Jennifer Coolidge). 

Oh yes! She’s back and more unmoored than ever. Tanya is married that flop love interest from the end of season one, Greg (Jon Gries). Good news (for him) is that he is no longer dying, but (bad news for everyone else is) his second chance at life has made him mean and inconsiderate. The reaper may have spared him, but the bargaining chip was marrying tempestuous Tanya. 

Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) and Greg (Jon Gries) in The White Lotus season 2.

Then, there’s the rich addition of Italian characters, who speak in their native dialect. We have hotel manager Sabrina, a professional who couldn’t be further removed from Emmy-winning Australian Murray Bartlett’s lawless character in season one. And Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and Mia (Beatrice Grannó) two, sparkling, naughty locals. Lucia is a sex worker prowling the hotel for guests, and Mia is an aspiring singer. 

In season two, the bedroom is the battlefield. It’s all about sex. Why we have it, who we choose to have it with, how we use it as leverage to get what we want, and how we use it to destroy each other. It’s everywhere. 

The ceramic vases of Moor’s Head, a local legend about a beautiful woman who decapitates her lover after finding out he was married with children, watch the guests from all vantage points through the suites of the Sicilian White Lotus. 

Mike White is a writer with an acute observational lens. His dialogue rings with the well-earned tenor of somebody that’s spent most of their life as a spectator, privy to the conversations of the whiners and the unrepentant. He is also, markedly, attuned to young people, in an in the know  kind of way (Sydney Sweeney and Brittany O’Grady’s characters in the first season were inspired by the It Girl contrarian podcast Red Scare). 

Sydney Sweeney and Brittany O’Grady in The White Lotus.

This season, Gen Z are plagued by nihilism. Over dinner with Albie, a driftless Portia waxes that she just wants to have fun but she can’t, because nothing feels fun anymore. “I’m sick of fucking TikTok and Bumble and screens and apps and bingeing Netflix. I just want to meet someone that’s totally ignorant to the discourse.”

A later conversation at breakfast echoes a conversation I force upon my boyfriend on a fortnightly basis. “Is everything boring?” she says. “I just feel like there must have been a time when the world had more, mystery or something.” 

Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) in The White Lotus season 2.

“Now you come somewhere like this and it’s beautiful and you take a picture and you realise that everybody’s taken that exact same picture from that exact same spot and you’ve just made some redundant content for stupid Instagram. 

You can’t even get lost anymore because you can just find yourself on Google Maps.”

Season Two of the White Lotus can be streamed on Binge. The first episode is available on October 31 and will drop weekly. We had a four-episode preview in order to write this review.