"White Lotus" on HBO Max

[nuxvomica]

This was a surprisingly engaging series despite the slow pacing and unlikable characters. I started watching and would pause to watch something else when the cringe-worthiness of the scenes and the self-involvement of the characters became too much to stomach. But I always returned as I wondered how these people would end up.

The story concerns three parties and their stay at an expensive Hawaiian resort: a husband and wife, both with high paying jobs, their asocial son and prickly daughter, and her tag-along friend; a young couple on their honeymoon--the wife a struggling journalist, the husband, a wealthy, entitled jerk; a wealthy basket case who has brought her recently deceased mother's ashes for release to the ocean. Among the hotel staff, there's a manager in recovery, a spa manager with ambitions to start her own business, and a native Hawaiian whose family once owned the land on which the resort was built. The interplay between them all has mostly disastrous but, at least in one case, unexpectedly positive results.

The limited series could easily have replaced "Lotus" with "Privilege" in the title as we see how wealth and privilege can have sometimes subtle yet toxic effects on even the happiness of the well-to-do, though the effects, of course, are far worse on their subservient victims. Worth watching, I think, for the glimpse it gives into the messiness of privileged lives, which most of us are living to some extent, and often obliviously so.