It’s been a while since a show has compelled me enough to drag my “entertainment writer-hat” out of my closet, and seriously flesh out my two cents about it. Because, after all, a show is a show is a show. Nothing else. And, everyone has a right to their opinion—meaning what one person may find absolutely drab and pointless, might be the best thing another person saw! And that’s just how it goes, doesn’t it?

Well, The White Lotus season 3 is the best thing I’ve seen on television lately. And I write this even as we’re yet to see the finale episode that’ll air next Monday. So, clearly the show is a winner for me regardless of how it ends (very rarely does this happen).


Set in a lush “monkey-ridden” wellness resort in Koh Samui, Thailand, the show, true to it’s signature, begins with a death mark like the previous two seasons. But, soon after, it sheds its old identity like its trademark intro-music (which had many fans disappointed when they didn’t get to dance on it like they’d seen in multiple Instagram reels), and starts singing a totally different tune. Perhaps, in doing so, Mike White wanted to free himself from his self-created image or brand that he so successfully planted in our minds. Perhaps, he wanted us to be free of all ideas and just see the show.


And just the way life can only be understood in hindsight, we’re transported one-week-earlier, to the very moment when the madness began—on a boat, enroute The White Lotus—a place where all our dark secrets tumble out like marbles out of a broken glass jar. The best we can do? Just see them as they unravel.


While I’ve loved all the previous seasons of TWL, there’s something so mature about this season, that the previous seasons now seem infantile, in front of a season that stands tall like the golden Buddha statue in Bangkok, visible from every angle; from the canals, from the road, from the flyovers, and from the tall buildlings. It’s how Mike White has scraped so close to the bone of humanity that makes this season so juicy—a hearty affair that’s part induglent, part reflective, and every bit worth savouring to the last bite. His cocktail named “Being Human” is served with a sardonic punch on the rich-class and their burden of “identity,” a stirring take on female friendships and its politics (and literal politics too), a heady twist of desire and its limits (or limitations), with a foaming top that’s still searching for its place and substance. And, this cocktail is served with a cute little umbrella that’s not for its own sake but carries too much baggage of the past—something no one can actually throw out and truly enjoy the fucking drink!


The ones who do enjoy this cocktail, unassumingly being the key word here, can see what Mike White’s politics is all about—living while you’re dying.


The largest chunk of the cocktail belongs to the Ratliff family, and rightly so. They’re after all the most burdened by “who” they are. A legacy dotted with famous grandfathers, fathers, universities, and achievements, and money as it’s obvious outcome, the Ratliffs have it tough from the start. A man (Rick) smoking in front of Timothy is enough to bother him and his family (by default) and mentally form an “idea” of the man who’s doing it. Victoria believes herself to be absolutely right when she talks to Timothy dismissively about Rick, “And what does he have? Cirrhosis? Lung cancer? Some bimbo he met on the internet?” Timothy replying to her with “We have it good,” is ironic and so seeped in pain, that it’s not ha-ha funny, but a dark joke told aloud, in absolute silence.


Parker Posey plays Victoria Ratliff, the eccentric pill-popping, umbrella-over-her-head, forever squirming in “foreign” social situations, and perpetually-sedate-enough-to-not-feel-a-thing (even her husband’s troubles) woman, who has lost all touch with reality and does little else apart from lying on the bed. This is the closest Mike White has come to depicting someone who’s so busy “protecting” her and her family from everything that’s not decent (most people, according to Victoria), it’s caused her to float far far away from the shared fabric of humanity, to a dreadful place where she now lives in constant fear of the smallest things (her hiding her bag behind a cushion on that yatch for instance), and is doubtful of everyone, but herself. It’s a poignant gaze on how money, and more importantly identity can make one go even beyond terms like shallow or hollow, and live in a place where delusions of grandeur are mistaken for reality, and even wished to be reality, because one is too weak to face it. Where taking Lorazepams is normal. Where children being weird is dismissed with a laugh. Where the husband being distant is also tolerated with a “sigh” and a glass of wine to douse yourself in. Nothing matters if you don’t feel it, seems to be the mantra Victoria Ratliff lives by.


But everything matters, because one is in fact alive. At least till they’re dead. And Mike White shows us the cracks everyone is busy hiding or escaping from to live nothing but “decent lives.”


Timothy Ratliff’s troubles are far deeper than they appear to be on the surface like Victoria’s. While she’s an easy read and a complete “whacko” for anyone who interacts with her, Timothy has learnt to keep a respectable front in the world he functions. He walks with a head that’s held high, not of its own accord, but a legacy that’s pulling its strings on him even as the dead no longer turn in their graves. His Duke legacy, his grandfather’s and father’s achievements are so seeped into his present, he can hardly distinguish his life from theirs. A mere setback for which he can pay a price and free himself from, becomes a life and death situation for him, as it threatens not just him, but his whole identity he’s built by standing on dead shoulders. It’s unbearable, the heavy burden of past he carries and tortures himself with. But he can’t see a way out. He can’t be nothing. This world view is passed to his eldest son, Saxon (what a bold debut by Patrick Schwarzenegger) who “glorifies” his work to the point that he sees a deep abyss without it, a blankness he cannot face.


Saxon is by far the character with the most interesting graph, who starts with being an “asshole” who’d do any hole, especially the one that refuses him, to someone who’s gone to the limits of his desires and now feels the emptiness of it in his bones. It’s Mike White at his rawest, where he makes no bones about things that make us human—flesh and bones and the desire for it. But, he goes into the very deep end of of this desire, where one is faced, not with another’s face, but his own. And how does one live with one’s own face? One’s own soul, with nowhere to escape or hide? Perhaps by seeing it?


Lochlan, the youngest of the three is an 18-year-old kid with stooping shoulders, twichy facial features, curled up hair, and no sense of self, yet. Sandwiched between Saxon, the bully elder brother who wants him to “buff up” and be a real man, and Piper, the sensitive virgin sister who’s decided to leave everything and become a monk’s disciple to find her “purpose”, his bent spine paints a colourless picture. He’s yet to find his own true colours. And the first step is to fuck his brother, so that he can come out of his looming shadow. The way Mike shows this has many people disturbed, but if you’re even a bit curious, you’d know why he chose to show it in the most graphic manner possible. Because that’s how hard it is for a “sheltered” younger sibling to find his own way in the world. And that’s how hard it is for an elder sibling to see the harm their seemingly “harmless” or playful bullying is actually doing.


The friends’ trio is the most entertaining thread of the show, for female friendships are anything but “perfect” as shown in many shows. Mike White lays bare every single chasm between them, which they, at first try to cover with words of mutual admiration of how they’re all lucky, and privileged, and still so good looking! But as the show progresses, we see how each one harbours certain “thoughts” about the other one, told only when the one isn’t present. Words, spoken about the other “lightly” but stemming from a strong core of who they are. Laurie, who initially comes across as chilled-out, untainted by self-importance, identity, privilege, money, and class unravels into someone who’s steeped into it all the most. And it’s simply through her judgement of it all. Mike White sure sees the truth as many and not singular.


Then, there’s my most favourite character Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) with her buckteeth and her wide eyes who’s the most cleanest person in the show. She says it like it is, making her instantly likeable and free from all the excess baggage everyone else is carrying. Tied to Rick’s sadness, and her “idea” of being his savior, she’s still discovering if anyone can really save the other. And what if one is doomed to self-destruct and you can’t do anything about it? How does one accept this knowledge and live their own life to its potential? Will Rick (a fine-stroked silent performance by Walton Goggins) eventually let go of his own past, learn to live and have non-hedonistic fun? Will the feeble, goody-good Gaitok discover his inner strength and let go of his ideas of righteousness? Perhaps the finale will tell us.


The darkest, probably, the blackest cloud in the show is Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), who, supposedly on her quest to learn the Thai wellness and massage techniques, cannot learn the one, most basic thing—of letting her past be in the past. Mike White’s heady cocktail is now down to its last sips, and even as I write this piece, I know we’ve got a monk amongst us, who’s intelligent enough to make a show where it seems as though “nothing” is happening, because everyone else is busy being something.