‘The White Lotus’ returns with an impeccable cast, to diminishing returns – The Boston Globe

It’s not that I disagree with what the show is saying. It’s that I find it too neat and too easy, even as each season reliably ropes an impeccable cast into a wickedly funny climax. And series creator Mike White, who writes and directs each episode, shows no signs of exiting this comfort zone any time soon — HBO has already renewed the series for a fourth season. But after viewing six of the eight episodes for the Thailand season, I’m finding it even harder to imagine where else White can take the concept. With a flash-forward opening that closes with the reveal of an unidentified dead body just like the first two seasons, the third go-around feels quite familiar, even with an ostensible shift in focus to a resort themed around wellness and self-care.

In a sense, maybe that’s the point: You can’t tell these people what to do or how to spend their time, so they’re going to treat your flagship Thai wellness retreat like any old hotel. Finance magnate Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs, doing a Benoit Blanc-style Southern accent) may have booked the reservation, but he balks at the optional-but-encouraged “digital detox” policy that would require him to surrender his cellphone. So he hangs onto it, as does his son/employee Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), who evokes a frat bro version of Patrick Bateman in “American Psycho.” The rest of the family — wife Victoria (Parker Posey, also with a mouthful of an accent), daughter Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), and younger son Lochlan (Sam Nivola) — are a little more agreeable to the hotel strictures.

The tensions that arise among the Ratliffs are more or less what we’ve come to expect from the series. As are the buried grievances between three friends (Michelle Monaghan, Leslie Bibb, and Carrie Coon) on a midlife crisis girls’ trip. As is the barely concealed disdain that grouchy Rick (Walton Goggins) visits upon his much-younger girlfriend, Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood).

What there isn’t, though, is any obvious equivalent for Jennifer Coolidge’s late heiress Tanya McQuoid, the chaotic carryover between the two prior seasons. On White’s end, it’s probably wise that he isn’t simply trying to duplicate Coolidge’s singular presence through another character, but the third season feels a little empty without her. Nobody invites that same strange combo of irritation and pity, so we’re left to just sneer at things like Saxon sending out for a deafening blender to mix his protein shakes.

Our new returning character is Natasha Rothwell’s Belinda, the beleaguered spa manager of the Hawaii location who spent the first season weathering Tanya’s whims. Initially, the series seems to position itself for a renewed focus on the hotel staff: we meet a security guard, Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong), and Mook (Blackpink’s Lalisa “Lisa” Manobal), the wellness consultant he’s smitten with. But these characters are thin at best, hardly translating to a more in-depth look at the hotel’s inner workings or a more salient social critique — and certainly not to any less screentime for the affluent hotel guests. For at least the initial six episodes, Belinda has little to do, and there’s not even much focus on the white hotel manager (Christian Friedel) who barely seems to speak the language of his subordinates.

It’s becoming hard to tell where the wealthy characters’ incuriosity ends and where Mike White’s own incuriosity begins, with so little attention paid to the process of running the hotel or the interior lives of the people who run it. This was a bit less of an issue in the show’s second, Sicilian season, which had relatively few hotel characters, but the staff’s resurgence here only replicates the problem of the first season: The non-white characters are awkwardly orbiting a story that regards them as props.

And it’s not that the guests are so much richer as characters. Any half-attentive viewer will clock the tensions between the three middle-aged women long before their reminiscing starts belaboring the point, and I spent the first few episodes worried that someone had finally found a way to waste Walton Goggins, whose sourpuss role here rarely leverages the raw charisma that even pokes through all his ghoulish prosthetics in “Fallout.” The problem is that the returns are diminishing, and fast. Each new season of “The White Lotus” has had one more episode than the last, yet the series has less to say than ever. It’s comfort food masquerading as social critique.

Even as White meanders in familiar territory, this Thailand chapter never exactly becomes an unfunny or poorly acted stretch of television. While I haven’t seen the final two episodes, the latter half of the season does start to maneuver the characters toward some audacious, inspired mayhem. But it’s tough to come away from these episodes without feeling that White really ought to hire some additional writers — if not to actually explore the peripheral characters, then to at least shake up what are starting to feel like rotating archetypes. There are only so many bleary mornings after, only so many strained hotel breakfasts where the cracks in a relationship begin to show.

THE WHITE LOTUS

Starring: Leslie Bibb, Carrie Coon, Walton Goggins, Sarah Catherine Hook, Jason Isaacs, Lalisa Manobal, Michelle Monaghan, Sam Nivola, Lek Patravadi, Parker Posey, Natasha Rothwell, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Tayme Thapthimthong, Aimee Lou Wood. On HBO/Max