The White Lotus' "Quality White Mess" speaks volumes about the TV we consume

The Daily Beast

Issa Rae tweeted Sunday that "The White Lotus = quality white mess + (Natasha Rothwell) being brilliant. Everything I want."  Mike White's HBO drama's "brand of Caucasian chaos adds a fresh layer of metaphysical mess: COVID-19 cases climbed in no small part due to the kind of privileged tourism the show depicts," says Tirhakah Love. "The show winks and nods at these ills, from water shortages for Hawaiian natives as resources are rerouted to luxury hotels like the one in the show to the incessant need to flex on the gram when a filter just isn’t enough. Certainly, there does seem to be a moral center: characters like 'the one brown friend' of the wealthy Mossbacher family, Paula (Brittany O’Grady), and spa manager turned unofficial grief counselor Belinda (Rothwell), negotiate their ability to resist and transcend the uber-capitalism of their environment—but when the hour is done, it feels icky to read tweets and articles from indigenous Hawaiians begging people not to travel there. But the Hollywood machine will inevitably churn. And let’s be frank: Quality White Mess is very much our thing. Nothing hits quite like a pumpkin-tanned Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) monologuing on lost love and onions; or emasculated Mossbacher patriarch Mark’s (Steve Zahn) oozing anxiety over his potentially cancerous twig and berries, on full-frontal display in the season’s first episode; or the shock of catching hotel manager Armond’s (Murray Bartlett) tongue running laps around his employee Dillon’s (Lukas Gage) butthole. There’s a reason why it works so well, and why the 'Golden Age of Television' was defined by Quality White Mess like The Sopranos, Mad Men, or Breaking Bad. It can be invigorating when what we know about certain white people’s obtuseness is confirmed by the art we consume. It’s even more satisfying when television ratchets up their seemingly lifelong existential crises into shambolic, gut-busting hours of television. The Golden Age was a pivotal time not only because it felt like the height of 'appointment TV viewing'—that halcyon period between 2007 and 2017 when it seemed like virtually everyone would sit around the Twitter machine guffawing at the relentless TV drama whites would create and undoubtedly make worse—but because it wasn’t just white people digging into premium offerings. It signaled something that Black TV viewers had known for years: We will pay for Quality White Mess. American media is shamefully white, which of course has had the long-term impact of non-whites having to seek themselves out in the shadows of celebrated popular media....We have to be able to find joy in the ugliness of a Eurocentric world that ultimately seeks our destruction; ergo, 'Quality White Mess + Natasha Rothwell’s brilliance.' It’s seldom that that capacity for experience is reciprocated in the same ways."

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• Why do viewers like watching rich people be messy?: "It's not a new concept, of course," says Bianca Betancourt. "Shows such as Dynasty were some of the first to pave the way for series that center on the drama and spectacle of the upper class. In the last decade and a half of television, however, shows like Gossip Girl (the original) and Succession have perfected the art of showcasing the 1 percent's self-absorbed delusion and the drama that can follow. In essence, watching the rich not just be rich but also be gloriously and categorically messy amid their personal and professional lives has become the addictive television fodder we just can't get enough of. If any new series has perfected the art form of media critiquing the upper echelon, it's HBO Max's latest dramatic offering, The White Lotus. The six-episode limited series is dubbed a 'social satire' that showcases a group of affluent individuals—including a mourning middle-aged woman (Jennifer Coolidge), a depressingly incompatible pair of newlyweds (Jake Lacy and Alexandra Daddario), and your classic rich suburban family helmed by a girlboss-esque matriarch (Connie Britton, Steve Zahn, Sydney Sweeney, and Fred Hechinger)—as they attempt to enjoy a luxurious stay at an exclusive Hawaiian resort. While Gossip Girl and Succession analyze the lives of the wealthy through dazzling distractions (i.e., designer fashion or the waning allure of the media industry), The White Lotus is layered in its approach to highlighting the disconnect between the rich (and let's be honest, rich white people) and the working class."
• The White Lotus is the searing satire on wealth we deserve: "Everyone in The White Lotus is a foil for someone else at all times — and within that, those foils shift, just as they do in actual society under capitalism," says Chloe Stillwell. "One day someone is up, the next they are down. One day someone is your enemy, the next they are your business partner. It is a metaphor for the lack of morality within capitalism. You could even see the overall play on death in the show as a metaphor for death capitalism, a satire on the inevitable demise of society that seems unavoidable at the present moment without significant shifts in culture. You will have to watch and hopefully enjoy the dark, funny and hallucinatory ride that is The White Lotus to find out which of our loveably hatable characters is fated to meet their end, but what we do know is that a second season has been ordered by HBO, which will be an anthology at a new White Lotus property. Only time will tell what new existential realities of our society will evolve to be mocked, which is a depressing thought, but at least we will get some more grade A satire out of it."
• Murray Bartlett is finally getting his due thanks to The White Lotus: "That Bartlett stands out amidst a cast that includes Jennifer Coolidge, Connie Britton, Natasha Rothwell, and Steve Zahn — all masters of their craft, seemingly born with impeccable comedic timing — is a feat unto itself," says Jude Dry. "Like Ralph Fiennes in The Grand Budapest Hotel or John Cleese in Fawlty Towers, Bartlett’s Armond is the ringleader of a three-ring circus that he well knows could topple over at any moment. Under Bartlett’s inspired performance, Armond slowly devolves from a duck paddling vigorously to maintain an utterly placid surface into a vengeful bully as obstinate and narcissistic as the ones he’s been wrangling."
• Mike White sees a little of himself in each of The White Lotus characters: "They're all very similar to me," he says. "I mean, there's a certain part of me in each of the characters, I think. There are some more than others, but I definitely feel like my job as a writer is to try to lean into the ways that I relate to that character, as opposed to just trying to create a character totally outside of something that I can relate to."