The Trailer For Season 3 Of “The White Lotus” Is Making Me Tense

It’s Christmas next week, and I don’t know about you guys, but I am stressed. Not about the holidays, but about the trailer for Season 3 of The White Lotus, which landed earlier this week. By now, fans will probably know that the show’s latest season will be set in Thailand, and I can’t help but be nervous about what misguided attempt at ‘social commentary’ awaits us this time. 

Am I being unkind? Maybe. To be fair, I won’t deny that The White Lotus is a wildly entertaining TV show that goes down with the ease of a chocolate eclair. But I’ve also never recovered from the show’s debut season, which copped well-deserved flak for being set in Hawaii while barely featuring Hawaiian people, thereby reproducing the power relations it seemed to want to critique. 

As Mitchell Kuga wrote for Vox, the show’s Hawaiian characters are really only present as plot devices. They exist, writes Kuga, only “in service of illuminating the inner lives of the series’ mostly white protagonists.” For example, in the very first episode of the show, the secretly pregnant hotel worker Lani (Jolene Purdy) gives birth to her baby in her white boss Armond’s office, which ends up prompting Armond to relapse into alcoholism. The point of Lani was solely to trigger Armond’s crisis, and that baby was born, we never see Lani again.

It’s fine, though, because the whole thing was ‘satire’, or so we were told. It may have mostly focused on the show’s wealthy white characters such as Steve Zahn’s spinning off the lines like “Obviously, Imperialism was bad, but that’s humanity”, but creator Mark White is poking fun at white American privilege… right?  The problem is that you can’t do that when you’re doing what imperialists tend to do anyway – push native Hawaiian people to the periphery while making white people front and centre. 

While a season about a new gaggle of cashed-up Americans heading to Thailand doesn’t sound as politically loaded as its Hawaiian counterpart, there’s a tonne of potential for some of the mistakes of Season 1 to repeat themselves. 

Will we, for example, be introduced to a Thai character who helps an American guest set a paper lantern in a stream of water, so that they can experience some kind of spiritual epiphany about the futility of working in a bank? Only time will tell. 

That said, the casting of Lisa from the hugely popular K-Pop band Blackpink as hotel employee would suggest that one Thai character, at least, will get a decent arc. Ultimately, a member of one of the biggest bands in the world probably won’t stand for a plotline akin to the Hawaiian employee in the show’s first season, so here’s hoping for a non-white local character that exists in all three dimensions. 

The White Lotus, I think, is best when it accepts its limits: there’s only so much that Mike White, who apparently filmed the first series of the show to “get out of LA”, and owns a property in Hawaii, can do in the way of critiquing white American privilege, when he himself has said that the joy he gets from being there is on the “backs of people who have had a complicated history with people like [him]”. 

My hope is that White has learnt from the mistakes of Season 1, and that this new season engages with the beauty and complexity of Thailand in a way that goes beyond throwing the odd Thai song over the credits. If we’re going to have a season in Thailand, we need Thai characters with their own interiority and fleshed-out storylines. Whatever happens, I’m begging you, Mike White: no more canoe scenes. And for God’s sake, not another close up of Steve Zahn’s d*ck.