Vacation Blues

The second season of Mike White’s satire about the world’s most manslaughter-y high-end resort chain relocates from Hawai’i to Sicily. Apart from the brand, the only holdovers are Jennifer Coolidge’s addled Tanya and White’s lightly concealed disdain for most of his subjects. (Michael Imperioli’s philandering LA dad and Theo James’s finance bro both come in for particularly cruel draggings.) The inner lives of the wealthy are sunlit and grotesque. Desire, both the horny and emotional kinds, circulates like norovirus or a forged euro. When death does finally come, it is a mercy kill. [REDACTED] has been too humiliated to go on (the bell tolls for OMG). As moralizing, The White Lotus is blithely hollow; as camp, it’s depressingly prurient. Maybe the third season can take place somewhere a little less obvious, like the Orkney Islands or Baku.