This is the best White Lotus yet, no matter who dies ...Middle East

Having signed off its second series in 2023 with a murderous gang of gays, a triumphant swindling sex worker and the slip of a stiletto on a yacht, the hotly anticipated third series of The White Lotus has felt somewhat muted. Two years after its second series’ explosive Sicilian conclusion, Mike White’s runaway pandemic hit has returned, this time in Thailand, with a new crew of elite holidayers – but with Jennifer Coolidge’s exquisite Tanya McQuoid duly killed off, the show has lost its greatest comic talent and fan favourite.

Reviews have largely been positive, yet anecdotally I’ve heard a raft of complaints: it’s slow to get off the ground, it’s boring, the characters aren’t likeable, its tropes are tired. None of this seems to be enough of a problem to actually stop people watching – but it does lead people to lament the loss of both the hilarious first and sexy second series.

I can see that this instalment is a different beast. It’s subtle, it’s understated, and the new theme tune doesn’t make you want to lunge triumphantly around your living room waving your hands in the air. But, with only the finale to go, I firmly believe this is The White Lotus’s best round yet – it’s so magnificent that I almost don’t care who dies.

Despite initial appearances, this series does have many of the mainstays of the previous two. There’s bacchanal drinking and drug-taking and debauched and taboo sex – where in series one hotel manager Armond (Murray Bartlett), high on ketamine, performed a sex act on his employee that I am too embarrassed to name, and in series two a graphic shot revealed that Jack (Leo Woodall) was not, in fact, Quentin’s (Tom Hollander) nephew, in this third series there was a drugged-up incest scene between conservative older brother Saxon (Patrick Schwarznegger) and naïve younger brother Lochlan (Sam Nivola).

To replace Tanya’s melodrama there’s the arch southern drawl of the brothers’ mother, played by Parker Posey, decrying her daughter’s interest in “Booodhism” and longing for her stolen lorazepam. Rather than the marital tensions between two couples in series two and the louche intellectualism of series one’s Olivia (Sydney Sweeney) there’s the strange relationship between soul-bearing Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) and bitter older boyfriend Rick (Walter Goggins), and the toxic narcissism of three female girlfriends.

But these features are not what makes the series fly. Rather, it’s the fact that it now has enough of a foundation that it can fully settle into its identity as a contemplative, profoundly existential study of the darkest parts of humanity. White has said that while the first series explored money (its class and wealth dynamics have been the most pronounced of the three) and the second, sex (its voluptuous Italian setting no coincidence), the third is focused on the theme of death. With it, it’s clear to anyone watching, we’re being asked to contemplate the soul and the meaning of life, all via White’s longheld interest in Eastern spirituality.

One criticism levelled at The White Lotus is that it exists in a bubble: that its makers are not adequately removed from the world it is trying to satirise. But the bubble is deliberate. It’s not a true eat-the-rich show – rather, the smooth, contained space of a luxury holiday resort is a vessel in which to explore these big themes that elsewhere would get bogged down in material problems. By removing the question of money and everyday struggle, all that’s left are the relationships, dynamics and psychologies of the characters that, unsympathetic as they often are, are still subject to the same emotional and spiritual forces as the rest of us.

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This series takes that pressure-cooker premise further by reducing major plot points and big reveals in favour of an extremely slow burn. Everything is bubbling under the surface, and no tension can truly be released until the characters leave the resort: Tim Ratliff’s (Jason Isaacs) imminent downfall and suicidal ideation; Kate (Leslie Bibb), Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) and Laurie’s (Carrie Coon) no-longer-viable friendship; the mysterious reappearance of Tanya’s husband Greg, now Gary (Jon Gries), who plotted to kill her in series two. There’s backstory and there’s anxiety and there’s resentment, but nothing much, still, has actually happened – save for a swiftly resolved security breach and a couple of rogue shags. It’s truly masterful to sustain a TV show on monkey metaphors, Buddhist aphorisms and feral snakes alone.

The White Lotus is like a haiku – its limitations are also its strengths. It’s no coincidence the idea was conceived during Covid, when worldwide lockdowns halted day-to-day life but whose claustrophobia catalysed personal breakthroughs. Of course, the pay-off will be in the finale when we find out whose body was floating in the pool and who pulled the trigger on what is, I suppose, the opposite of Chekhov’s gun. But it’s hugely to The White Lotus’s credit that I would gladly watch this season many times over, without a murder in sight, and still find it has more to say.

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