The first series of The White Lotus was a “lockdown treat” – a comedy-drama about the ghastly ways of the super-rich, set in a five-star resort in Hawaii, said Ed Power in The Daily Telegraph. Now, it’s back, but this time the action unfolds in a luxury hotel in Sicily, and there is a new cast.
The only familiar faces are Jennifer Coolidge, who returns as the eccentric heiress Tanya, and Jon Gries, her series-one lover. As before, the overprivileged American holidaymakers are drawn with “gimlet-eyed precision”, from a nerdy professional couple to a multigenerational family of Italian-Americans making a misty-eyed visit to the land of their forefathers.
True, the series (on Sky Atlantic and Now) suffers “from all the characters being different flavours of unlikeable”, and the European ones (who include a Bertie Wooster-ish Englishman played by Tom Hollander) are a bit on the flat side; but at its best, it offers “brilliantly bawdy fun”.
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It is fun to watch, said Abby Robinson in the Radio Times, but it “lacks the bite” of series one, which thrived in particular on the sparring between the hotel manager Armond (Murray Bartlett) and a particularly annoying guest.
Still, “there is nothing more enjoyable to watch on television right now”, said Nick Hilton in The Independent. “Whip-smart, sexy and with an artistic sentiment as relentlessly focused on audience gratification as the lowest-denominator reality TV: this is as moreish, and mouth-watering, as a big bowl of spaghetti alle vongole.”