"White Lotus," Year Two

Minor spoilers ahead.

The second "White Lotus" miniseries takes place in Sicily, where another set of American tourists are forced to confront some uncomfortable truths about themselves while on vacation.  This year the focus isn't on the class divide, letting both the locals and the visitors get involved in stories revolving around love and sex, with varying outcomes.  

Our major characters include three groups of tourists, a very uptight White Lotus manager, Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore), and a pair of ambitious prostitutes, Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and Mia (Beatrice Granno).  Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) from the first series is back, with a new husband Greg (Jon Gries), and a new assistant, Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), in tow.  We also have two rich couples, Harper (Aubrey Plaza) and Ethan (Will Sharpe), and Cameron (Theo James) and Daphne (Meghann Fahy), with very different outlooks on matrimony.  Finally, there are the three generations of the Di Grasso family, who are in Italy to search for their roots - grandfather Bert (F. Murray Abraham), father Dominic (Michael Imperioli), and son Albie (Adam DiMarco).  The prostitutes are our main linking characters, appearing in each story.

Like the first season, we have gorgeous locales, an incredibly talented cast, and a lot of pointed skewering of the little hypocrisies that everyone employs.  Mike White has a lot of fun taking aim at different aspects of his subject matter through the various characters.  The couples are his way to talk about fidelity and jealousy.  The Di Grassos embody generational differences in attitudes toward sex - and how none of that ultimately matters. Valentina is our example of what happens when sexuality is denied.  Tanya and Portia are both blinded by love, ultimately taking them to very unexpected places.  Lucia and Mia treat sex as purely transactional and are the least troubled characters of the lot.  They're the ones who understand best that anybody can be seduced, and perhaps on some level everyone wants to be.  The dark comedy is less biting this year, and there are several happy - or at least less downbeat endings.

This makes the season more watchable, but also significantly tamer than the first.  There are no truly hateable characters, no deeply uncomfortable topics being broached, and it's only in the last episode that anything truly intense and shocking happens.  The performances are good all around, with a notably higher caliber cast, but I didn't find anything on the level of Murray Barlett's work in the Hawaii season.  Jennifer Coolidge comes close, though.  Still, the writing remains very strong, and often very funny.  I think it was a good choice to have several potentially calamitous situations foreshadowed that never actually happen, and a lot of things are left open ended and ambiguous.  This is one of those shows that's probably best to watch live, because speculating how events will play out is half the fun.  

My biggest disappointment with the season is that some of the actors, like F. Murray Abraham, stayed on the sidelines and didn't have much to do.  Michael Imperioli has a promising storyline set up that doesn't really go anywhere.  There's also the fact that the White Lotus hotel staff are a smaller part of this season, with Valentina's story being fairly limited, and never affecting any of the guests.  On the other hand, I can see why Mike White would want to avoid setting the expectation that every season would have to involve the hotel staff.  Not all the White Lotuses should be as dysfunctional as the one in the first series.  

I'm looking forward to the next round, which White has already hinted will be about death.  Well, it will be about death more directly than the show has been so far.  There are also a couple of loose ends left here that it would be such a shame to not see the fallout from next season.  Until next time.

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