“The White Lotus” visits a new resort in Thailand in season three

With “Succession” finished and “the righteous gems” that are finishing, “The White Lotus” is the last show that stands among HBO’s wealth. It is perhaps the purest expression of the subject’s appeal that lets us drink in the decadent lifestyle in one percent without feeling guilty or depressed, because we also get to feel the guard superior that we are not so self -absorbed and out of pipe Like every season’s bunch of money malcontents. For Thailand-Set Third Season, which premieres Sunday at. 21 at HBO and Max, it is business as usual on the eponymous hotel chain: Beautiful people in beautiful places give us the beautiful insurance that our worldview is correct and our assumptions undisputed.

It’s not that I disagree with what the show is saying. It’s that I find it too neat and too easy, even when each season reliably rope an impeccable role crew in a wicked fun climax. And the series creator Mike White, who writes and directs each episode, shows no evidence of leaving this comfort zone soon – Ho has already renewed the series in a fourth season. But after watching six of the eight episodes to the Thailand season, I find it even harder to imagine where otherwise white can take the concept. With a flash-forward opening that closes with the reveal of an unidentified death body, just like the first two seasons, the third round feels quite well known, even with a seeming shift in focus to a resort theme around wellness and self-care.

In a way, that might be the point: You can’t tell these people what to do or how to spend their time, so they have to treat your flagship Thai Wellness Retreat as any old hotel. Finance Magnat Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs that makes a Benoit Blanc-style southern Accent) may have reserved the reservation, but he Balder on the optional-but-enclosed “Digital Detox” policy that would require him to surrender his mobile phone. So he hangs on it, just like his son/employee Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), which provokes a frat bridge version of Patrick Bateman in “American Psycho.” The rest of the family – wife Victoria (Parker Posey, also with a mouthful of an accent), daughter Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) and younger son Lochlan (Sam Nivola) – is a little more comfortable for the hotel’s strings.

The tensions that arise among Ratliffs are more or less what we have come to expect from the series. Like the buried complaints between three friends (Michelle Monaghan, Leslie Bibb and Carrie Coon) on a midlife crisis girls. As it is hardly hidden contempt that Grouchy Rick (Walton Goggins) visits his much-young girlfriend, Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood).

What is not, however, is somewhat obviously equivalent to Jennifer Coolidge’s late heir Tanya McQuoid, the chaotic transfer between the two previous seasons. At White’s end, it is probably wise that he not only tries to duplicate Coolidge’s unique presence through another character, but the third season feels a little empty without her. No one invites the same strange combination of irritation and pity, so we are left to just snow on things like Saxon that send out a deafening blender to mix his protein shakes.

Our new recurring character is Natasha Rothwell’s Belinda, the fated spa manager of the Hawaii location, which spent the first season of weathering Tanya’s whim. Originally, the series seems to be positioning a renewed focus on hotel staff: We meet a security guard, Gaitok (Tayme ThapThimthong) and Mook (Blackpinks Lalisa “Lisa” Manobal), the wellness consultant he is beaten with. But these characters are thin at best and hardly translate into a more in-depth look at the hotel’s inner work or a more prominent social criticism and certainly not to less screentime for the wealthy hotel guests. At least the first six episodes have a little to do, and there is not even much focus on the white hotel manager (Christian Friedel), who hardly seems to speak the language of his subordinates.

It becomes difficult to see where the obscurity of the wealthy characters ends and where Mike White’s own obscurity begins, with so little attention directed at the process of running the hotel or the inner life of the people who drive it. This was a little less of a problem in the show’s second Sicilian season that had relatively few hotel figures, but the staff’s resurrection here repeats only the problem of the first season: the non-white characters are awkward orbiting a story that considers them as props.

And it’s not that guests are as much richer as grades. Any half -attention viewer will bell the tensions between the three middle -aged women long before their memory starts Belary the point, and I spent the first few episodes that were worried that someone had finally found a way to waste Walton Goggins, whose Sourpuss role rarely exploits the raw charisma that even sticks through all his ghoulic prosthetics in “Fallout . ” The problem is that the return is falling and rapidly. Every new season of “The White Lotus” has had one more episode than the last, but the series has less to say than ever. It is comfort food that masks as social criticism.

Even when White bends on well -known territory, this Thailand chapter never becomes exactly an unhappy or badly traded TV. Although I haven’t seen the last two episodes, the last half of the season begins to maneuver the characters against some bold, inspired chaos. But it’s hard to get away from these episodes without feeling that White should really hire some additional writers – if not exploring the peripheral characters, at least shaking up what’s starting to feel like rotating archetypes. There are only so many unclear mornings after, only so many strained hotel breakfast where the cracks in a relationship begin to show.

The white lotus

Starring: Leslie Bibb, Carrie Coon, Walton Goggins, Sarah Catherine Hook, Jason Isaacs, Lalisa Manobal, Michelle Monaghan, Sam Nivola, Lek Patravadi, Parker Posey, Natasha Rothwell, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Tayme Thapthimthong, Aime Ladte Let. At HBO/Max