On 'The White Lotus'

It shouldn’t be too surprising then that screenwriter and director Mike White, best known for Jack Black vehicle School of Rock and his brief but beloved HBO series Enlightened, is one of the few artists alive who really understands the moment that we’re in. His colossal monster of a hit HBO series, The White Lotus, is among the most elegantly simplistic of narrative constructions I’ve come across: rich people go on vacation. And in this construction, White has stretched The White Lotus in its second season out to be a grandiose, surreal, operatic art-porn that literally says everything about the world that we’re inhabiting, right now, in 2022.