Missing the point? Moi?

It makes my head spin to think that we live in a world where something called the “White Lotus effect” exists. Maybe, as a critic, I’m watching Mike White’s hugely popular black comedy and taking away the wrong message — or perhaps I’m just too cynical to appreciate that a show that skewers the cold-heartedness and moral shallowness of the 1% can also just be appreciated for its beautiful settings and luxury amenities.

Whatever the reason, the figures indicate that for most people, and for the Four Seasons chain itself, The White Lotus means big business and jam-packed reservation lists wherever it chooses to take its story. The creators, including White, are only too willing to encourage links between the show and increased tourism. Spending time researching the next story at a five-star luxury resort in a breathtaking location is now one of the perks of the job.

Pity the fools like me who think of the show not as a luxury-tourism booster but rather as a satire of modern inequality that offers a digital age reminder of W Somerset Maugham’s famous description of the French Riviera: “A sunny place for shady people.” We can stay at home. For the rest of the world, every season of The White Lotus since its debut in 2021 has been a chance to start making bookings for your next holiday at an ultra-luxurious resort, ensuring that you, like Jennifer Coolidge, can let your hair blow in the wind as you take a picturesque Vespa ride, winding along the sun-drenched Sicilian coastline. Just don’t remind yourself of what happens to Coolidge’s character Tanya a few episodes after that Vespa ride and you’ll stay ignorantly blissful.

The show’s settings provide a stark visual contrast between the Edenic environment in which its wealthy characters find themselves and the dark psychological pressures that ultimately see them unravel. Audiences, however, have shown that while the plots of White’s dramedy certainly keep them engaged and guessing, it’s the locations that really stay with them.

HBO, Four Seasons and even White himself have put aside any possible nagging contradictions between the beauty of the exteriors and the ugliness of the interiors of its mostly unlikeable characters in favour of encouraging misguided post-show tourist bonanzas. HBO has announced an official partnership with the show, White now speaks of where the next seasons may happen in terms of where he’d most like to spend his time writing, and Gen Z audiences who can’t afford to live in apartments much bigger than a parking spot are squirreling away their savings to make pilgrimages to Four Seasons resorts in Hawaii, Sicily, and Thailand.

 It would be one thing if all of this were of the macabre, car-crash “dark tourist” kind, but this is popular sheeple tourism of a supposedly fun, family-friendly kind and no one seems to think that anything is rotten in the state of Denmark.

It all began back in 2021 after the show’s breakout first season, when The Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea experienced a whopping 386% increase in availability enquiries. That original location was chosen partly because, under Covid, it was both convenient for and familiar to White, who has a house on Kauai in Hawaii. Using the resort, which had been shuttered during the pandemic, put 400 people who had been at home and uncertain about their futures back to work. That is, by any measure, a good thing. In the context of the once-in-a-generation anxieties brough on by the pandemic it could have remained a “good news in dark times” story. Instead, it heralded the beginning of the idiocy as, in the four years since the show’s debut, every new visitor to the Maui Four Seasons has besieged staff with questions about The White Lotus, looking to be taken to the famed “Pineapple Suite” or shown a hat worn by Sydney Sweeney and the urn carted around by Coolidge.

The same phenomenon has occurred at season two’s location — the San Domenico Palace, Taormina, a Four Seasons hotel in Sicily — and Four Seasons Resort Koh Samui in Thailand, where third-season fans have already besieged the hotel with requests for upgrades to the $10 000-a-night villas featured in the show.

It’s not as though Four Seasons staff and execs aren’t aware of the irony of luxury tourists following in the footsteps of a show that takes sharp aim at the bubble of luxury tourism. As Lorenzo Maraviglia, the general manager of San Domenico, told Elle earlier this year, “For us, the focus has been, ‘Yes, we have people at the door. Now let’s make sure they see something else. Let’s make sure they don’t just have the Vespa ride Jennifer Coolidge had. Let’s make sure they also explore the art, the culture, and the food that we have to offer in this particular region.’”

That’s all very well and good, but I still can’t get past the fact that these hordes of luxury tourists shouldn’t be there in the first place — if you’re lusting after the amenities and locations in The White Lotus you’re fundamentally missing the point. And by partnering with these resorts the show’s creators have also lost the plot — you can’t take aim at the shallowness of uber-rich tourists and help to promote luxury tourism at the same time. Pick a side or accept that the original elements that made the show stand out are now just add-ons — no matter how dark you make the stories and how nasty you make the characters, viewers are just going to look at the villas and the views and start booking their dream holidays. If that’s the case, then the show may as well be a Travel Channel special.

The big takeaway used to be that, no matter how much money you have or how luxurious your vacation destination, you cannot escape the demons eating at what remains of your soul after all the glitz is stripped away. Now it’s all about the villas, the views, the water features, the staged dinner shows of stereotypical local culture, and the mai tais in the jacuzzi. The rest of it is just story getting in the way of the postcard shots.

If you want a real White Lotus travel experience, pay tens of thousands of dollars for a vacation in an ultra-luxurious resort in an envy-inducing exotic location. Watch as the embittered, resentful staff and locals set about helping to ensure that everything goes wrong from the moment you get there. See that, by the time you manage to get out of there, you’re just glad to be alive and have sworn to whatever higher power you now believe in that you’re going to be a better person, stop worshipping money and material things, and never leave your house again. Tell your friends that they won’t find what they’re looking for at the Four Seasons in Hawaii, Sicily or Thailand and that they’d be better served working on themselves at home, rewatching the first two seasons of The White Lotus and paying attention to what’s happening to the characters rather than getting blinded by the glow of the exteriors and the hotel-room finishings. That kind of White Lotus effect: priceless. The current White Lotus effect: just a click and a credit-card transaction away and about as memorable as an influencer’s over-staged, over-paid, and underwhelming Instagram story.  

From the May edition of Wanted, 2025