The White Lotus season three review: Mike White uses the same old, tired tricks

“What if this life is a test, to see if we can become better people?”

It’s an earnest question from an impressionable 17-year-old teen boy to his older brother, a loutish, unjustifiably confident finance bro who probably listens to Joe Rogan, and met with an incredulous “no!”.

The question is a somewhat reductive but not entirely wrong encapsulation of Buddhism, which features throughout the third season of The White Lotus as it moves the action to Thailand where rich Americans check in for a taste, but only a smidge of a slice of a taste, of Eastern spirituality while still drinking poolside margaritas and acting culturally superior.

The characters are no more enlightened than the privileged prats of its first two instalments and you know that they will leave exactly as they came — not better people.

The White Lotus, written and directed by Mike White, specialises in skewering rich arseholes who range from clueless to malignant, while playing tourist in a lush, expensive resort designed for the whims of people with more money than sense.

By now, White knows what audiences expect of him and for the latest season he delivers more of the same. For the fans — and they are legion — it will scratch that same itch but definitely not a new one.

It’s rife with repetition and caricature, but that will be more than enough for many viewers. That’s exactly what they loved about the previous seasons and likely will be again about an already green-lit season four.

The new characters include Kate (Leslie Bibb), Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) and Laurie (Carrie Coon), three forty-something women who have been friends since high school and like to pretend their histories are enough to sustain relationships that have drifted.

Jaclyn is a famous TV actor while Laurie, newly divorced, is a high-flying lawyer in New York City. Kate now lives in Texas and goes to church every Sunday and may or may not have voted for Donald Trump, which appals her coastal friends.

They clink champagne glasses and gossip about the hot Russian attendant but they secretly-but-not-so-secretly hate each other. It’s a familiar dynamic that we’ve all seen before.

Then there are the moneyed Ratliffs from North Carolina, this season’s version of the Mossbachers from Maui. Dad Timothy (Jason Isaacs) is a wealthy businessman whose financial empire is on the verge of collapsing and with a little potential jail time thrown in.

The rest of the family have no idea, including mum Victoria (Parker Posey), an old-school American Southerner who espouses “good values” while popping benzos just to sleep or, god forbid, to interact with strangers.

Daughter Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) is the reason they’re in Thailand, she wants to interview this monk for her university thesis project, while obnoxious older son Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger, who at one point dons a printed shirt almost the same as his dad wore in Twins) is trying to turn his younger brother Lochlan (Sam Nivola) into a man’s-man.

The stand-out character is Aimee Lou Wood’s Chelsea, a young, non-judgemental young woman who is genuinely in love with her much older boyfriend, the slippery Rick (Walton Goggins). She’s the only guest who you don’t want to hate — she actually seems normal?

Natasha Rothwell reprises her character of Belinda from the Maui season, one of two returnees but the other can’t be mentioned yet.

There are also Thai characters who are mostly staff and given little precious to do other than to serve. One romantic subplot between Mook (Blackpink’s Lalisa Manobal) and security guard Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) is undercooked while resort owner Sritala (Lek Patravadi) mostly floats around.

They may come into play more in the final two episodes (six out of eight episodes were made available for review) but White, who scripts and directs everything himself without a writers room or a roster of helmers, is sometimes like the characters he sends up.

He too is a tourist in these cultures and lacks the depth and lived experience to do justice to the non-white characters in these worlds.

Just as he wasn’t equipped to deal with colonialism in Hawaii (which is why it came off as so tediously didactic), he’s also just paying lip service to Eastern philosophies, especially around death, as made evident in the opening scene and all the way throughout. So much foreshadowing.

It’s not that he isn’t allowed to be in these worlds, it’s that he sheathes the show in the trappings of these other cultures without the foundational understanding to the significance of everything. Maybe that’s the whole point, to be in the perspective of his American characters but it just feels ooky.

It’s why the second season is by far The White Lotus’s best. White is far more comfortable in writing about sex and shame.

The other question some will have is whether the show works without Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya McQuoid, and it’s very much a yes. You don’t miss her at all because, if we’re honest with each other, she was already tiresome in Sicily. That was a one-trick character who didn’t need more airtime, not that her manner of death wasn’t amusing.

The White Lotus season three is fine. It’s like checking into a generic business hotel in the Hilton-Westin-Hyatt frame. As soon as walk through those revolving doors, everything will be exactly as you expect. No surprises.

The White Lotus season three is on Binge from Monday, February 17