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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
114
Mixed:
8
Negative:
3
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Critic Reviews
Feb 14, 2025
Season 3 Review:
OK, the Thailand-set season 3 takes longer to ignite, but brilliant series creator Mike White and a new cast of entitled one-percenters, led by Parker Posey, Carrie Coon and an Oscar-winning mystery guest, deliver a ferociously funny social satire that defines TV at its peak.
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Oct 28, 2022
Season 2 Review:
Prepare to be wowed. Mike White returns for a second season of his Emmy-winning series and tops himself by digging deeper into this stinging satire of white privilege., this time in Sicily. A top cast (hello again Jennifer Coolidge!) delivers TV at its seductive, sneakily unnerving best.
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Feb 12, 2025
Season 3 Review:
It’s comfort food masquerading as social critique. Even as White meanders in familiar territory, this Thailand chapter never exactly becomes an unfunny or poorly acted stretch of television. While I haven’t seen the final two episodes, the latter half of the season does start to maneuver the characters toward some audacious, inspired mayhem. But it’s tough to come away from these episodes without feeling that White really ought to hire some additional writers.
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Oct 26, 2022
Season 2 Review:
Like most things in season two, Coolidge is not as revelatory here as she was in the show’s first season, even while she is excellent. Once it changed from a one-off into an anthology series, “The White Lotus” became a formula — this season also opens with a mystery, as a number of bodies are found — and as such it is a tad more predictable. But that didn’t get in the way of my enjoyment, watching this collection of high-end guests, played by an able cast, squirm and skirmish while sitting in the lap of luxury.
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Oct 28, 2022
Season 2 Review:
While much transpires, we still have little clue as to which character(s) will be killed, and who will be doing the killing. It’s a tribute to the depth of the writing and the excellent work by the ensemble that whoever winds up floating in the sea, I’m gonna feel bad for them but I’ll also probably understand why someone wanted them gone.
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Feb 26, 2025
Season 3 Review:
The show’s narrow scope means it ends up recycling the same tropes of seasons past. The hotel guests aren’t people so much as stock characters with one or two defining traits. .... There’s an aimlessness that can come to define the vacation experience. That’s also true of the stories to which White is drawn, resulting in uneven performances.
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Oct 27, 2022
Season 2 Review:
Nobody has a real conversation; they say things at each other as if lobbing verbal tennis balls over a net, which is maybe why it all sounds so trite. Even as it skewers these people, the show is too in love with the idea of being rich to really consider the rot at its core.
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Oct 28, 2022
Season 2 Review:
The White Lotus hasn’t lost any of its intoxicating allure, shifting its mix of rich-people problems and staff struggles to a new island (Sicily), with Jennifer Coolidge as the one holdover from the Emmy-winning original. It’s an impressive exercise in reloading by writer-director Mike White, who based on this encore should have plenty of frequent-flyer miles in his future if he chooses.
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Jul 9, 2021
Season 1 Review:
If you're itching for a tropical vacation, The White Lotus might cool those jets. The latest product from the dark and twisty mind of Mike White ("Enlightened") deals with class in a way few recent TV productions have, in an edgy, engrossing six-part HBO limited series that follows multiple stories in a kind of modern "Upstairs, Downstairs" fashion.
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ColliderJul 13, 2021
Feb 11, 2025
Season 3 Review:
There are plenty of solid characters, thanks to standout performances from Wood, Coon, and especially Rothwell, who brings a lovely empathetic grace to the screen. And critics have yet to see the final two episodes of the season, which might do a lot to wrap things up cohesively. As it stands, Season 3 isn’t quite the success of seasons past. But there are worse vacations out there.
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Oct 24, 2022
Season 2 Review:
The guests are a lot more palatable as characters this season, with White having a very effective understanding of how to withhold their backstories in order to draw in the viewer’s interest. ... Half the fun of the early episodes is coming to understand who these people are and why they’ve come to this place together, and once those relationships are established, the season moves like lightning towards whatever trainwreck the finale promises.
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Feb 11, 2025
Season 3 Review:
The beats of the season are rote, the characters verge on cringe-worthy cliche, and The White Lotus seems to be lazily conforming to a formula that’s already inspired countless pale imitations since its 2021 series launch. .... The biggest thing the The White Lotus Season 3 has going for it, though, is its phenomenal cast. The actors that Mike White has assembled give each character a pathos that maybe wasn’t originally there on the page. .... Ultimately, The White Lotus Season 3 is still the best at what the show sets out to do.
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Jul 7, 2021
Season 1 Review:
In this self-dissection of wealthy Caucasian self-awareness, some subplots are just navel-gazing. ... Still, I got wrapped up in the dreamy dramedy. Looking's Bartlett stuns as a tightly wound perfectionist falling way off the wagon. Rothwell, hysterical on Insecure, goes 180 degrees as a wellness worker bee carrying the weight of moneyed sorrow. Coming off The Handmaid's Tale, Sharp Objects, and Euphoria, Sweeney confirms herself as the generational representative for soulful perversity.
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Feb 11, 2025
Season 3 Review:
The White Lotus season 3 has all of the elements we’ve come to know and love from Mike White’s satirical anthology – a great cast, an exotic locale, and messy interpersonal drama – but there’s some serious spice missing from the recipe. .... There’s a disappointing amount of wheel-spinning for the guests and the staff alike, which makes me wonder if the series is creatively tapped out – or maybe its ugly-American motif has just lost its bite.
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IndieWireOct 24, 2022
IndieWireJul 8, 2021
Season 1 Review:
White’s latest work is also an ensemble showcase with a handful of unforgettable performances — Bartlett and Jennifer Coolidge top among them — as well as a paradox unto itself, in that it’s extremely addictive and consistently uncomfortable. Conceived and shot during the pandemic, “The White Lotus” is many things, but it’s nothing short of a marvel.
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Feb 14, 2025
Season 3 Review:
There is less — really no — explicit comedy this time out, no replacement for Jennifer Coolidge’s needy heiress from Seasons 1 and 2. (As if you could replace Jennifer Coolidge.) Yet something in the direction, something like affection for these bumbling adults and young adults, lightens the tone.
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Oct 28, 2022
Season 2 Review:
For all the goings on, the first five episodes don’t exactly build up a narrative head of steam. It’s hard to tell where any of these stories are heading, or if they’re heading anywhere. That’s not a criticism, exactly; it’s easy enough to hang out here, with the actors and the scenery, and the series is not without a subtle sort of movement.
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Feb 11, 2025
Season 3 Review:
Campy, naughty, a little shocking, and a little old hat, The White Lotus’s third season has its flaws and its hang-ups, without question. They hint at depth, at complicated things to say about wealth and cultural experience as a consumer product, and how to find meaning. If season three ends at all like the previous seasons did, the show may not figure out how to do more than hint. But as with its first two seasons, The White Lotus succeeds at being fun TV first and foremost.
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Oct 28, 2022
Season 2 Review:
The result is a portrait that feels like half–Tennessee Williams play, half–Men are from Mars, Women Are From Venus. The cast, in particular Aubrey Plaza and F. Murray Abraham, elevates the material’s gender-based clichés (women are shrews, men cads) with performances that are precisely bemused or aggrieved. ... But without a greater guiding thesis about why marriage reaffirms gender roles for people who otherwise consider themselves progressive, or a secondary plot focus to round out this vacillating heterosexual frivolity and panic, The White Lotus feels defanged.
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Jul 9, 2021
Season 1 Review:
This series is a sharply etched satire of classism and white privilege, as well as a deft exploration of the power dynamics that define every relationship between and among the guests and staff in this upscale paradise. ... Armond’s behavior, like that of almost every character in The White Lotus, could and may launch a thousand think pieces, which is a testament to the serrated edges in White’s writing and the fantastic actors that make up the cast.
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Oct 24, 2022
Season 2 Review:
While The White Lotus Season 2 is certainly gorgeous to look at, it falls a bit short once again as any sort of legitimate social commentary. It’s obvious that these people are generally awful: spoiled, self-involved, and lacking the sort of basic self-awareness we often see in so many (generally American) travelers abroad. But beyond that, is there anything worth really saying about them, or the journey they’re on?
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Jul 8, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Despite a strong start and some excellent performances, The White Lotus does wane towards the end of the series’ six stylish episodes. The attempted class commentary is only slightly developed, and the obvious disillusionment experienced by the staff is set aside for a focus on the guests.
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Oct 27, 2022
Season 2 Review:
Even if the plotting is less urgent and the comedy, when it flares up (not often enough), is less biting, “White Lotus” remains consistently watchable for White’s finely-drawn characters, whether it’s Daphne’s sunny disposition that masks uncomfortable truths or Dominic’s justification/excuse for his cheating ways.
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Radio TimesFeb 11, 2025
Radio TimesOct 31, 2022
RogerEbert.comFeb 11, 2025
Season 3 Review:
White takes full advantage of his setting in a manner that brings it to life in ways that even the last two gorgeous settings didn’t produce. The way he constructs his episodes, not just narratively but visually, is arguably without peer on TV right now. He somehow finds a way to capture the opulence and beauty of Thailand while never losing the realism of the stories he’s telling there.
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Feb 11, 2025
Season 3 Review:
The end result is still extremely entertaining, thanks to White again assembling a top-notch cast that includes Walton Goggins, Parker Posey, and Carrie Coon, among many others, and thanks to White’s knack for finding creative ways to depict the oblivious entitlement of the hotel’s obscenely wealthy guests. But there’s a clear formula by this point that takes away the thrill of discovery the series had when it debuted back in 2021.
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Oct 24, 2022
Season 2 Review:
The White Lotus Season Two is definitely not boring. Once again, it boasts a great cast — Emmy-winning returnee Jennifer Coolidge is joined by the likes of Aubrey Plaza, Michael Imperioli, and F. Murray Abraham, among others — gorgeous scenery, and the acidic wit of writer-director Mike White. But there are times when it’s hard to disagree with Portia’s larger concern that this has all been done before, and better, the first time around.
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Jul 12, 2021
Season 1 Review:
"The White Lotus" is a destination event, a safe, controlled daytrip into disquiet. Some will love the airy cringe that White purveys here, which intensifies as this series goes deeper into its run. Even if the agita gets to be too much to handle, you can still take relief knowing that like all good vacations, it comes to an end exactly how it should, and when it should.
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Feb 11, 2025
Season 3 Review:
“The White Lotus” is one of those series that requires a deep breath, or perhaps a shudder, after each dose. That it also manages to be laugh-out-loud funny is a testament to White’s mastery of tone. There’s an element of schadenfreude that comes with watching the show. But that wanes once you look in the mirror and think about how human the characters are. It’s hard to spotlight individual performances in such a mighty ensemble.
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Jul 8, 2021
Season 1 Review:
“White Lotus” loses something in the last episode when, in an effort to bring elements together, it goes in search of a message and finds one, just in time for the finish. The experience ends up feeling sad and pedestrian, when it could have finished wild and senseless. Still, for five of six hours, it’s hard to argue with the experience.
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Feb 14, 2025
Season 3 Review:
Although she [Jennifer Coolidge] lit up two seasons of the quirky Mike White drama, she has a kindred spirit in Parker Posey, who takes the third season to her own offbeat heights. .... “The White Lotus,” season three, is a bit more lush than the previous two and stuffed with phrases you’ll be hearing for months to come.
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Oct 27, 2022
Season 2 Review:
As easily digested as gelato, this season has action that hinges on those two young women (Beatrice Granno and Simona Tabasco) making visitors feel welcome. That means the stakes are high and the room service bills even higher. Coolidge continues her winning ways (Emmy No. 2? It’s possible) and DiMarco has just enough innocence to make you wonder what his future will be. “The White Lotus” still ranks among television’s best.
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Feb 11, 2025
Season 3 Review:
The season largely leaves the thoughts of these characters about their work and the people it serves unexplored. That disconnect is, perhaps, the point—a statement about the chasms that separate the classes, about the alienation of labor in what amounts to a micro-colony of the extremely affluent—but it leads the proceedings to feel incohesive. Instead, season three works best as a mood piece.
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Jul 1, 2021
Season 1 Review:
The series is less a situational comedy about the stress of vacation than a satire on white American privilege. But it’s one in which the laughs are often supplanted by intimations of a barely obscured and gathering darkness, and in which the plot often appears subordinate to the seductive atmosphere of Disneyfied decadence gradually sliding into degradation.
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Feb 21, 2025
Season 3 Review:
Although Belinda is ostensibly there to learn, she comes in as much a blank slate as the paying guests, with little more to offer her Thai co-workers than a stiff khàawp khun. White isn’t much more generous, or more interested. The White Lotus began as an Upstairs Downstairs parable of economic exploitation, with a little postcolonial critique, as a treat. But the third season’s native characters are barely an afterthought.
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Jul 13, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Where The White Lotus ends up is, in some ways, the slyest joke of all. The Love Boat with class tensions, a smart summer soap, is fundamentally fatalist—and less riotously, a bit didactic. Still I wonder if The White Lotus’ indictment of class and race privilege doesn’t lose a bit of its bite from the company it keeps.
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Feb 18, 2025
Season 3 Review:
A first episode of The White Lotus is clearly all table-setting. And that’s very much the case here, with every scene slowly unfolding as a way to tell us more about these varied guests—and those hotel employees who’ll be there to serve them. .... But it’s clear that Goggins’ Rick may be the one to watch. He’s clearly on a mission, even if Chelsea has no idea why they are in Thailand at all.
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Oct 27, 2022The GuardianFeb 11, 2025
Season 3 Review:
On the evidence of the first few episodes, it seems that the third series may have moved even further from the original’s MO. But the precision of the storytelling and the realisation of every character, from the most central to the most peripheral, remains masterly. Exquisitely shot, scripted, paced and performed, it’s a sumptuous feast for all the senses.
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The GuardianJul 9, 2021
Season 1 Review:
The White Lotus isn’t insisting itself as a state of the nation satire but White’s deft and unforgiving writing manages what so many others have tried and failed to do in the last five years. He’s created a deeply funny and bracingly topical piece of art that prods and provokes without preaching. His show says more about class, sex and race because it’s not directly about those issues, remembering, vitally, that to send a message, one has to package it well.
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Feb 11, 2025
Season 3 Review:
I can reassure viewers who find the start of the season slow that things pick up dramatically, especially in the fifth or sixth episodes, which have events perched precariously on the verge of disaster. Will that inevitable disaster take a form that doesn’t feel, at least somewhat, like a reboot of previous White Lotus installments? I can’t say for sure, but if you accept that the joy is in the interpretation, it’s enough to watch the new group revel in the toxic treats that Mike White so readily supplies.
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Jun 30, 2021
Season 1 Review:
White Lotus is delightfully mean-spirited and unexpectedly big-hearted in ways that will probably polarize some audiences. I found it vibrantly messy and deceptively emotional, a show that I wasn’t convinced was working after one episode and that I didn’t want to end after six.
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The IndependentFeb 11, 2025
Season 3 Review:
What it shows is that The White Lotus is a franchise now so totally in command of its own appeal that it can be transferred anywhere. Compared to other contemporary anthology shows (like True Detective or Fargo), it feels more in control of its tone, more consistent in its approach.
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The Mercury NewsFeb 13, 2025
Season 3 Review:
I gobbled down six of the eight episodes available for review, and will say – without even the slightest reservations – that “Lotus” regulars should check in for this third season. You won’t be disappointed. Just be prepared to get your jaw dropped and your raised eyebrows torched right off.
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Jul 8, 2021
Season 1 Review:
“The White Lotus” could use more attention to the downstairs half of its upstairs-downstairs story; it flicks at, but doesn’t really explore, the lives of the native Hawaiian staff busing tables and performing dinnertime rituals. And it sometimes strains to be topical, with its culture-war Mad Libs references to triggering and cucking, canceling and doxxing. But this is a sharp, soulful series that knows its characters in full and gets richer as it goes on.
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Nov 9, 2022
Season 2 Review:
The second season initially feels like a mere echo of the first. ... But the first five episodes suggest that White has undergone his own unclenching. The airless sociological fatalism of Season 1, which was matched by a claustrophobic production due to covid-19 restrictions, gives way to a more mature drama, as well as a deeper exploration of how the characters’ class concerns converge with gendered angst.
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Jul 26, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Welcome to “Upstairs, Downstairs,” Aloha State edition. The series, called “The White Lotus,” named for the fictional resort where the action takes place, is a near-note-perfect tragicomedy. ... The actors are excellent across the board, but Bartlett, whose practiced amiability turns progressively feral throughout the series, is a revelation.
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Jul 9, 2021
Season 1 Review:
It’s to the credit of White and the wonderfully well-chosen cast that we keep watching, even knowing that these guests are probably not going to find much self-awareness. ... The splendid cast is led by Bartlett, who makes Armond’s growing resentment a volatile partner to his put-a-smile-on-everything professional demeanor. Rothwell emerges as the heart and soul of the series. ... Coolidge is outstanding, as she makes Tanya’s stunted emotional life kind of sympathetic. Britton and Zahn are pitch-perfect as a couple with their own challenges.
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The PlaylistFeb 11, 2025
Season 3 Review:
White pulls off a masterclass with these women as they forge alliances behind each other’s backs, only to increasingly betray each other over the silliest of social interactions. You know these women. You and your friends may be these women. It’s a spot-on microscope of adult friendships that this season may end up being remembered for the most.
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The PlaylistOct 25, 2022
Season 2 Review:
Nothing remotely insightful has been said about the rich other than they’re terrible to the planet and to each other. At this point, it seems the show is mostly just interested in reveling in the spoils of the rich (there’s a particularly gorgeous villa featured in one episode) and that’s it.
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The PlaylistJun 30, 2021
Season 1 Review:
It asks people to spend a great deal of time with a group of relatively unlikable people (one of whom may be the most toxically abrasive person on TV this year). Still, White’s overall love for the outsider and even his empathy for some of the insiders carry the project to a satisfying conclusion. It’s a little minor for White, who wrote and directed every episode, but it’s very well-acted and ambitious enough to make it a memorable trip.
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The TelegraphOct 24, 2022
Season 2 Review:
The White Lotus isn’t quite as insightful as it thinks it is and suffers from all the characters being different flavours of unlikeable (see also: House of the Dragon). But there is the implicit promise throughout that this ghastly gallery of vacationers will receive their comeuppance. Paired with the dramatic Sicilian landscape, that cocktail of sunshine and delayed schadenfreude goes down irresistibly.
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The TimesNov 2, 2022
Season 2 Review:
In a nutshell this series is funny, but not as funny as the last one. But series one took its time to take off too. And, having watched ahead only five episodes; I don't know the denouement be assured that Mike White builds the tension exquisitely and there is much toxicity to gorge upon. ... I love Tanya. She embodies the show's essence: that being filthy rich doesn't make you happy. Indeed, it can make you wretchedly miserable. Enjoy the schadenfreude.
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