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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
114
Mixed:
8
Negative:
3
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Critic Reviews
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 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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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 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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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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Jul 9, 2021
Season 1 Review:
There’s plenty here of White’s tart sensibility, queer boundary-pushing and serrated observations of how self-loathers tend to spread their wretchedness to those around them. The trollish timing of the show’s premise, that vacations are wasted on those who least need it, certainly deserves some grudging admiration. But a swerve late in the series disappointingly sails the story toward calmer waters. Once the turbulence is over, only froth remains.
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TV Guide MagazineJul 1, 2021
Season 1 Review:
A fitfully diverting and gorgeously filmed six-part limited series. [5- 18 Jul 2021, p.8]
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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Sep 4, 2025
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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Radio TimesFeb 11, 2025
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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Radio TimesOct 31, 2022
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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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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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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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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