The fall of The White Lotus

From comedy of manners to weird mid crime drama

One of my hottest takes is that I don’t like the rise of “prestige” television dramas.

Structurally, one big advantage of movies over TV shows is that if a critic writes a positive review of a film, it’s because she’s seen the whole movie from beginning to end and decided to tell people that it’s good. Similarly, if a movie has positive word of mouth, that’s being spread by people who saw the entire movie. Even with the creative process, a director knows how the screenplay ends before he begins filming.

With a television show, you might have a well-styled, well-acted scene midway through the second episode, and there’s simply no way to tell whether this is a brilliant setup for a later payoff or it’s purely style over substance.

My favorite movie of the year so far is Black Bag, but it would be really weird to watch 20 minutes of Black Bag, stop the movie, and then write about how good it is. You can absolutely tell within 20 minutes that Steven Soderberg, Michael Fassbender, and Cate Blanchett bring a high level of skill and craft to filmmaking. But you don’t need to watch the movie at all to know that! The reason you know the movie is good is that after having seen the end of the movie, you can say, for sure, that David Koepp’s story made sense and all the cool stuff at the beginning had an actual point.

Again, that’s not to say there are no great television shows. After the fiasco of Game of Thrones, though, I like to hear from people who’ve seen an entire series that it’s good before I commit.

But after season two of The White Lotus wrapped and I heard good things, I made an exception because it’s an anthology show. Each season is a kind of self-contained plot arc, set at a different hotel. Yes, the first two seasons have one character in common, but they’re two separate stories. And people said they both were good, from beginning to end, so I watched them both.

That’s how they get you.