White Lotus Season 3 and the #1 Pitfall of Writing About the Rich

The first two seasons of The White Lotus were excellent television. The satire was sharp, the dialogue was crisp, and the acting was top-notch. The third season, though, has thus far proven a disappointment, and while there are a lot of explanations that could be given for the drop-off, it wouldn’t surprise me if one of the main causes is this: Season 3 is actually, well… socially realistic. It portrays the rich as miserable, petty, ugly, and with very few redeeming qualities. That’s true to life—I know dozens of these people, and they’re mostly awful—but it’s not compelling writing. The real world is in fact full of one-dimensional people, but one-dimensional characters are a sign of second-rate fiction.

To explain the show, for those who haven’t seen it: each season occurs in a different franchise of an exclusive, upper-middle- to lower-upper-class hotel chain, and uses a murder mystery format. An ensemble cast of wealthy people—a two-to-one mix; some are charming ingenues, while others stand in for the criminal malefactors who certainly play a role in making our society the dystopia it is—decide to spend a week at a resort, mostly eating breakfast and having bland adventures. While first appearances indicate they shall enjoy a peaceful, relaxing Time-Limited Resource-Consumptive Vacation Experience (TLRCVE; if you use this acronym, Severance, credit me) it becomes clear early on that, for these people, “Wherever you go, there you are.” Thus, things go increasingly wrong, until an absurd, violent conclusion is reached. It’s not a new structure and it doesn’t need to be—the execution, for the first two seasons, was fantastic.

Season 1’s top-billing asshole character, Shane, was unlikeable but expertly played. He had the antics and expressive range of Andy from The Office. He was a love-to-hate character—there is something deeply funny about watching a grown-ass man argue with someone smarter than he is (a self-destructive gay Aussie, also a fantastic character) about a fucking hotel room. It’s hilarious because men are supposed to be above creature comforts—painting rich men as gender failures (the rich hate when we do that) is always great entertainment. Season 2’s version of him (Cameron) is more dark and unpleasant, but has—like a real rich person—the ability to blend in and hide his true nature for, at least, five minutes; if nothing else, he understands his role as a rich person and that his main job is to let his rich person’s wife play the role of a rich person’s wife. Season 3’s version of this character? Well, Saxon’s deal is that… he likes sex. That’s it. He watches lots of porn, he masturbates in front of his younger brother, he is obsessed with his sister’s sex life or lack thereof, and he’s constantly hitting on female guests. If he were a real person, he’d have definitely committed at least one sexual assault and still be in denial about the wrongness of what he has done. Do predatory men exist among the rich? We all know they do. It’s not news. These characters can be written, but when it comes to Saxon, there’s not only nothing compelling or redeeming, there’s nothing funny. Penis! Did you laugh? Probably not. Saxon isn’t an interesting villain; you just want him to go away.

If anything, Saxon’s character is misleading. What is frightening about sexual predators is how normal they seem. They do not “look like” predators and often they don’t even consider themselves to be such. They have the support of society because they’ve been bred for upper-class agreeability and because people are scared to oppose them. Saxon isn’t that, though; Saxon is cartoonishly transparent, and it just doesn’t work.

Speaking more broadly, let’s investigate the unspoken rules of Writing About The Rich, because this will help us understand what made the first two seasons of The White Lotus—and all seasons of Succession—excellent, while so many efforts in this genre fall flat.

The oldest story isn’t the hero’s journey—it’s human sacrifice, or tragedy; the hero’s journey is a subgenre in which the sacrificial person not only survives, but prospers. We crave the hero’s journey because tragedy, in real life, is just more common. Almost never does the person sent up for sacrifice return alive.

The murder mystery reverses the tragic arc, or at least introduces a variation. There is a physical sacrifice at the beginning (which may not be the earliest point in timeline time, but must be introduced early to the viewer or reader) and a more open-ended sacrifice toward the end: if caught, a killer may lose freedom and esteem; if the killer goes free, society’s morale decays. It is not traditional sacrifice insofar as the end-of-story’s stakes are often lower than violent death; still, it is useful to understand the roots of the genre.

When it comes to human sacrifice, real and fictional, we know that societies have subjected all classes of people to it—slaves and princes, beggars and queens—but, on the day of the occasion, the victim is usually dressed in finery. The scapegoat may not have been rich or important in life, and it may be pure mockery to present this person as now such, but it is the sins of the power that are being atoned-for—human sacrifice is an admission that, if society were better, this debacle would not need to occur.

Writing about the rich—please note: this is not the same thing as writing a rich character—requires us to investigate the corruption with uncomfortable intimacy. You can write a character who is rich and who is also a good human being, because such people do exist—they’re rare, as the ugliness of our society shows, but the count of such people is nonzero. When you use the setting of the upper classes, though, you are not a real artist unless you understand why you can only go negative. Most rich people are exactly the sorts of people you, observing the kind of society they have built for us, believe them to be. As an artist, you must “punch up,” so to speak. Punching down isn’t just distasteful—it’s bad art, bad ideology, and badly ideological art. (See also: Ayn Rand.)

Succession, although it has humorous moments, is not a comedy or even a dark comedy. It is, although no unexpected deaths occur, a tragedy. The characters are all deeply unlikeable—from faux-liberal Shiv to the chaotic-evil fascist-friendly Roman; from “midwestern nice” Tom Wambsgans to Season 17 king Greg—but also exquisitely balanced. If you find yourself taking sides, you’re missing the point.

If these characters were uniformly ugly, viewers would tire of them after an episode and a half. Knowing this, Succession’s writers made sure to give each character one solid redeeming quality. Logan Roy, though he is extremely old and not just in age, is an absolute force—you would not enjoy having him as a boss buut you would, in some sense, admire him. What it does to give each character one redeeming trait is not precisely make us like the characters—you don’t have to like the characters to enjoy a story—but give us a compelling reason why each one believes he or she deserves to win. Shiv is smarter and has more correct politics. Roman is honest about the idiocy and hypocrisy of the world in which he was born. Kendall is devoted to his work and tries to play by the rules. This gets the characters invested in a fight over what is in fact very little and, when final losses are doled out, we feel as if they have faced real tragedy. Roman Roy delivers the climatic revelation: “We are bullshit. You are bullshit. You're fucking bullshit, man. I'm fucking bullshit. [The victorious party] is bullshit. It's all fucking nothing. Man, I'm telling you this because I know it, okay? We're nothing.”

Rich people making each other unhappy is not, on its own, enough to carry a show. Very few people hate the rich because they are rich; we despise them, justifiably, because they’ve built such an odious society for us. Succession takes on the responsible rich—people who have made billions at direct social cost. The White Lotus, in this sense, has a harder job, because the people immediately responsible for our society’s shittiness do not stay at cookie-cutter resorts—they own 200-foot yachts. Instead, we observe a mix of upper-midlevel corporate executives, never-launched failsons on honeymoons, and businessmen compensating for their lack of talent with criminal involvements. They are people who report to people who report to Eichmann; they are not Hitler. It’s easy to feel contempt for these people, but it’s hard to truly hate them, because when it comes to the state of society, they’re not the ones who made it the way it is—they are, although more morally compromised than us and therefore more successful in this shitworld, not the untouchably high people who are truly culpable.

Season 3, as it moves from bleak comedy toward real tragedy, has a few structural flaws. Classical tragedy demands that the protagonist’s decisions and hubris lead to his downfall. Seasons 1 and 2 riff on this, though it is usually innocents who suffer—but Season 3 opens with its tragic figures already fallen. Timothy, the patriarch of an overly stereotypical rich Southern family, has already committed whatever (underspecified) crime will bring him down; he’s damned from day zero. The insufferable, childish Rick is not made miserable by his own failings—he was miserable long before this ill-fated, unsettling vacation. The purpose of tragedy, when it focuses on the rich (as it classically must) is not to see done to the rich what they do to us; to take enjoyment in such would make us, in some sense, morally equivalent to them, as if we would be no better in their position. Instead, it is to see them do to themselves what they do to us, and it is vitally important that their self-destructive actions happen on camera—not in the backstory.

All that Season 3 gets wrong, from an artistic perspective, can be justified in the name of realism. There is a middle-aged woman—an absentee mother—with probable brain damage from benzodiazepine abuse. There is an older brother who is openly predatory, and a slightly-neurodivergent younger brother whose milieu ensures he will turn into a creep no matter what he does. There are three upper-middle-class white girls who use their “girl power” to engage in senseless competition. There is a misfit couple; the older man seems low-status in spite of his probable wealth, and the dimwitted young woman “almost dies” twice. The dialogue is slow, meandering, featureless, and pointless—identical in this way to the conversations of actual rich people. Unlike Seasons 1 and 2, there is no effort in making these people more intelligent or more attractive than average folk; a bit refreshingly, their character sheets are full of single-digit ability scores. There are so many characters in Season 3 who, thus far, have not shown a sole redeeming quality. This portrays many people—and, among the rich, a disproportionately high percentage of them—accurately, as humans without redeeming qualities really do exist. But it doesn’t work artistically. We can debate whether all fiction is concept-level dialogue in disguise, but even one who believes it is mostly not will still tire, after hours upon hours of watching, of characters who stand for nothing.

Writing about the rich is difficult. Breathless admiration, in addition to having morally incorrect class politics, is insufferable—this is the failing of Billions and The Social Network. Brutal realism—portraying these people as they actually are: aimless, amoral, and average-at-best in talent—also doesn’t work. One can use extraordinarily bleak comedy (although, to some audiences, the bleakness gets old) or one can use tragedy. In the latter case, one must build up the tragic figure using well-chosen departures from realism—Macbeth is extraordinarily driven; Othello is exquisitely articulate, Achilles is almost invulnerable—while driving him toward a demise for which his on-screen decisions are the sole cause. It is not enough, when writing about the rich, to make them suffer. Rather, the suffering must always come from an interior cause, and it must sustain the sense of an alternative—until very late in the story, redemption should still be possible—in spite of the inexorability induced by the tragic figure’s moral failings. If it is not done this way, it leaves us as viewers or readers feeling like we are just watching bad things happen to people—and that is not, on its own, a pleasant feeling at all.