Saturday, December 10, 2022

From the New York Time This Morning-One of My Favorite TV Shows

Yes, indeed I am looking forward to the finale of The White Lotus, Season 2 on HBO Max. Attached is from the New York Time this morning!  

Author Headshot

By Melissa Kirsch

Good morning. The finale of “The White Lotus” airs tomorrow. Here’s to being a fan, without going overboard.




María Jesús Contreras

Fool’s paradise

I try to lead a pop-cultural life free of regrets, but a couple of Sundays ago, in a nearly postprandial fugue following a viewing of “The White Lotus,” I did something I wish I could take back.

I read every comment, every fan hypothesis, every impeccably researched theory for how the season will turn out in the aftershow discussion thread on Reddit.

I did not intend to ruin the show for myself. I wished only to convene with (or lurk among) other enthusiasts, to enjoy the glorious and increasingly rare experience of processing an episode of a show in real time, just after it’s aired, before the rest of the internet has had its way with it.

Instead, I emerged from a hallucinatory hour (or was it three?) of reading certain that I knew exactly how the season would play out, who would double-cross whom, who would live and who would meet with a watery death. (The fact that there is, indeed, watery death in the offing was established in the season’s first episode.)

While I wish I hadn’t entered Reddit’s den of Lotus sleuths, I do not regret the other slightly obsessive — but, crucially, plot-preserving — fan research I’ve been conducting.

I am glad to have listened to this week’s “Fresh Air” interview with Mike White, the show’s creator, in which he discussed how his love of “Fantasy Island,” “The Love Boat” and “Laverne & Shirley” informed this season. I am also glad that I looked up White’s favorite books (he, like Torrey Peters, who spoke to The Morning earlier this year, loves “Independent People” by Halldor Laxness) and reserved many of them from the library. I read with gusto this interview with Simona Tabasco, who plays Lucia, and listened to this episode of “Las Culturistas” with Meghann Fahy, who plays Daphne. I watched Aubrey Plaza respond to fans on social media, and I rewatched Jennifer Coolidge’s charming Emmy acceptance speech.

I’m happy to know more about the people who make the show that I find so compelling. I just wish I hadn’t let my fandom lead me into the fluorescent-lit land of plot despoiling.

And so it is that my excitement for tomorrow’s finale of “The White Lotus” is mixed with some grief and some relief. I’m sad to bid ciao to the enchanting vistas of Sicily; to the characters I’ve found myself wondering about as if I knew them personally; to what has become, for me, appointment television. But I’m looking forward to having this season’s mysteries resolved definitively and, maybe even more, to watching next season spoiler-free.

For more

  • “The White Lotus” is “positively haunted by movies and the fantasies they engender,” writes Carina Chocano in The Times.
  • F. Murray Abraham and Michael Imperioli got Covid at the same time while filming in Sicily.
  • The show’s costume designer discusses dressing the Gen Z characters.
  • “If on a fine day the unsuspecting visitor strolls to the parapet to look at the view, cardiac arrest may be the reward.” From 1979, “The Scenic Overkill of Taormina,” the town where this season of “The White Lotus” was filmed.

December 10, 2022


 Meanwhile enjoy this photo from my collection:



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