White Lotus: prestige service

Prestige TV—Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, etc. etc.—has dominated the cultural landscape for at least fifteen years now. At this point, shows like Succession and White Lotus have taken the mantle. I didn’t really watch Succession (a few episodes only—I found the characters to be too annoying—and isn’t life annoying enough already, without willingly inviting specially-crafted annoying characters into your eyes?); and I only watched this latest season of White Lotus, which just ended, not the earlier ones. Why did I watch it? Morbid curiosity…

The interesting thing about it to me is how it occupies this space that I will call prestige service—it is still a prestige show—it has those trappings, it looks like one, and is viewed and discussed as one. But it is a prestige show in form and aesthetics only—and even that, not really, because it’s an anthology show—every season is a different story (with very slight overlaps). The “golden age” of prestige TV was all hyper-serialized—Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Sopranos, etc, all of them told very tight stories about the same characters, from year to year. The White Lotus is not that—it’s a new set of actors dropped into a fancy hotel every year, because that is what the fans want. The writing is very fan service and basic—like a scene where Parker Posey’s snooty bougie character tells a young woman she is too hot to be with her older man, and asks if she is just with him for the money—what an obvious, basic thing to have that character say. But the fact that it’s White Lotus, and Parker Posey—an auteur type actor from the freakin cultural as hell 90s—was delivering it, so it must be prestige-y, right.

Also interesting (in a sickening way) are the commercial tie-ins: actors from the show appear in liquor commercials, talking about the show they’re in. The liquor company even created a special drink for the show: The White Lotus Vesper Martini.

Prestige, fan service, branding and marketing—all combined in one neat package. This is beyond just the lines between entertainment and reality being blurred—that’s old news at this point. This is the lines between high and low, commerce and art, being blurred.

Fan service wrapped in the guise of prestige art—this is a new entry in our cultural landscape, and it feels like the logical culmination of many social tendencies, like everything has pointed towards this synthesis—and like nothing points beyond it. The future will look a lot like this—fan service done in a fake prestigious way, with more commercial tie-ins than you can imagine…