The main point is: rich people are privileged and do not face consequences for their actions, while poor people do. Which is not a bad thesis in and of itself but the show makes it in such a sloppy way that this show could have been pro-rich people and it probably could have been written the exact same way.

A quick rundown for people who haven't seen the show: The White Lotus is set in an expensive resort in Hawai'i. The viewer follows the perspectives of a few of the guests and the workers as they often interact in comical ways. The guests are vapid and stuck in their own world, while the workers are often abused or treated as objects to be used by the guests like any other amenity in the resort. The guests often have personal problems in their own lives or families that they refuse to address or fix because they are privileged and have no reason to do so.

Okay cool, so what are some of the issues? The first issue I noticed in the show was that by making a show set in Hawai'i based on how different classes interact with each other, one of the obvious things the show should look at is how Native Hawai'ins are treated by tourists/tourism industry. And the show does have a Native Hawai'in character, but he only mentions his negative treatment in a single conversation and only appears in 2 episodes of the show. This character disappears from the story after committing a crime and being arrested. The last time we see the character, is in committing the crime, the show then goes back to focusing mainly on the guests. This narrative choice could make sense, the Native Hawai'in character disappears from the story just as he disappears from the minds of the rich white guests.

Unfortunately, this appears more to be the writer not wanting to talk about this issue. The writer/creator of the show Mike White said he didn't feel like it was his place to tell the story of Native Hawai'ins. Which like, fair yeah you can't as a rich white guy. But that's a reason to get other people on your writing team, not write this 'from his own perspective' because we have enough perspectives of rich white people in media who don't actually give a shit about marginalized groups.

The other main issue of the show is that it presents no other viable alternative to the system that allows these rich white people to do whatever they want. At the end of the show, all the rich guests end up happy, while all the poor workers end up in jail, murdered, or locked in their shitty jobs for the rest of their lives. Which I mean, pretty accurate to real life, but I didn't need 6 hours of a show to tell me that. If I was a rich person watching this show, at no point would I be forced to actually reckon with my own privilege. To a worker watching this show it's clear that the rich people are empathy lacking sociopaths, but the only times the rich guests act maliciously in the show is in reaction to slights the workers have committed. Making it easy for a rich viewer to simply choose the side of the rich guests, see them get rewarded at the end of the show, and assume nothing in the show actually criticized their behaviour. This is shown in discussions on :reddit-logo: where many have taken the side of the rich guests in the show and hate the worker characters.

The only representation of leftism in the show is in the character of Olivia, played by Sydney Sweeney, a guest at the hotel. Who reads Frantz Fanon, criticizes her mother's job as CFO of not-Google, and supports things like BLM. Olivia is in college and her support of marginalized people is shown to be performative, as she torments her autistic(?) brother, and is shown to be just like her parents, indicating her leftism is just a phase. While the actual workers on the show are shown to be void of ideology, with only one of them having an actual goal: to own their own business. It is clear from this what Mike White's opinion on leftism is; it is something for privileged college students to support performatively while real workers don't really support it. The inclusion of Frantz Fanon here is especially egregious considering his focus on colonialism and imperialism in relation to the poor portrayal of Hawai'i Natives, but I digress.

Ultimately, I am disappointed because the show could have actually done something with it's characters but chose not to.