The White Lotus season 1

The first season of The White Lotus, an American satirical comedy-drama anthology television series created, written, and directed by Mike White, premiered on HBO on July 11, 2021. The season was greenlit in October 2020 as a limited series, filmed in Hawaii in late 2020, and features an ensemble cast of Murray Bartlett, Connie Britton, Jennifer Coolidge, Alexandra Daddario, Fred Hechinger, Jake Lacy, Brittany O'Grady, Natasha Rothwell, Sydney Sweeney, Steve Zahn and Molly Shannon. The season consists of six episodes, and follows the lives of the staff and wealthy guests at a tropical resort in Hawaii.
The season received critical acclaim. It received 11 nominations at the 74th Primetime Emmy Awards and nine nominations at the Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards. The season received ten wins across both ceremonies. Despite being developed as a limited series, HBO renewed the series on August 10, 2021, for a second season, making it an anthology series. The second season premiered on October 30, 2022.
On October 19, 2020, HBO gave The White Lotus a limited series order that consisted of six episodes. The series was created, written and directed by Mike White. White also serves as executive producer alongside David Bernad and Nick Hall. Mark Kamine serves as the co-executive producer. In an interview with Ben Travers of IndieWire at the 2021 ATX Television Festival, White explained his creative inspiration for the first season. White wished to explore the question of "how money can pervert even our most intimate relationships," to examine the "ethics of vacationing in other people's realities," and to present the "flesh and blood" experience of being gripped by the power dynamics of "today's culture wars".
Following the first season’s critical acclaim and viewership numbers, the show was renewed as an anthology series, which will tell the story of a different group of travelers during their stay at another White Lotus property.
Principal photography for the first season began in October 2020 in Hawaii under COVID-19 guidelines. By November 21, 2020, the series was halfway through filming at the Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea and was scheduled to film in December at locations around Maui. This included Lana'i Island where they shot some beach scenes. Zahn told The Hollywood Reporter that the Four Seasons was closed during filming, which resulted in a bubble for the cast and crew. Both he and Hechinger got PADI certified for the scuba scenes. Ben Kutchins served as the director of photography for the season.
Upon the limited series order announcement, Murray Bartlett, Connie Britton, Jennifer Coolidge, Alexandra Daddario, Fred Hechinger, Jake Lacy, Brittany O'Grady, Natasha Rothwell, Sydney Sweeney, and Steve Zahn were cast to star. On October 30, 2020, Molly Shannon, Jon Gries, Jolene Purdy, Kekoa Kekumano, and Lukas Gage joined the cast in recurring roles. Alec Merlino, who was a fellow contestant on Survivor: David vs. Goliath with White, was cast as Hutch, a waiter.
Chilean composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer was hired by White to score the season. The theme tune for the season, "Aloha!", was composed to evoke sounds of the jungle. Tapia de Veer used unusual methods, including over-blowing into a flute and performing squawking vocal noises and "monkey sounds" himself. He also used a South American charango, a dozen or so drums from different cultures (mostly handmade drums fashioned from wood and animal skin), a variety of natural shakers, and some piano.
According to Vulture, the costs of production for the season was under US$3 million per episode.
The season premiered on July 11, 2021, on HBO and HBO Max. In the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, the season premiered on Sky Atlantic on August 16, 2021.
The season was released on DVD on September 13, 2022.
Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported an approval rating of 90% for the first season of The White Lotus based on 97 critic reviews, with an average rating of 8.4/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Though its true intentions can get a bit murky, gorgeous vistas, twisty drama, and a pitch perfect cast make The White Lotus a compelling—if uncomfortable—viewing destination." On Metacritic, the season has a score of 82 out of 100 based on 39 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
Matthew Jacobs of TV Guide rated it 4.5 out of 5 and wrote that it is "some of the year's best television thus far." Rolling Stone's Alan Sepinwall graded it 3.5 out of 5 stars and called it "frequently uncomfortable, sometimes poetic, occasionally hilarious, and deeply idiosyncratic throughout." White's attention to character detail was praised, with Naomi Fry of The New Yorker lauding his "affection for his characters, who never feel like caricatures", and Judy Berman of Time commenting he is "uniquely attuned to characters' internal conflicts as well as their varying level of self-awareness."The New York Times's James Poniewozik commended White's signature balance of "sardonic and sincere" tones and his "ear for how people can weaponize idealism", though he also noted the writing "sometimes strains to be topical, with its culture-war Mad Libs references to triggering and cucking, canceling and doxxing."
The performances of the ensemble cast were widely praised, with Roxana Hadadi of RogerEbert.com giving four stars out of four and writing it reveals a "combination of performances that are nearly universally enthralling." Of the character of Armond, Poniewozik wrote Bartlett shows "the invisible gymnastics that go into this job" and plays him like "a coiled spring". Hadadi lauded Rothwell's "nuanced, elastic work" with a "haunting" final onscreen moment. Berman said Coolidge is poised to be the series' breakout but also praised Zahn, Bartlett, Rothwell, Lacy, Sweeney, and Daddario.
Criticisms of the first season lamented that the nonwhite, native Hawaiian characters who work at the resort, such as Lani and Kai, received little screen time and were the least developed characters. In this way, critics argued the show did not sufficiently engage in the issue it seemed poised to critique—the privileges of the affluent, white upper class. Poniewozik felt the show "could use more attention to the downstairs half of its upstairs-downstairs story; it flicks at, but doesn't really explore, the lives of the native Hawaiian staff busing tables and performing dinnertime rituals" for the guests. Mitchell Kuga of Vox wrote, "scraping at imperialism, The White Lotus mimes a moral center but never engages the topic beyond mere gesture...how successful can a piece of satire be if it replicates the very power structures it purports to satirize?" White has said the intention of giving native characters less screen time was to show how "interchangeable" the workers appear to the more privileged.
Inkoo Kang of The Washington Post said the characters and performances "make for a twisty, queasy, sweatily claustrophobic drama", but opined that next to other popular TV shows that center on white, affluent people, such as Succession, Big Little Lies, The Undoing, and The Crown, The White Lotus does not have anything new "to observe about the trail of casual destruction the moneyed and connected can leave in their unhappy wake." In The Observer, Kyle Turner wrote, "as someone who is very fond of White's usually tender, deft hand at balancing tone", he hoped the show had "more precision in its aimed poisoned arrows." Turner added the show is "too broad to be a good satire, too pointedly critical to be a straight tragedy, too invested in its melodrama to be a broad comedy, until it becomes ouroborosian in its indecision on tone and ethos. It's not that these genres and tropes can't coexist. It's that here, they float adrift, devoid of alchemical balance."
Critics were divided about the season one finale, with Kang saying the "swerve late in the series disappointingly sails the story toward calmer waters. Once the turbulence is over, only froth remains." Other critics, such as Emily St. James of Vox, argued that what they considered the anticlimactic nature of the ending was precisely the point of the show and underscored White's commentary on the powerful and the privileged.
The season appeared in the top ten on numerous publications' "Best of 2021" lists, including first for The A.V. Club, The Globe and Mail, The Ringer, Slant Magazine, and The Sunday Times; second for The Boston Globe, Decider, Exclaim!, The Guardian, The Independent, New York Daily News, San Antonio Express-News, Sioux City Journal, Time, and Vulture; and third for Good Morning America, NME, and Uproxx, among others.
The first season of The White Lotus ranked number one among all series on HBO Max and achieved consistent week-over-week growth for both the premiere and digital audience.
More specifically, the second episode showed a 9.29% increase in premiere ratings from the first episode, while the third episode only saw a 4.14% increase, the fourth episode saw a 7.74% increase, the fifth episode saw a 5.05% increase, the sixth and final episode saw a 57.12% increase making it the largest ratings increase in the season. The first season also reached an average of 0.544 million viewers in ratings.
The season received 11 nominations at the 74th Primetime Emmy Awards in the limited or anthology series categories. It was also nominated for nine Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards across eight categories, winning five. The season won the most Emmys that year across both ceremonies, including Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series, Murray Bartlett for Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor, Jennifer Coolidge for Outstanding Supporting Actress, and Mike White for both Outstanding Directing and Outstanding Writing. Connie Britton, Alexandra Daddario, Jake Lacy, Natasha Rothwell, Sydney Sweeney, and Steve Zahn also received acting nominations.