The WHITE LOTUS is the BEST SATIRE of WEALTH PRIVILEGE on TV right now

Here's parts of an EXCELLENT article in the GUARDIAN that SUMS UP the characters quite well:

The WHITE LOTUS is the BEST SATIRE on WEALTH PRIVILEGE right now

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/aug/02/the-white-lotus-hbo-mike-white

The spiky six-part HBO mini-series by Mike White captures the self-delusion and defensiveness of the wealthy white one-percenters in the US

Nicole Mossbacher (an unparalleled Connie Britton), the chief financial officer of a Facebook-esque tech company, asks her daughter Olivia (Euphoria’s Sydney Sweeney) and friend Paula (Little Voice’s Brittany O’Grady), both bratty college sophomores, for a favor – could they include Olivia’s brother, Quinn (Fred Hechinger) more?

“I don’t think you appreciate how tough things are for kids like Quinn right now,” she explains, rubbing sunscreen on her tanned arms. “He is a straight, white, young man, and nobody has any sympathy for them right now.”

Olivia, fluent in both cruelty toward her family and online appearances, rolls her eyes. Paula, a guest on the Mossbachers’ vacation and, like most of the staff at the White Lotus, a person of color, adds that maybe it’s “impossible” to hire straight white male candidates, as Nicole argues, because “up until now, they’re the only people that you’ve ever hired.” She gets it, Nicole assures – “I’m just saying I understand how guys like Quinn can feel a little alienated from the culture right now.”

Nicole’s reasoning is a near-transcription of language I’ve heard among white, moneyed families concerned about the prospects for their children, and a testament to creator/writer Mike White’s understanding of the gulf between emotional truth and material power, cultural shifts and actual change. Nicole’s not wrong, on an emotional level; Quinn is alienated – from his family, who treat him as an afterthought or a nuisance, from genuine connection outside his phone. But he is not, from a bird’s eye view, actually at a disadvantage.

The scene illustrates The White Lotus’s key insight on wealth privilege in the US ...

It’s the mental gymnastics Nicole does to justify her sense of aggrievement, the delusions constructed to believe you think the right things, or are being a good person, while still protecting one’s wealth.

White’s writing often captures, with stomach-churning accuracy, the way a certain class of wealthy white people can react with both extreme sincerity and self-centeredness at once.

The guests in The White Lotus, including the Mossbachers, are rich, but they’re the kind of rich you find in any US city, at any luxury resort at any warm-weather destination.

The White Lotus presents, by mid-season, a caustically bleak comment on the rot at the heart of the entire enterprise. There’s the unnamed body, in a plane-bound “human remains” container, at the start of the first episode

a sense of ominousness hangs over the whole season. Sun-dappled pool scenes are bookended by wordless shots of the churning ocean; large, leafy greens crawl over the bedspreads. Fruit withers on the wallpaper

Bleaker still is the show’s merry-go-round of use and get used

Tanya McQuoid, a rich alcoholic whose bottomless vortex of need is both genuinely sympathetic and vampiric

No one is spared the corrosive effects of moneyed exploitation, even as it masquerades as paradise. “Nobody cedes their privilege,” Nicole’s husband, Mark (Steve Zahn), says at a late episode dinner. “That’s absurd. It goes against human nature. We’re all just trying to win the game of life.” The White Lotus burrows into the violence of this logic; it’s not just faith in the virtue of the game that’s toxic, but the sugar – justifications, defenses, delusions, unashamed ignorance – that helps it go down.