Mike White is offering some more ideas for the third season of The White Lotus
With another legendary stay at The White Lotus behind us, it's time to theorize about the next season
Last night, HBO’s The White Lotus said “Arrivederci” after another luxury vacation for the ages. Now that the deaths of a few rich, miserable people have been played out and packed away, it’s time to, firstly, praise the performances of Meghann Fahy and Jennifer Coolidge this season, and secondly, start looking forward to season three.
As Mike White has previously stated, the third season of The White Lotus has set its sights on a resort somewhere in Asia, but the writer and director is now offering new ideas about the central theme of the next installment.
“The first season kind of highlighted money, and then the second season is sex,” White says in HBO’s behind-the-scenes special, “Unpacking S2 E7.” “I think the third season would be maybe a satirical and funny look at death and Eastern religion and spirituality. It feels like it could be a rich tapestry to do another round at White Lotus.”
Who knows—maybe we will catch up with Ethan (Will Sharpe), Harper (Aubrey Plaza), Cameron (Theo James), and Daphne (Meghann Fahy) on next year’s vacation to the Maldives. These complicated friends have to schedule another opportunity to cheat and lie to one another over lots and lots of alcohol!
What we do know (this is your spoiler alert!), is that Coolidge’s Tanya McQuoid will not be joining us on the next White Lotus excursion after facing her tragically funny demise in the season two finale. After getting absolutely bamboozled by her husband Greg (John Gries) and his posse of Palermo gays, she shot her way out of a Mafia-backed death only to tumble out of the yacht, hitting her head on the way down.
On Tanya’s death, White says, “I was thinking, it’d be so fun to bring Tanya back because she’s such a great character, but maybe that’s the journey for her, a journey to death. Not that I really wanted to kill Tanya because I love her as a character and obviously love Jennifer, but I just felt like, we’re going to Italy, she’s such a diva—a larger-than-life female archetype—it felt like we could devise our own operatic conclusion to Tanya’s life and her story.”
He continues, “It just made me laugh to think she would like take out this cabal of killers and, after she successfully does that, she just dies this derpy death, and it just felt like that’s just so Tanya.”
Oh, Tanya, you will be missed—but boy, did you go out with some truly iconic lines and a shoot-out we will never forget.