< 'The White Lotus' lands in Thailand for its most soul-searching season yet

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. One of this year's most eagerly awaited TV series is the new season of "The White Lotus." Mike White's acclaimed comic drama about privileged tourists getting up to trouble in posh seaside resorts. In this latest installment, whose first episode drops on HBO this Sunday, the action has moved to Thailand, with visitors that include characters played by Michelle Monaghan, Walton Goggins, Carrie Coon, Jason Isaacs and Parker Posey. Critic-at-large John Powers has watched a big chunk of the series and says it aims deeper than earlier seasons.

JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: One of the most exquisitely cynical lines in 20th century literature comes in the Italian novel "The Leopard." A young aristocrat is telling his uncle, the Prince, why he's joined up with Garibaldi's revolutionaries. If we want things to stay as they are, he explains, things will have to change. This is precisely the thinking behind successful TV franchises, which try to change things just enough to seem fresh while still serving up what the audience loved the first time. Except for maybe "Fargo," no show tackles this challenge more honorably than "The White Lotus," the Emmy-grabbing HBO series in which rich, entitled, white folks cause trouble at enviably gorgeous beachfront resorts. Written and directed by Mike White, "The White Lotus" doesn't merely introduce new characters and locales every season - the latest one is set in Thailand - but also shifts its tone and preoccupations.

Still, it follows a template. Like its predecessors, Season 3 begins with an unidentified dead body and then flashes back to show us who's dead and why. We watch the guests arrive at the White Lotus, a wellness-centered resort on the island of Ko Samui. These include the well-heeled Ratliff family from North Carolina. The parents are played by Jason Isaacs and Parker Posey. There are three 40-something girlfriends led by Jaclyn, a TV star played by Michelle Monaghan. There's gloomy Rick - that's Walton Goggins - a scruffy dude, who's here with his far younger girlfriend, Chelsea. And as always in paradise, there's a serpent.

It would take an hour to tell you the plot. Suffice it to say that, after a low-key start, the show becomes a stir fry of financial secrets, dark family histories, drug abuse, kinky high jinks, poisonous snakes, scary gunfire and oddball comedy. White loves to shove his characters and audiences out of their comfort zone. We often can't be sure whether something is supposed to be funny or serious or both. We don't know which characters are actually nice, are deeper than they first seem, or are blithely headed toward bad things.

Take, for instance, the Ratliff family - Timothy and Victoria and their three grown-up kids. Their provincial complacency is on display when they arrive at the White Lotus and meet the hotel managers.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE WHITE LOTUS")

JASON ISAACS: (As Timothy Ratliff) Wow.

PARKER POSEY: (As Victoria Ratliff) Whoo (ph).

ISAACS: (As Timothy Ratliff) Yeah. Hi.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) The Ratliff family, yes?

ISAACS: (As Timothy Ratliff) That's us.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) How was your flight?

ISAACS: (As Timothy Ratliff) Long layover in Doha, but it's all forgotten now.

POSEY: (As Victoria Ratliff) We flew over the North Pole.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) How did you find us, may I ask?

ISAACS: (As Timothy Ratliff) Well, Piper here is a senior - thank you - at Chapel Hill.

POSEY: (As Victoria Ratliff) I was also a Tar Heel. But Timothy went to Duke. Saxton graduated Duke. Lochlan, our youngest, just got accepted to both. So you can imagine. It's a whole thing.

ISAACS: (As Timothy Ratliff) And she's a religious studies major. So she's writing her thesis on - well, what's your thesis on, Pipe?

SARAH CATHERINE HOOK: (As Piper Ratliff) Buddha (ph).

ISAACS: (As Timothy Ratliff) Yeah. Well, it's on Buddhism. And there's a monk and a monastery near here. Anyway, she wants to interview him. So we made a family road trip over.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Pam, would you please escort them to the villa?

MORGANA O'REILLY: (As Pam) Certainly.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Please enjoy.

O'REILLY: (As Pam) Right this way.

ISAACS: (As Timothy Ratliff) Thank you.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Enjoy.

POSEY: (As Victoria Ratliff) Thank you.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Enjoy.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Enjoy

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Enjoy.

POWERS: If you've seen either of the two seasons, you know that Victoria and her kin are likely to face trickier issues than the rivalry between Duke and the Tar Heels. In truth, Season 3 is less effervescent than 1 or 2, yet the show is still superbly acted by its stars, and White stuffs his scenes with pleasures. I love the comedy of the Ratliff's alpha-male son, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger's son, Patrick, driving everyone crazy by obsessively making protein shakes in a deafening blender. I love the increasingly fraught dynamics of Jaclyn and her friends. The others are played by Carrie Coon and Leslie Bibb, by the way. Whenever two of them get together, they grow catty about the one who's not there. I was especially knocked out by the scene in which Rick meets an old friend who launches into a monologue about his sexcapades in Bangkok. It is, I promise you, the most surprising thing you're going to hear on TV this year.

"The White Lotus" takes it as a given that it's privileged characters have no interest in the culture they're visiting - be it Hawaii or Sicily or now Thailand. They treat it as a theme park or a stage on which they can act out. White clearly hopes to avoid doing that himself. Although he does glamorize Thailand - conspicuous luxury is one of the show's selling points after all - he treats Buddhism respectfully, and he makes a point of trying to incorporate Thai characters. The two best are the hotel's owner - a silver-haired Diva - and a sympathetic security guard whose fecklessess makes us constantly worry for him. Now, over the course of the six episodes available to screen - there are eight in all - White repeatedly shows us two very different things - monkeys and Buddhas. This motif is fitting, for White's theme here is the tension between our animal nature and our yearning for a deeper, more spiritual existence, one free from the values and egotisms that imprison us. Pushing its characters toward questions of life's meaning, this is the most soul conscious of the three seasons. No matter how safe and comfortable things might seem, White suggests, there comes a time of reckoning when we have to face how alone we really are.

MOSLEY: John Powers reviewed the new season of "The White Lotus," which begins Sunday on HBO. Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, we hear from some of "Saturday Night Live's" early cast members, ahead of their three-hour 50th anniversary special on Sunday. Dan Aykroyd, Al Franken, who was one of the show's original writers before becoming a cast member, and writer Alan Zweibel, talks about creating iconic sketches with Gilda Radner. I hope you can join us.

Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.

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