‘Wave like you mean it,” the hotel manager tells his staff as they line up on the beach waiting for the next boatful of guests to arrive at the luxurious White Lotus resort. With that line, Mike White’s immaculate six-part creation is set. On to the beach come the clientele, awed by the beauty of their surroundings but already taking the humans on the shoreline for granted – checking that their needs (wants) have been anticipated, extracting further efforts from those they are sure exist only to serve, and soon demanding (in what in Shane’s case will evolve into a series-long war of attrition with the manager, Armond) apologies and upgrades whenever minor mistakes are made. The White Lotus had many superficial similarities with previous glossy hits such as Big Little Lies. It looked gorgeous, had an array of affluent white characters living what they considered ordinary and what most would consider easeful, glamorous lives, and a murder-mystery woven in. White’s purpose, however, couldn’t have been more different. The initial focus on the guests soon broadened to include the staff, their stories and their various entanglements with those whose beds they changed, massages they gave and egos they indulged in the name of hospitality. In the process it became many things. It was a set of scabrous character studies, whose highlights included self-confessed “insane alcoholic” Tanya straddling the line between neediness and outright narcissism and perfectly played by Jennifer Coolidge, and the gruelling vileness of Olivia (Sydney Sweeney) the pretty, privileged teen who has weaponised wokeness in order to burnish her untouchability when in a just world the hypocrisy should burn in her veins hard enough to kill her. It was a tragicomedy or a hysterically funny drama that folded in every kind of comic moment, from alpha mum Nicole’s fretting over lumpen, screen-addicted scion Quinn (“so alienated”) because there’s never been a harder time to be a straight, white male, to Rachel’s giddily awful mother-in-law, to the simple joy of Armond’s scatological revenge in the finale. Above all it was a social satire, the luxury resort providing a picture of America (and/or any other country currently contorting itself around the requirements of late western capitalism) in microcosm. The disparity between the haves and have-nots was on permanent display. It was not just the fact that the guests assumed money could buy them their own way, we realised as the story unfolded and especially as it reached its startling yet credible conclusion, but that they were right. White’s show held up to the light the way class structures – perhaps enshrined most clearly in the increasingly emotionally exploitative relationship forced on spa therapist Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) by Tanya – are embedded so deeply and so firmly entwined with racism that they seem almost invisible (to the beneficiaries) and immutable (to all). And it showed the inexorability of two vital truths; nobody really cares about anything as long as they’re all right – and that although an actual turd may be contained in a suitcase, metaphorical shit always rolls downhill. Add to these meaty themes a brilliant ensemble cast (including Steve Zahn, Connie Britton, Molly Shannon, plus Jake Lacy playing brilliantly against type as overbearing manbaby Shane) and a cracking good story, kept from slipping into soapiness by delicate dialogue and a firm hand on the narrative reins, and you felt rather like you’d been treated to a luxury holiday yourself. Special mention must go to Murray Bartlett’s hugely funny and in the end hugely moving performance as Armond, a recovering drug addict who had been clean for five years before the latest arrivals proved too much for him. Highly strung but professional and capable until almost the last, his undoing stands for the unsustainability of all power imbalances. A man and a society can only take so much.