'White Lotus' and the Gentle Art of Hating Your Protagonists

Never underestimate the power of schadenfreude.

I come here not to praise the most recent season of “White Lotus,” nor to bury it, but to judge its characters—specifically, how those characters violate one of the more facile “rules” of screenwriting that have always driven me slightly insane.

If you’ve ever sat through any kind of Screenwriting 101 course, you know that instructors often insist you make a character sympathetic, or at least empathetic. Nobody will buy your script if they don’t like your protagonist, they’ll say. People won’t want to watch it. (You also find this edict delivered amidst fiction-writing courses, albeit more rarely.)

“White Lotus” takes that advice, grips it in a sweaty double-suplex, and smashes it neck-first into the mat. Throughout all three seasons, virtually no characters are sympathetic; in fact, the majority are hilariously reprehensible, a gaggle of ultra-rich hotel guests who never realize how terminally disconnected they sound as they opine about their workout routines or surface-sheen spiritual…