Hacker Cinema
The White Lotus
2021 · TV series · 3 seasons
Created by Mike White
Follow the exploits of various guests and employees at an exclusive tropical resort over the span of a week as with each passing day, a darker complexity emerges in these picture-perfect travelers, the hotel’s cheerful employees and the idyllic locale itself.
6 positive2 negative2 mixed12 neutralfrom 22 commenters
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23 comments on Hacker News
Nobody advocates for fixing the price. People want more supply which will bring the cost of housing as a whole down or at least provide more price diversity.
Is it even beneficial to have a house worth a lot of money? Think about places where property is expensive, it is also expensive to live there in general because housing costs so much. The cost of housing means employers have to pay their employees a lot to keep them there. This in turn means you are paying more for goods and services. If you're a homeowner, but NOT a high income person, this is very bad. It means you can't make payments towards maintenance of your house, going out becomes harder, etc. Your quality of life decreases.
People who inherit homes that are worth a lot, but aren't flush with cash end up having to sell frequently because there is no way for them to maintain it. It's also the plot of white lotus season 2 with the villas lol.
My backlog is crazy long. As much as I love TV I don't get nearly as much time to watch it as I'd like.
* Andor * Black Rabbit * Dune * Last of Us * Percy Mason * The Paper * Pluribus * Severance * The Studio * Succession * White Lotus
Of all those, Andor was the biggest surprise. I'm a mild Star Wars fan (I've seen the movies and that's about it) but I really enjoyed this, probably more than the movies. It looked amazing, was well written and acted. It's a prequel to one of the movies and we watched the movie right after we finished the series and I ended up liking the movie a lot more than I did the first time I saw it.
The Paper and The Studio are comedies and watching them made me miss the great sitcoms of the past. Why aren't there more comedies?
I liked the Last of Us game and I think that's a big part of why I enjoyed the tv show. If you haven't played the game or aren't a zombie person, you could probably skip that one.
I liked The Peripheral but it was canceled so I have a hard time recommending it. What they made was very good but there just isn't enough of it. The William Gibson book it's based on is worth reading IMHO.
Why can’t we have original stories(I.e Sinners, Black Panther, White Lotus) and instead try to make White Snow black or whatever and paint people racist? I get that people want to make these stories more inclusive but the characters are just too powerful to change them and not expect a backlash.
People prefer new characters or “staying true to the original story/character” instead of lazy remixes.
Or you can create your own remix with AI now. Feed the movie and make the characters as you want. The result may seem a bit weird(i.e like a Snow White being a fat black gay male) for a fan of the movie/character but for you as an activist it will check the marks you are looking for. Just don’t invoke racism if people won’t like your AI slop.
I’m really disappointed, because Netflix doesn’t sell any of their content. You have to subscribe.
I own Soprano’s, White Lotus, Batman Movies, etc on regular media, but I can’t get shows like Black Mirror outside of a subscription for the rest of my life.
I really hope they continue to offer physical and digital sales of their media for those who perfer to buy instead of renting.
Paramount, Disney, NBC Universal, etc all still sell their content even though they operate subscription services and I wish Netflix would do the same.
Sad news. HBO has a veritable treasure trove of TV shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Silicon Valley etc. Even their more recent ones like White Lotus, How to With John Wilson are leagues above Netflix. Only HBO can bet on artists’ vision like that.
I cancelled my Netflix subscription 7 years ago, 99% of their content is algorithmic drivel. Mindhunter, Dahmer, House of Cards were something I liked but nothing beyond that. I knew they were trash once I saw the sheer number of spinoffs they have just on Pablo Escobar. They had had one decent run of Narcos but then they just tried to extract every drop of juice out of that one persona. Most of Netflix dramas are just the equivalent of abhorrent and ugly graffiti. Their shows are Exhibit A in what happens if you give into algorithmic drivel and have no human touch to curate them.
HBO has some timeless TV classics that I keep rewatching every year even though I have watched them multiple times. Netflix can’t produce TV dramas like that, ain’t in their blood. Completely different DNAs.
Netflix does deserve all the plaudits wrt to their streaming experience though.
I’m curious about this.
My assumption is that pharma companies sponsor / use cases like this to advertise their drug via TV show mentions. Is this common? And is that the case with the White Lotus?
Why was lorazepam mentioned specifically. Could it have been any other anti-anxiety drug?
Is there a way to find out which companies are affiliated with which media productions? (Tv shows, movies, music, etc)
I generally just assume that a product name is never mentioned accidentally in any content online
I think you've got it backwards.
That was the hallmark of old TV, on networks. Since the start of TV in the 50's.
There are tons of modern TV shows that don't do anything you're talking about because they're made for streamers or paid TV without ads.
It sounds like you watch different shows than I do, but I watch a lot of TV and haven't seen what you're talking about in many, many years. Not with Squid Game or Stranger Things on Netflix, or Andor on Disney+, or White Lotus on HBO, or Severance on Apple TV+, or even something like Alien: Earth currently on FX/Hulu.
You might want to find better places for watching TV...
> and yet what have they created of any real quality in the last few years besides White Lotus?
Now you’re just acting like the OP. There’s plenty of highly regarded us shows from the last few years. Just go look the highest rated current TV shows on rotten tomatoes.
>Wolf Hall ...
you're nitpicking. it's a high class, well-produced, well-acted, British-made TV show, by the BBC, of a very high quality that would be well-regarded in any era (if you ignore the weird racial thing they did in S2)
>Line of Duty
your opinion is absolutely in the minority, which isn't to say it's wrong, but it's a very well regarded, high class show that's widely seen as well above "decent procedural"
>Adolescence
whether it's liberal or paid for by Netflix is irrelevant to whether it's a high quality British-made tv show
>you haven't watched the others
then you're going to struggle to give a useful opinion on this matter, aren't you?
>Hardly in the class of historical Beeb
every historical BBC show you can name will have myriad minor subjective criticisms of the like you've just produced
>let alone contemporary US brilliance.
if you think US TV is even remotely comparable with UK TV, you're not paying attention. the US is long since out of its golden era, which pretty much died with Game of Thrones. US media has an order of magnitude more financial means than that of the UK, and yet what have they created of any real quality in the last few years besides White Lotus? they repeatedly fail to even remotely approach the class and quality of our TV. on the rare occasions they do get close, it's on the back of British actors or British production
I think most platforms have recognised this and now release an episode per week to get that common cultural experience back. I great plenty of discussion about last night's episode of white lotus or last of us.
I wouldn't be getting to nostalgic about the old days of tv. Remember how it was to miss am episode and have to wait for the repeat? Or be sick in bed for days and bored with literally nothing to watch/binge?
Ever seen white lotus season 2? Stanford grad falls for a prostitute. Italians cannot resist.
Try this: look up the most highly rated episodes on IMDB and watch only those. Missing the crummy episodes usually does not interfere with understanding the story arc. Often, I set a minimum IMDB score that I will watch, like 8.5 or 9.0 to capture only the best. This works well with series that:
- take a year or two to find their footing or
- have a large cast (some mediocre) that get their own story lines of no consequence occasionally or
- introduce cast members that don't make it or
- implode towards the final season.
I have done this for many series that are somewhat uneven:
- The Americans
- How I Met Your Mother
- Fringe
- Orphan Black
- Halt and Catch Fire
- House of Cards (watching the ratings allows you to miss all of season 6)
- Arrested Development
- Bojack Horseman
- Veep
- 30 Rock
- Jane the Virgin
- Black Mirror
- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
- Suits
- Six Feet Under
- La Femme Nikita
- The Blacklist
- Peaky Blinders
- The Romanoffs
- Ozark
- Westworld (sometimes dropping episodes does not matter)
- Succession
- Borgen
And all of these series have lots of strong episodes.
Series I would not do this with:
- The Bear
- Breaking Bad
- Money Heist
- The Serpent
- Fleabag
- Chernobyl
- The White Lotus
> Without advertising, you wouldn't even know that many products and services exist.
This is a vastly positive tradeoff. The number of products which would improve my life, versus the number of products I am inundated with daily, is a negligible ratio.
> You can't rely on word-of-mouth for everything.
That's true. However, I can rely on independent review sites, and I could probably rely on search engines to find me products that solve problems when I search for them, if they weren't controlled by advertisers.
Nobody is saying rely on word-of-mouth. That's a straw man.
> Of course, so many advertisers have abused their power that blocking ads is a good choice for many reasons, but don't make the mistake of calling all advertising "evil". Without it, how do you know a new movie is coming soon, or that someone's invented and is selling a new computer peripheral, for instance?
There are a number of movie reviewers I follow, and a few friends who have similar taste in movies as me. I'm not interested in computer peripherals, but if I were, I imagine Wirecutter contains information, and there are probably other similar sites.
Advertisers are not helping me find movies to watch or computer peripherals I need. They're helping themselves, and in a way that's aligned with harming me. I never saw an ad for Everything Everywhere All At Once, which was my favorite movie last year--my friend Adam invited me to see it. I did see a ton of astroturfing for White Lotus, which was a complete waste of my time to watch two episodes of. Why would I want ads?
Stop this nonsense about how we need ads. We don't.
> The old-style small, highly-targeted, text-only ads that Google used to show alongside search results really were the pinnacle of advertising I think. They were great for learning about something that would fix whatever problem you were googling about.
God forbid Google return the solution to your problem as a search result, you know, like a functioning search engine.
This really is the most absurdly missing-the-point example you could have chosen.
> Seinfeld is one of the few sitcoms where a female character is as flawed as the men. You couldn't even do that show today.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia? Succession? Yellow Jackets? The Righteous Gemstones? Beef? White Lotus? House of The Dragon?
You could argue about percentages but it is in fact extremely easy to do a show with flawed female characters today.
Seems like season 3 of white lotus and Cristobal Tapia de Veer should work these blobs into the opening of the show.
isn't it obvious? Mike White's season three of The White Lotus will be shot there.
Some good quotes:
> The true villains of our time are ensconced in cocoons of comfort, immune to accountability. They enjoy their lives; they are not burdened by guilt or shame; the other shoe is never going to drop. To see them suffer, we have the cinema.
And
> As critics have noted, there is an element of feeble wish fulfillment in these works, an unctuous eagerness to flatter the audience’s moral sensibilities while satiating a furtive lust for class warfare. (Somehow, hostility to the ultrarich has become a marker of modish cultural literacy.) At other times, a frisson of class consciousness serves only as an alibi for an audience eager to live vicariously in luxury. (HBO’s White Lotus and Succession, which Mylod frequently directs, manage this dance particularly well.) As viewers, we get to have it both ways: Indulge in a fantasy of extravagance, and then, remembering we’ll never have it for ourselves, relish watching it turn to (literal) shit.
Yeah given the numbers of shows being produced, as long as 3-4 new ones per year are worth watching what more do you really need? There's tons of back libraries of good shows and HBO and Apple TV is still making high quality stuff.
Let Netflix produced a pile of garbage and I'll sift through the diamonds the year after... I have yet to have a year where there wasn't 3-5+ high quality streaming seasons (this yr = White Lotus, The Offer, and Severence).
If not you can always rewatch The Wire for the 5th time.
The only losers are those looking to binge watch new stuff every week... AFAIK those people were previously the audience for garbage prime time network shows on FOX/NBC/etc that no one even remembers the names of 5yrs later.
So I guess it sucks for them - being the guinea pigs for the rest of us ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Streaming is in an interesting place because a lot of the big hits (at least from my POV) are now such lavish productions that like movies, their sequels do not necessarily arrive year after year. So The White Lotus, House of the Dragon, and Andor (of Disney+) are being filmed in 2023, and will not be returning until 2024.
It's an interesting scheduling situation- so they're going to have to put out new content to fill the void in the meantime for the fans of such shows who have nothing to look forward to for an entire year, to keep them from unsubscribing.
Airing 1 or 2 episodes a week gives maximum opportunity for a show to be successful, esp if it's a smaller show that doesn't have a built in audience (ie. if it's not a Marvel/Disney show or returning seasons of successful shows). Airing weekly means that there is an ongoing conversation around your show (if it's any good) and each media outlet is potentially writing about your show n times as opposed to writing about your show 1 time reviewing the entire thing, that results in more chances for the audience finding your show. The cancelling the service thing is at best a secondary concern. Moreover creators of many show prefer that their show be consumed on a week to week basis as opposed to binged in 1 sitting with little opportunity for the audience to reflect on it.
HBO has mastered that art of "1 episode a week to maximize the audience and buzz of what appears to be a niche show" even on their streaming service and as a result have found unconventional hits like Euphoria, The White Lotus, Succession, The Leftovers which would otherwise have been lost in the glut of peak tv abyss if they were just dropped in one night.
Just to be clear: the white friend in White Lotus does not in fact genuinely care about her minority friend Paula. The series sets up the falsity and creepiness of their relationship over multiple episodes.
That doesn't refute any point you're trying to make here, but I'm pretty confident the show doesn't want you to see the white family as the "good guys" in the story.
For this thread, I'd just leave it at: White Lotus is an absurdist work of fiction. Excepting the BLM guy and maybe Belinda the wellness spa worker, if anything anybody on that show says really resonates with you, you should double-check yourself. The point of the show is that most of the characters are in their own ways odious.
> Yes, practices based in tradition and not evidence have that problem.
Let’s not pretend that education is a practice based in “evidence.” America has among the most professionalized schools systems in the developed world, and also among the worst. My cousin in Sacramento was complaining the other day about how far behind her kid’s school is in math compared to what she learned in Bangladesh in the 1990s. You think we have EdDs? No, just tradition (i.e. practices with a track record of working).
> Minorities (especially blacks and American Indians) are ghettoized by the status quo system, in which they do not have equal upward mobility.
And ethnic identity politics is part of the status quo system for those groups. At least in the last 30 years, that seems to have hurt more than it’s helped.
> You play a nice trick talking about immigrants (a small minority of racial and ethnic minorities) and the pretending that covers the bulk of the minority experience, but it does not.
Hispanics and Asians, the vast majority of whom have immigrant backgrounds within the last few generations, comprise 25% of the country, while Black and native Americans comprise 15%. By 2060, the Black and native population share will be about the same, while Asians and Hispanics will be nearly 40% of the population. The liberal approach of projecting the Black and indigenous experience onto all “people of color” is innumerate.
Hispanics and Asians are economically converging with whites over time: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. Possibly derailing that convergence (which is pretty much unprecedented in the world) is something everyone should be scared of.
The TV show White Lotus had a tremendous illustration of the problem. One of the characters, Paula, is a minority who is college friends with a white girl and comes to Hawaii with the girl’s family. Paula falsely convinces herself that her white friends don’t really care about her. She persuades a (reluctant) native Hawaiian worker at the hotel to steal from her friend’s family, giving some speech she learned at school about stolen land, but he gets caught and arrested. Liberal identity education hurts the affluent “brown” girl by driving an artificial racial wedge between her and her friend who genuinely cares about her, and destroys the life of the working class “brown” boy, by corrupting his traditional morality. I’m not sure it was supposed to be a conservative polemic but it succinctly illustrated exactly what I’m afraid of happening to my own kids as they’re taught to develop an “identity” around their “skin color” in elementary school (according to the email I received recently).
Do you think my progressive Maryland school is throwing “skin color is really important in society” while leaving “but all skin colors are equal” out of the discussion?
But we’re dealing with kids who haven’t yet been socialized with the ideal of color blindness, like you and I. At the same time, they don’t take what teachers say at face value.
Teachers say “skin color is really important” and “America is systemically racist against dark skinned people.” Teachers can say “but all skin colors are equal” but that isn’t necessary what kids take away. What do they mean by “equal?” Is it a euphemism, like so many others we use? Is it moral equivalence rather than literal equality? At the same time, teachers are saying people with different skin colors are different—the kids are taught to celebrate their diversity. And why would so many people think people with dark skin are inferior if there wasn’t some truth to that? You can’t tell second graders that skin color is a big deal but also not a big deal.
Also, the premise isn’t true. I grew up in Virginia when it was a red state. I went to college at Georgia Tech, where most of my classmates were from red parts of the south. But I’ve only ever been called a racial slur twice, both times by homeless people who weren’t white.
Telling brown kids that society is systemically racist against them when it isn’t true does harm. It divides them from their white peers and makes them look for racism where it might not exist.
The TV show “White Lotus” actually has a great take on this. Native Hawaiian girl goes to elite school and visits a Hawaiian resort with her friend’s wealthy white parents. She’s learned CRT education at her college and become woke. She convinces a native Hawaiian hotel worker to ignore his moral compass by telling him to steal her friend’s family’s jewelry because after all white people stolen Hawaii from people like him. He gets arrested and it ruins his life. And she strains her relationship with her white friend, who genuinely cared about her as a person. As the parent of a brown girl the show articulated exactly what I’m afraid of with CRT education.