The Premise
Mike White's HBO anthology drops a fresh cast of the loaded and the miserable into a different luxury resort every season — Hawaii, Sicily, Thailand — and watches them curdle. Each installment opens on a body being loaded onto a plane, then jumps back a week to the arrivals dock, where you meet the guests, the staff serving them, and the mutual contempt that comes standard with a private plunge pool. Jennifer Coolidge anchored the first two seasons as Tanya, a rich widow whose neediness could crack marble. Season three moves to Koh Samui with Walton Goggins, Parker Posey, Carrie Coon, Michelle Monaghan, Sam Rockwell, Jason Isaacs, and Aimee Lou Wood, plus Natasha Rothwell returning as the masseuse Belinda. Same format, new bar cart.
The Case For
Casting. White writes parts that give big actors somewhere to go, and they show up. Murray Bartlett's spiraling resort manager in season one is one of the best TV performances of the decade. Coolidge, who could have coasted, instead built Tanya into a full tragicomic figure and won two Emmys for it. Season two lets Aubrey Plaza and Meghann Fahy quietly stare each other into oblivion across dinner tables while F. Murray Abraham, Michael Imperioli, and Sabrina Impacciatore chew through Sicily. The scripts are patient. Cristobal Tapia de Veer's score sounds like a monkey attacking a synthesizer, and it works. And White directs every episode himself, which is why the tone stays coherent even when the ensembles balloon.
The Case Against
It is a formula show now. Body on a plane, flashback, guests bicker, staff seethe, someone gets what's coming. Once you clock the shape, you can feel White building toward it. Season three runs eight episodes and takes its sweet time, and if you don't find the Thailand storylines as sharp as the Sicily ones, that's a lot of wellness retreat to sit through. Some viewers find the satire obvious — rich people are bad, service work is degrading, spirituality is a spa product — and want him to cut deeper than he does. The Belinda arc has always felt a little schematic. And Coolidge's absence in season three is a real loss.
Who It's For, Who'll Bounce
If you liked Succession's cruelty but wanted it in linen, or Big Little Lies with better jokes, you're the audience. Fans of Six Feet Under and Enlightened (White's earlier HBO show, criminally underwatched) will recognize his fingerprints immediately. Bouncers: anyone who needs a protagonist to root for, anyone allergic to slow burns, anyone who watched two episodes of season one waiting for a plot and gave up. Also, if resort-porn cinematography makes you itchy about the wealth on display, the show is aware of that but won't rescue you from it.
The Ruling
Worth it because the craft holds. White uses the anthology reset to swap ensembles without discarding his voice, and he trusts scenes to breathe — a dinner argument runs its full ugly length. The themes about class, service, and money live inside the characters, not in monologues, so nobody's turning to camera to explain the point. Wealth-critique TV usually goes preachy; this one keeps the moralizing in the drama, where it belongs. Three seasons in, the seams show a little and the formula is visible, but the writing, direction, and casts are still doing real work. That's the tier.