There’s a lot to love about HBO’s The White Lotus (Jennifer Coolidge’s hysterical performance, first and foremost) and a lot to wonder about (seriously, are we ever going to get a mainstream hit series about Hawaiian culture that doesn’t center on white tourists?), but one of the show’s greatest assets is its over-the-top yet surprisingly nuanced portrayal of young adult culture.
The college sophomores at the show’s center—queen bee Olivia Mossbacher (Sydney Sweeney) and her best friend Paula (Brittany O’Grady)—are alternately silent and sardonic, reserving their stores of enthusiasm primarily for their stash of legal and illegal drugs, and their bitchiness for Olivia’s oddball brother, Quinn (Fred Hechinger). As writer Maya Kosoff noted on Twitter, they do “mean, hot, over-it teen” even better than the young people who populate the Gossip Girl reboot.
Much of the drama on The White Lotus comes courtesy of the adults—there’s sex galore, and who could forget the scene in which Coolidge, playing the grieving Tanya, screams incessantly as she scatters her mother’s ashes into the sea?—yet it reaches its most refined point when Olivia and Paula are involved. One of the show’s most fascinating moments comes in the third episode, when Olivia’s father, Mark (Steve Zahn), learns that his father didn’t die of cancer, as he’d been led to believe; in reality, he was closeted and died of AIDS. Mark is quite literally shell-shocked by the revelation, but Olivia and Paula don’t bat an eyelash; immediately, they launch into oh-so-edgelord patter about Mark’s father’s preferred sexual position, with Olivia sweetly telling her dad, “Even if he wasn’t a top, that doesn’t mean he was femme.”
To their credit, though, even as they speculate about whether Olivia’s grandfather was a “bossy bottom,” Olivia and Paula seem genuinely grossed out by the idea that Mark is actually wrestling with his father’s sexuality. Within both of them are shades of Matt Damon’s teen daughter (the one who wrote a “treatise” convincing him to stop using an offensive gay slur), but it’s hard to imagine either one doing anything as earnest as writing their parents a persuasive essay. To these young women, homophobia is simply…cheugy, and who knows? Maybe Olivia’s withering, irony-cloaked disdain at her father’s discomfort with his own father’s queerness is a more effective weapon than genuine outrage.
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