‘The White Lotus’ Season 3 Aims to Satirize Eastern Religion

Show creator Mike White chatted about Sunday night's finale and revealed his plans for the next season in an Unpacking interview.

By Rich Juzwiak | December 12, 2022 | 2:32pm

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‘The White Lotus’ Season 3 Aims to Satirize Eastern Religion

Warning: Spoilers for the season finale of The White Lotus (Episode 7, “Arrivederci”) are below.

The White Lotus may be heading to Asia. In a postmortem interview, series creator Mike White (who has also written and directed every episode of the crowd-pleasing series) revealed that the next season may have a spiritual bent.

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“The first season kind of highlighted money, and then the second season is sex,” White said in the Unpacking bonus feature that accompanied the Lotus season finale on HBO Max. “And I think the third season would be maybe a satirical and funny look at death and Eastern religion and spirituality. It feels like it could be a rich tapestry to do another round at White Lotus.”

White also indicated that Season 3 may feature a through line from Season 2: Chasing down Greg (Jon Gries). As was made clear during the Season 2 finale, Greg took a hit out on his wife Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) in order to get her money (a divorce would have given him virtually nothing, thanks to their prenup, but he stood to inherit her fortune in the event of her death). This culminated with Tanya killing almost all of the men who conspired to murder her, and then falling to her own death. Meanwhile, her assistant Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) had been separated from her and dropped off near an airport, advised not to look back.

“It’s possible that Portia is scared enough to just leave it alone, but the fact that all of those guys die on the boat, it feels like there’s gotta be somebody who’s gonna track it back down to Greg,” said White. “But maybe you’ll have to wait and find out what happens.”

Tanya’s shocking death threaded the needle between the first and second seasons. Initially, it seemed that Tanya had been brought back simply because Coolidge was a fan favorite (she and Gries were the only returning cast members). But the two seasons traced an entire arc for Tanya, which began with her meeting with Greg in Season 1 and ended with the full revelation of his plan to have her murdered. White described the arc as Tanya’s “journey to death.”

“Not that I really wanted to kill Tanya because I love her as a character and obviously love Jennifer, but I just felt like, you know, we’re going to Italy, she’s such a kind of diva—a larger than life female archetype—it just felt like we could devise our own operatic conclusion to Tanya’s life and her story,” said White.

“I just felt like dying at the hands of someone else, it felt too tragic,” he continued regarding Tanya’s ultimate demise. “She needed to give her best fight back and that she, in a way, had some kind of victory over whoever was conspiring to get rid of her. It just made me laugh to think she would like take out all of these cabal of killers and, after she successfully does that, she just dies this derpy death, and it just felt like that’s just so Tanya.”

Last month, it was announced that The White Lotus has been picked up for Season 3. Variety reported, “Like the seasons before it, the third season will follow a new group of guests at an entirely different White Lotus resort.”

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