The White Lotus is a luxury resort in Hawaii. A new group of guests has just arrived: there's the newlyweds, the family - husband, wife, teenaged daughter and friend, teenaged son - and the solo middle-aged holidayer. One of them will be dead within a week.
I wasn't entirely sure what to expect with this series. On face value it seems intriguing enough and the high IMDB rating made me think it's worth a watch. Having now watched the first episode I'm wondering how on Earth it got such a high rating.
The most striking thing about the first episode is that it is almost entire devoid of likeable characters: Almost everyone is incredibly irritating: the spoiled-brat daughter and friend, the vacuous, always-staring-at-phone son, the overcontrolling celebrity mother, the paranoid father, the hyper-anxious, high-maintenance, talkative-yet-dull solo woman, the newlywed guy who is always looking for faults.
The only likeable character among the guests is Rachel Patton (Alexandra Daddario) but indications are she's not going to live more than a week, making any engagement with her quite limited.
The resort manager, Armond (Murray Bartlett), is easily the most colourful character and pretty much the only thing preventing this from being an incredibly drab affair. The plot is pretty basic and dull at this point but this being the first episode it's currently more about scene-setting and character-introduction than plot development so is to be expected, to an extent. Would be nice to have some engaging characters though...
Also, apparently this is a comedy. You wouldn't know that from this episode.
