Opinion What hitting the fast-forward button on The White Lotus reveals about you

The show’s third outing, however, has not been smooth sailing.

Season 3 of The White Lotus, set in Thailand, has received mixed reviews. Some critics have praised it as a “sumptuous feast for all the senses”. Others have complained of its ponderous pacing and predictable plot twists. I must admit to belonging to the latter category. With over eight hours of runtime to get through, I used the fast-forward button more times than I care to reveal. There is only so much one can take of a 50-year-old man agonising over his daddy issues. Enough of this excessive world-building, I muttered to myself as I skipped through the later episodes, jumping scenes and ignoring monologues to just know how it all ends.

Netflix and other streaming platforms are known to be popular options for “casual viewing”. They supply endless content that can become backing tracks to your life, stuff you can keep playing as you attend the after-hours antakshari Zoom call your HR team insisted was mandatory. There have even been reports of Netflix executives asking screenwriters to have their “character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this programme on in the background can follow along”.

There is, however, a delicious irony here. Because even as they advise writers to dumb down content, OTT platforms have given a fresh lease of life to brooding, slow-burning dramas and made them available to audiences worldwide. This does, occasionally, make for great television.

Over the course of a season, these ambitious projects get sufficient time to tackle complex subjects and deliver satisfying resolutions. If they are done well, that is. But for every series that gets it right — Succession, The Bear, Broadchurch — there are many that don’t. The errant ones mistake aimless intricacy for depth, and have plots that are thinner than a Pringles chip — the very problems that ail The White Lotus’s third season.

A few days after finishing the series, I discovered via Instagram posts that the season finale was replete with art symbolism. (As someone who can barely tell the difference between a Picasso and a Pollock, it was no surprise I missed them when I watched the episode.)

In later viewings, the moments referenced by art historians did gain a certain luminosity. Being aware of the easter eggs, the hat-tips to iconic artefacts, made the scenes more weighty, more laden with meaning. It nudged the show, ever so slightly, towards being something worth admiring. It made me wonder if those of us who disliked the latest season had been too quick to judge it. In choosing to linger over characters and their circumstances, wasn’t it attempting to do the same thing that makes the best books so attractive?

In literature, there is a rich tradition of valuing novels where “nothing happens”. Indeed, one may argue that those are the sort of books that sit atop the pyramid, the ones that win the big awards. “Literary fiction” is the momentous title bequeathed to these works to distinguish them from the hoi polloi: The “genre fiction” titles that are viewed as being good for a distraction but with little else to offer.

A lot happens in “genre fiction” books. People fall in love, spies go on missions, detectives solve murders. Plot is supreme. “Literary fiction” tends to chart a different course. There is more contemplation, more interiority as the readers get to know the novel and its inhabitants bit by bit, page after page. Plot twists exist only to reveal a facet of a character’s personality or to pose a moral conundrum. In the works of the best writers, you can lose yourself for hours, for hundreds of pages, and emerge richer for the experience. This is why we allow such books the time to grow on us. It is the promise of the pay-off that prompts us to be patient with them. But why does this patience dissipate so quickly when we switch on the TV?

Perhaps the difference is in the way they engage our senses. When you’re reading a book, your imagination gets free rein to concoct the smells, sights and sounds you encounter in the text. The mere act of reading immerses you in the narrative because you have to spend the cognitive effort to build the world it describes. After a page or a chapter, you’re already invested — in fact, you are now a part of the novel. It only makes sense to continue reading.

A TV show, on the other hand, leaves little room for improvisation. You are no longer the architect of the fictional setting, just a passive observer. A viewer has less agency than a reader, and maybe that is why a viewer is also less indulgent. We want the story to gallop ahead, for the climax to hasten towards us, because that is the only way we can get our hit, the only recourse to satisfy our craving for stimulation. If that’s the case, then every time we moan about a show being boring, it may, in truth, be less of a comment about the show and more a comment about ourselves.

Does this long and winding argument make me change my opinion about The White Lotus, Thailand Edition? Not really. I still regret the eight-plus hours I spent on the show. But it does ensure that when The White Lotus Season 4 is released, I’ll try my best to keep my fingers away from the fast-forward button.

The writer is a Mumbai-based lawyer