Mike White, what are we doing here?
Checking out of The White Lotus. 🛎️
Hi everyone. I just had a great burger at a lunch hosted by the Tory Burch team celebrating their new Romy bag. My bag fit a pair of Rothy’s flats inside of it on the way to lunch, and a pair of Miu Miu pumps and two boxes of Band-Aids on the way home.
Today’s letter has a great lineup, including:
on the lackluster current season of White Lotus, breaking restaurant news about The Met, Audrey Gelman’s Hudson Valley hotel, Alex Cooper hiring a social media manager who is “confident behind the camera” and wants to make $40/hour, Eric Adams trying to open E11EVEN in New York, and more.Before I hand the mic over to Teddy, I want to tee up his column. We’ve been doing weekly live White Lotus Substack chats for the past few Sunday nights, and the overwhelming sentiment is disappointment.
Teddy’s essay focuses on the flatness of the season due to writing, shot length, editing choices, and the most interesting culprit to me: TV Twitter, clip accounts, and online fandom! We know Mike White, like Rian Johnson, is for better or worse, super online and seems to be in dialogue with his own online fans. White is working with tropes and stock characters that should be familiar to the Very Online. At the very least, he’s more successful at this than Rian Johnson, whose reliance on types (“podcast guy”) pushed the second Glass Onion into cringe territory. Say what you will, Mike White and his actors have given us some great memes! Think, “These gays are trying to kill me.”
I value Teddy’s take on this topic as a screenwriter, but also as a writer who focuses on deep trends and signal insights in technology. Plus, he has great taste (he suggested this movie about a woman who gets plastic surgery, and then her kids don’t believe it’s her anymore — I’m going to watch it this weekend).
The TikTokification of The White Lotus.
Stay Tuned is a guest column on Feed Me written by . In this column, Teddy writes about when entertainment comes in contact with tech — and the implications of that. You can read his last column about the new American cinema, here.
As the third season of The White Lotus comes to a close on Sunday, I thought it’d be fitting to take a page from Feed Me’s esteemed restaurant critic J Lee and go off with some thoughts on the spotlight TV of the moment. From the outset, this season has felt—if not entirely off—somewhat undercooked. White Lotus has always been satirical but the characters—they’ve gotten better since the first few episodes—feel flatter and more broadly drawn this time around.
By the time I finished Episode 5 (“Full-Moon Party”), another issue finally dawned on me: there are no scenes in Episode 5. By no “scenes” I mean there are no sequences or set pieces in one setting that have a beginning, middle, and end before moving on to the next thing. The entire episode is just every single story line in the show all happening across one night, with each one barely getting a few lines in before cutting away to the next one, going around like a carousel. It’s all motion, no punctuation.
“Maybe the finale this Sunday will prove me wrong. The depth of field is actually shallow because the show is about shallow people. We cycle through the same conversations in the same settings the way our lives are stuck in a cycle of reincarnation.”
The whole season suffers from this but it’s especially bad in this episode. It’s not that rapid intercutting is inherently bad. When done well and used sparingly, it can create rhythm, tension, even surprise. Along with the handheld camera and zippy writing, it’s what gives a show like Succession a lot of its pep. But when it’s used as a crutch, when every thread is spliced into micro-moments, none are allowed to breathe. There’s little connective tissue between beats, and even less payoff. What should feel like deliberate narrative choreography instead reads as a mechanical relay race between storylines, each baton passed off just as we begin to care.
We’ve entered the era of second-screen television—shows you can watch while looking at your phone—and The White Lotus seems to be adapting accordingly. The editing pattern of White Lotus feels like a direct response to this phenomenon, a competitive adaptation, an early milestone in the TikTokification of TV. I just can’t shake the feeling that the third season is intentionally edited for this effect, the way Cocomelon is engineered with rapid cuts to capture the attention of children.
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