It’s easy to tell when a show has exceeded its purpose, which, in long-running shows, is called “jumping the shark,” named after an episode of “Happy Days” where character The Fonz did such a stunt, with viewers criticizing the show for devolving in quality. It had digressed from what made it good, and ventured into the arbitrary and nonsensical. But there is a slightly different kind of shark-jumping: one exclusive to anthologies, surprise smash-hits and other shows that are only supposed to last one season. In these cases, the original tight, single idea is bloated into a second or third season and beyond; the script rambling on long after the story has been told. Can we call this “whitening the lotus?” 

Season one of “The White Lotus” was flawed, but great. Set at a luxury Hawaiian resort, it follows a week in the lives of various stupid-wealthy guests and the teeth-gritting staff who must put up with them, and the first episode ends with a mysterious dead body. The contrast between the beautiful locale and the awful, miserable people who exploit it make for hilarious satire on class, power and how things just sort of suck a lot of the time. As a viewer, my one big note is that the whole story never really congeals. Each of the three main character groups stay separate, and the dead body (spoilers!) ends up being the result of a narrative fluke rather than the conclusion to a well-oiled plot. But what was a minor problem in the first season is now the defining problem of the show as a whole. 

“The White Lotus” was released as a limited series, which made sense. All the characters complete their arcs and resolve their stories within the span of those six episodes, and the focal point — the resort — would likely never see these same faces together again. How could you make more seasons? Apparently, by making cartoon-coin-pools of money for HBO. And so, true to its characters, “The White Lotus” sold out for a second season. Narrative cohesion was unimportant — the show became an anthology, with a new resort and new characters every season, the only continuity being annoying rich people doing annoying things at their exotic escapes. 

The result is a second season where every choice feels like a reaction to the first. Instead of exploited Hawai’i, the setting, for some reason, is Sicily; instead of just one horribly-matched married couple, there’s two; and instead of a dead body, there’s a bunch of dead bodies! It’s a worse, less subtle version of the first season, except when it tries something new — then it’s just plain bad. In one of the pointless ‘making-of’ clips that plays at the end of each episode, creator Mike White says that the first season highlighted money, and the second season sex. This is true — there’s a lot of commentary on everything from infidelity to generational views of masculinity, and some of it’s even pretty good. What’s not clear, though, is why “The White Lotus” is the show to talk about it. The first season “highlighted money” because the entire concept of the show revolved around money, from the setting to the characters to the body in the box. Pivoting to Italy to talk about sex is like if “The Sopranos” switched to a family of Chicago doctors also called Soprano. “The White Lotus” said everything it needed to say in its first six hours; anything beyond that is either repetitive or the words of a different show.

This is not to say that anthologies or unplanned seasons can’t be good. I’m skeptical of any filler fiction, but if its creators find new and relevant ways to tell a continued story, I’ll be the first to tune in. What bothers me is the idea that a show can be retrofitted. If “The White Lotus” was meant to be “a bedroom farce with teeth,” in the words of Mike White, then it would have been that all along. As it stands, the show is stuck with a concept that only worked the first time around, when it was built to fit. White says the third season will satirize Eastern spirituality with an Asian setting. Again, this is not the domain of “The White Lotus,” but it is a little closer, I guess. I hope it will work this time, and that the showrunners won’t whiten this lotus.