‘White Lotus’ Creator Crushes Woke Guardrails on Storytelling

Mike White isn’t a rule-breaking investor, a drug-addled socialite or a Gen Z womanizer.

He’s a soft-spoken artist who penned those characters for the third season of “The White Lotus.”

The Max series, a critical darling for its first two installments, brings a bevy of flawed figures to wallow in paradise. Watching them squirm is oddly enjoyable.

This season, paradise means the sumptuous jungles of Thailand.

White, the show’s writer and director, has no problem creating characters outside of his personal experience. He’s a talented, openly gay man who acts as well as directs. 

His ability to create a range of colorful characters is why audiences have flocked to the saga since its inception. The fourth episode of the current season drew 3.4 million viewers, a solid sum in the modern TV landscape. It also lapped the viewership for the show’s third-season debut.

In short – we can’t get enough of “The White Lotus.”

White explained to blogger and podcaster Andrew Sullivan why he doesn’t let Identity Politics hold him back in the writer’s room.

“The idea of lived experience … there’s some identity barriers you’re not welcome to cross, and that was always the pleasure [of storytelling],” White told Sullivan. “I would be a different writer if I just wanted to write first-person, truthful narratives about my feelings and what I think and whatever. That doesn’t excite me to write.”

He gently pushed back at the fading woke notion that writers must stick to their backgrounds and immutable characteristics when creating art.

The most glaring example?

Author Jeanine Cummins faced an aggressive Cancel Culture campaign when her book “American Dirt” hit stores in 2020. Cummins isn’t Mexican, but she wrote a well-regarded tale of a Mexican woman crossing into America through the Southern border.

Some on the far Left said she had no right to tell another culture’s story.

Her publicity tour got shelved following violent threats. Some of her biggest supporters, including Oprah Winfrey, backpedaled following the imbroglio.

White has no time for such restrictions.

“I disagree with [Identity Politics in art] in some kind of a more fundamanental way … We also share so much. The idea that we’re always focusing on our identity differences and this kind of codified idea of what identity is supposed to be .. … I just don’t believe the world is that way.”

“I feel like there’s something that is an outgrowth of my religious upbringing, the best part of that … that we are more alike than we are different. These idiosyncracies can be shared by a black woman or a white guy.”

The characters on the show, Sullivan said, “are recognizably human … so many other characters on TV are not.”

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