Though Tanya, played by Jennifer Coolidge, is the only carryover from season one, she won't be on vacation in season three unless it's a prequel, belatedly identifying the elaborate plan her husband had hatched, with the help of his friend Quentin (Tom Hollander, absolutely brilliant), to orchestrate his untimely demise. It happened, but in the darkest and most hilarious way imaginable, after Tanya hooks up an errant gun and wades her way within inches of a drain. Tanya, however, wasn't the only character manipulated for money or advantage, which is what connected the show's various threads.

This included the hardworking hotel manager Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore), who succumbed to her repressed sexual urges and gave Mia (Beatrice Grannò) a job after satisfying them; and Albie (Adam DiMarco), the young American who tries to play the white knight by rescuing Mia's friend, the prostitute Lucia (Simona Tabasco), by convincing her father Dominic (Michael Imperioli) to give him 50,000 euros. "How are you going to be successful in life if you are so important?" Dominic asked, before finally giving in, swayed by his son's promise to help him reconcile with his wife.

Lucia and Mia walked off into the sunset with the lyric, "The best things in life are free," a near-perfect, tongue-in-cheek coda to a show where money has complicated everything, including old and new relationships. Wealth has also permeated the third main storyline involving Ethan (Will Sharpe) and Cameron (Theo James), two college roommates who go on vacation with their wives Harper (Aubrey Plaza) and Daphne (Meghann Fahy), respectively. During the final episodes, Ethan became preoccupied with suspicions that Cameron had seduced Harper, which he blamed on resentment that Ethan was far more financially successful than his friend than him.

 However, the rift between them was healed by Daphne, who had clearly found her own way of dealing with her husband's infidelities, and after taking Ethan to a secluded cove, seemingly opening his eyes to the possibilities, to the mysteries, as she put it . , within the world. the confines of a marriage that might have saved even his dying relationship with Harper.

Beyond the shift in location, there were fundamental differences in the hotel service worker-guest dynamic that defined the original, including how class distinctions were echoed through those interactions. At the same time, White has again conjured a disarmingly out-of-place atmosphere, anchoring in both issues the bizarre events not only surrounding a foreshadowed death, but also the struggles of a hard-working hotel manager grappling with how it could be a personal life as you take care of all the spoiled children in your care.

Keeping Coolidge around might have been something of a security blanket for the producers, but for the doubters, White proved that 'The White Lotus' can be placed in any elegant setting, as long as people are willing to stay in a chain of hotel. . where terrible things seem to happen from time to time. HBO isn't free (and like CNN, it's part of Warner Bros. Discovery), but thanks to "The White Lotus," it's home to some of the best things in television, and as anthology-style concepts, potentially. the most durable. So now that all the show-obsessed have said "Goodbye" in Sicily, the only real question is, "Where do we go next?"