How the middle-aged ‘anal retentive’ behind The White Lotus became the unlikely saviour of US TV

Mike White turned a mid-pandemic crisis into The White Lotus, cementing his place in prestige TV.

Mike White, the son of a gay evangelical minister, created the HBO hit following years of disappointment and at least one nervous breakdown.

Mike White was feeling blue when the email arrived.

It was the first year of the pandemic, and White – a screenwriter and actor best known for his script for Richard Linklater’s 2003 feel-good blockbuster School of Rock, starring Jack Black – was driving aimlessly around Los Angeles, trying to shake himself out of a Covid-era “funk”.

His existential crisis took a back-seat, however, as his inbox pinged with a message from HBO, the prestige US network which had commissioned two seasons of his quirky dramedy with Laura Dern, Enlightened. At one of his lowest moments since a mental breakdown a decade previously, he’d been handed a lockdown lifeline.

HBO had reached out to White, not because he was a big-shot writer or a proven hitmaker. Although well reviewed, Enlightened had been a ratings disappointment for the network, which dropped it at the first opportunity. But executives knew White worked quickly, and in the dystopian television landscape of early 2020, speed mattered, as Covid played havoc with production schedules and forced studios to magic up new content on the fly.

A few months later – a mere finger-click in TV terms – HBO had their script, and cameras were rolling on White’s new show: a spiky deconstruction of wealth, privilege, murder and hellish holidays, set at a luxury Hawaiian resort called The White Lotus.

Five years later, The White Lotus has returned for a third season, and White is, at age 54, a middle-aged overnight success. It’s a remarkable late blooming for a writer who seemed to have had his moment with School of Rock, penned for his then-neighbour Black. In the years since, failure had followed failure, culminating in a breakdown while he was working on the aptly-titled sitcom Cracking Up, which resulted in a stay at a psychiatric hospital. Until The White Lotus, the highlight of his career was appearing as a contestant on US reality shows The Amazing Race and Survivor (that’s how White saw it, anyway).

Mike White writes and directs The White Lotus, which has just premiered its third season.

White is a complicated figure, but the premise of The White Lotus is simple. Each season, a group of wealthy and largely loathsome characters gather at a luxury destination run by the eponymous resort chain. In series one, it was in Hawaii, where Murray Bartlett played resort manager and former drug addict Armond, slowly cracking from the pressure of waiting hand-and-foot on entitled vacationers. In 2022, the action shifted to Sicily, where the all-new cast included F Murray Abraham, Aubrey Plaza and Tom Hollander (Jennifer Coolidge returned from series one).

This year it’s Phuket in Thailand, where Jason Isaacs and Parker Posey play a middle-aged couple on holiday with their three children, including their cocky son (Patrick Schwarzenegger), while Michelle Monaghan stars as one of a trio of old friends on a girls’ trip. Invariably, the gilded getaway takes a turn for the worst – and in the ensuing chaos, closets are shaken, and all sorts of skeletons come rattling out.

White would be the first to admit he is an unlikely success story. He’s always kept Hollywood at arm’s length, regarding himself as an outsider in a town where it’s all about connections. His first major gig was working on 90s teen drama Dawson’s Creek – but he quit because he couldn’t stand the weekly grind of backstabbing and brown-nosing. He then landed a job on the early Judd Apatow comedy Freaks and Geeks, where he struggled to adapt to Apatow’s quasi-improvisational style.

“I’m anal retentive, and Judd is the ultimate anal expulsive,” White told the New Republic in 2013, explaining that Apatow’s working method of constantly tinkering with a script and adding improvised jokes drove him to distraction. “For someone like me, who wants to have a lot of authorial intent, you start to feel like – I can’t.”

HBO approached Mike White in 2020 because they knew he could write fast - The White Lotus was born in months. Photo / AFP

The White Lotus is all about secrets hiding in plain sight – whether it be Shane and Rachel’s shaky marriage in series one or Quentin’s relationship with his much younger “naughty nephew” Jack in series two. Secrets are something with which White is all too familiar, having grown up in Pasadena, California, as the son of an Evangelical minister who wrote sermons for famous preachers such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. His dad was a pillar of the community. He was also gay – and, unbeknown to his family, had signed up for conversion therapy in the desperate hope his homosexuality could be “cured”.

Mel White finally came out to his wife and kids. But his son, Mike, already knew the truth, having happened upon documents detailing his father’s treatment. “I found out he was gay prior to him coming out to the family just because he’d had a lot of therapy and kept all these notes about the therapy,” he revealed to American public radio. “And I stumbled upon that and realised that there was this whole other side to him and what was going on. I was just always taught that in the greater community that my parents were a part of, sex was mostly sinful and kind of unspeakable. And it was something that everybody kind of kept under wraps.”

Before The White Lotus, White almost hit the big-time with the aforementioned School of Rock. But if friendly with Black, he and the movie’s director, Richard Linklater, didn’t see eye to eye, and what ended up on screen was Linklater’s vision as much as White’s. Linklater cast sometime actor White as Black’s nerdy roommate Ned – but according to Black, the mood on set wasn’t always conciliatory.

“I don’t think that Mike White and Richard Linklater ever would’ve gotten together to collaborate had it not been for [producer] Scott Rudin, because they’re very different temperaments,” Black said. “They’re a little bit like oil and water. They didn’t always totally get along.”

While White was having his issues with the industry, his father had found his calling campaigning for evangelical churches to acknowledge and cherish gay members of their congregation – and would go on to write books such as Holy Terror: Lies the Christian Right Tells To Deny Gay Equality. Father and son remain close and, in 2009, appeared together on The Amazing Race.

His love for reality TV is often mistaken for an affectation. He insists there is nothing tongue-in-cheek about his enthusiasm for the genre. He remembers hosting a party where he told Jennifer Aniston that he and his dad were about to go on Amazing Race – and being struck by her look of utter horror.

Jennifer Coolidge starred in seasons one and two of The White Lotus, the HBO series written and directed by Mike White. Photo / Araya Diaz, Getty Images, AFP

“It’s not ironic. It’s not ironic,” he explained to The New Yorker in 2021. “Survivor is the only show I really devotedly watch, even though I get frustrated with it. Part of my job and my way of life is studying people and analysing motivation and character. I still feel like, even on the most contrived reality show, the people are human and they’re more interesting than some of the most well-scripted drama. And for me, as a writer of drama, I aspire to do what reality television already does. To create characters that are surprising and dimensional and do weird s*** and capture your attention.”

Capturing people’s attention is no longer a problem for White. The White Lotus season three will cement his standing as one of prestige TV’s last true auteurs – a successor to figures such as Sopranos creator David Chase and Breaking Bad’s Vince Gilligan.

Far from embracing success, White has struggled to adapt to his new status as an ageing boy-genius of satirical comedy. He’s spent his entire life as the underdog – becoming the toast of the chattering classes is an adjustment, and judging by recent interviews, he’s having trouble taking it in his stride. He also knows you’re only as hot as your latest hit – and that, just like the guests of The White Lotus, he’ll have to check out eventually. “I’ve done so much weird-ass stuff,” he said, contemplating The White Lotus and its impact in 2022. “This is only a little frozen moment in time.”

New episodes of The White Lotus season three are available weekly on Mondays on Neon (from 4pm) and Sky’s HBO (8.30pm)