Review: Things Stay Steamy as 'The White Lotus' Travels to Thailand for Season 3

"The White Lotus" arrives at a new locale and introduces a whole new cadre of good-looking guests with first-world problems and clothes that come off easily – but there's at least one familiar face.

Let's start there. Season One's Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), still dreaming of owning her own spa, makes the trip from Hawaii to learn some new rejuvenating techniques. But once she's there she starts to make connections that could open the way to romance... or danger.

Belinda's not the only one facing such disparate destinies. As with the previous seasons, this one starts off with the introduction of a body before ushering us on to meet a roster of potential victims (and perpetrators). There's the chaotic Ratliff family, a squabbling brood presided over by a compromised businessman Timothy (Jason Isaacs) and his clueless, pill-popping wife, Victoria (Parker Posey). Timothy can't disconnect from his phone calls to the office, which are growing increasingly frantic as colleagues alert him to a growing crisis. Victoria, meantime, is too busy booking sessions of pampering to figure out in which country, exactly, the resort is located.

Their kids range from late teens through mid-twenties, with eldest son Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) – a horny, self-professed workaholic – set to follow in his father's footsteps. (In true "White Lotus" style, it's not long before Saxon is wandering around in the buff.)

Saxon teases his younger siblings for what he sees as their success-stunting sexual shyness, but sister Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) has different, and more spiritual, priorities, while youngest child Lochlan (Sam Nivola), at eighteen, is ready and willing to hook up... if, that is, he can find his way forward and admit to what he really wants.

Then there's a trio of longtime girlfriends, Laurie, Jaclyn, and Kate (played by the magnificent Carrie Coon, in the company of Michelle Monaghan and Leslie Bibb, equally magnificent), who have come to the resort to reconnect and take a break. Their lives and careers are busy, glamorous, and maybe not all they are cracked up to be. In fact, if anything is cracking up, it might be them; each wrestles with personal problems that, as younger women, the three would probably have been all too eager to hear about and to help with. But now? A need to cling to youth and project a glossy facade of success and contentment overrides a yearning for solace.