The White Lotus (2021)

If you’re never going to experience a luxury holiday in one of the world’s finest hotels, here’s the next best thing: watching a drama where people doing that have a horrible time, and someone ends up dead. The schadenfreude is addictive as each season of Mike White’s outrageous satire introduces a new clutch of guests - in Hawaii, then Sicily, then Thailand - whose problems can’t be solved by pampering. Breakout star Jennifer Coolidge rules the first two seasons as the eccentric Tanya, but White’s writing is so sharp, you can relax in the knowledge that every new creation of his will be fascinatingly awful.

We all like to be challenged intellectually from time to time, but isn’t it nice when you can just kick back and enjoy something that you know is going to be fun without any of the fuss? That’s not to say The White Lotus is overly simple or lacking any substance. No, it’s more a testament to the fact that this show absolutely nails the balance between gentle thrills and laugh out loud comedy. Combining a superb rotating cast with each of its seasons, luxurious settings, and scandalous plot twists, The White Lotus is almost evocative of the thrillers we saw coming out of Europe in the 1960s, like L’Avventura, or more modern Hollywood flicks like Knives Out and A Bigger Splash.