Who cares about The White Lotus? For at least eight years now, since the debut of Big Little Lies in 2017, HBO has been pumping out nominal satires of the ultra-wealthy. From the travails of the Monterey Five through Succession, Industry, House of the Dragon, The Righteous Gemstones, The Idol, Winning Time, and, of course, The Gilded Age, the premium cable network’s most consistent narrative move for the better part of a decade has been putting a bunch of rich folks in a room and pointing at them. The political postures of these series vary widely, from agnosticism to contempt to affectionate ribbing.

While viewers, in general, seem to perceive that they should disapprove of all this decadence, it’s been hard to discern a clear point of view from the network. Not every show needs to be a polemic on behalf of the 99 percent, and there are pitfalls to an approach that’s too heavy-handed or obvious. But it’s also hard to take HBO’s “eat the rich” manifestos all that seriously when the network is now run by a bunch of private equity Nosferatus.

Among these series, though, Mike White’s The White Lotus has long been the most savage and most accomplished. Starting over every season at a different, far-flung outpost of the same superluxury resort chain, White’s tangy satire has moved from Hawaii to Sicily and now, in its third season, to Thailand. Every White Lotus resort is full of people who are quippily, hilariously telling on themselves nonstop. Here is an insular community’s myopic account of itself; here is the melodrama of lovers and families strangled by their own privilege; here are the scammers who scam them; here are the victims of their humiliation. But, despite the boldness of its bold strokes, there’s always been something about The White Lotus that feels roughed out rather than fully realized. The presence of Thai service workers this season, or local Sicilian criminals, or any number of other upstairs/downstairs farces in previous seasons, tempts us toward a vision of the show that isn’t really in its purview. This is simply a show about horrible, rich, horribly rich people.

Where has all of this swiping at the rich gotten us? Mike White, in an interview he gave toward the end of The White Lotus’s first season, described the show as both a critique and a fantasy. “You go to these colonial spots, and the........

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