It’s time The White Lotus be exposed. Thinking that HBO’s salacious hit series is to be enjoyed for satire is a mistake made by conservatives who think like liberals. They misconstrue the show’s “dark” humor, cosseting its audacity — the power of the political Left to shape pop culture and put across sinister beliefs as entertainment.

Call this bipartisan nihilism, as seen when conservatives go along with other nasty, acclaimed HBO dramas — Euphoria, The Wire, True Blood, Big Little Lies — that confirm and celebrate negativity and decadence. Indie filmmaker Mike White, The White Lotus producer-writer-director, follows HBO’s sexploitation formula. The late senator Bob Dole once warned against this trend, identifying “nightmares of depravity,” but that was back in the ’90s; the Left hadn’t yet won the culture wars. Conservatives who praise The White Lotus wave the white flag of surrender.

It’s also defeat. The villains in The White Lotus, wealthy vacationers who travel en famille to exotic hotels in Hawaii and Sicily, represent the selfish, bourgeois, unhip, and invariably white middle class — cross-generational stereotypes that trigger guilt in conservative viewers.

In the Christian magazine America, a reviewer praised the series for making “spiritual sickness” its “true subject” — though the show is more symptom than cure. “Mike White is a master at an off-kilter tone, a cringe-comedy sensibility that pushes complicated characters to extremes — not quite cruelly but also without undue sentimentality.” Did that writer never see Fellini’s non-ironic masterpiece La Dolce Vita (1960) or even Ruben Östlund’s recent non-masterpiece Triangle of Sadness?

More in Television

• The Last of Us Elevates the Zombie Thriller

• American Pop Culture Suffers under the Yoke of ‘Woke’

• Report: Netflix Bans Employees from Looking at Each Other for More Than Five Seconds

Are some conservatives so out of touch with popular culture that they fall for trite hipster irony? They seem unaware of Todd Solondz’s superior, morally compelling films (Happiness, Storytelling, Palindromes, Life During Wartime, Weiner Dog, Dark Horse) in which exploring the psychological depth in average Americans equates to social critique. Naïve conservatives swallow the $3-million-per-episode sensationalism of showrunner Mike White, but it’s Solondz’s startling, scathingly funny films that uncover the dark heart of modern alienation — lessons ignored by mainstream reviewers and omitted from the cultural conversation.

This behind-the-times approach to Hollywood’s latest dreck hoodwinks conservatives who haven’t kept up with the depravity. White’s ugly Americans are cable-TV clichés, as in the vaunted Sopranos, which taught viewers to love, but mostly hate, themselves. Or, to interpret the overly charitable praise of the America reviewer: to sin shamelessly.

Even the estimable Federalist pushed cultural naïveté beyond reason, calling The White Lotus “a reactionary masterpiece.” (The word “reactionary” may be the most abused term in the political world, next to “existential.”) Surely the Federalist should recognize that White’s anti-American joke is compassionate only toward the non-white service class and swarthy immigrants in the story who, in the newest season of The White Lotus, are servile toward the Yankee decadence of which they are resentful and judgmental. Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci carved sharp, deliberate satire, while White goes for cheap sentimentality — the vengeful sadism of a liberal TV mogul. White dispenses humiliation for his white protagonists and patronizes the secondary, non-white observers of white folks’ folly.

The only twist in White’s scheme is killing off the erstwhile gay, sex-addict, drug-addict hero, Armond (Murray Bartlett), the restless hotelier of the Hawaiian episodes. (Name-check below.) Armond’s self-indulgence peaks in moments of sexual, scatological explicitness that are no more daring or insightful than Frances McDormand’s on-screen bowel movement in Nomadland. (The White Lotus is either Nomadland for the Club Med crowd or a perversion of The Love Boat.)

Capitalizing on Hunter Biden’s notorious dissipation, keeping it above the law and without criminality, White stages Armond’s final act so that it also invokes the Amber Heard scandal. Bringing both celebrities into play (they’ve become icons of decadent camp) signifies White’s brazen gay authorship. But the Federalist misread White’s conceit, hence concealing its insider, underground snark. Instead, the Federalist extolled the show’s resident “fairy godmother,” the hefty, blousy, peripatetic Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), who appears across several seasons. In America’s unhip, admiring take, “Tanya has the contours of caricature but the soulfulness of a wounded animal.” The Federalist concurred with that pitying statement, twisting it into feminist approval by unaccountably quoting neoliberal scholar Camille Paglia to validate what is nothing more than an egregious fag-hag portrayal. Because Coolidge is a fondly regarded John Waters archetype, conservative publications are saved from accusations of Puritanism.

The ultimate paradox of conservative reviewers praising The White Lotus’s anti-conservatism proves what critic Gregory Solman called “political aphasia”: They can watch the show’s odious, partisan characterizations and tell themselves, “That’s not me.”

Conservatives are supposed to like The White Lotus so that submitting to culture-war defeat will feel like a victory, if a pyrrhic one. When one reviewer confessed how “the show’s virtues become less clear-cut,” her half-doubt still submits to HBO’s marketing — a force stronger than some conservatives’ political principles. That Mike White (no relation) gave his erstwhile hero the name “Armond” reminded me that my New York Press reviews trounced White’s Chuck & Buck (2000) and School of Rock (2003). I assume “the tightly wound Australian named Armond” (according to America) is retribution. It doesn’t equal high-ironist Charlie Kaufman frequently evoking my critical rep in his novel Antkind. The White Lotus offends my sensibility, but I can take White’s mockery as puerile clapback. Thanks, Mike.