“If everything’s so perfect, why are we so miserable?” That’s a line that could come straight out of any number of characters on The White Lotus, the second season of which deepens its examination of how real happiness eludes the well-heeled. Instead, it’s a line spoken by the ship purser Gopher (Fred Grandy) on the luxury ocean liner Pacific Princess, in the 1977 pilot of The Love Boat.
That’s notable, as The White Lotus creator Mike White recently revealed that his own prestigious hit series, whose second-season finale lands Sunday on HBO, is heavily influenced by his steady diet of crowd-pleasing hit shows that he watched as a kid. “I’m definitely in the Fantasy Island [and] Love Boat generation,” White told NPR earlier this week. “I was probably 10 to 13 years old when they were in their heyday. And I love those shows.”
His longtime love for those shows is evident in the bloodline of The White Lotus, but seems more as if he watched them on acid. He also reportedly admits to taking cues from the cliff-hangers of the reality TV show Survivor, on which he appeared as a contestant, and Laverne & Shirley, whose wacky working-girls hijinks influenced plot lines for local sex workers Mia (Beatrice Grannò) and Lucia (Simona Tabasco).
The Love Boat, which ran from 1977 to 1986, features affluent passengers cruising through Mexican resort beaches to forget their troubles, only to find that, removed from real-world distractions, those troubles are laid bare to a claustrophobic degree. It attracted a slew of top-notch actors of the day (or those who would soon become famous), from Betty White and Olivia de Havilland to a young Tim Robbins and Tom Hanks, and it ranked among the top-watched shows of the era.
Part of a wildly popular double hitter of Saturday-night programming on ABC, The Love Boat was followed by Fantasy Island, a show where guests visited a tropical island (some on-location shots were filmed in Hawaii) and paid a handsome sum to have their deepest desires fulfilled, only to learn that they should’ve been careful what they wished for. Their fantasies took somewhat darker, unexpected turns than The Love Boat, sometimes even involving the supernatural or time travel. The show also drew top actors or soon-to-be-stars of the day to guest-star spots (Geena Davis, Don Knotts, LeVar Burton).
Both shows were produced by Aaron Spelling, whose pitch to ABC execs for Fantasy Island, funnily enough, echoes the underlying premise of The White Lotus. “Leonard [Goldberg] and I were sitting, and the head of ABC out here at the time [Brandon Stoddard] came in, and he wanted us to do some more TV movies for him,” Spelling told the Television Academy Foundation in 1999. “And we pitched some very touching subject matter and he said, ‘No, that’s too down. No, that’s too family. No, we need something exciting.’ We must’ve pitched six ideas trying to mull it down, and I said as a joke, ‘Oh, so what do you want, this great island where people can go to and all their sexual fantasies will be realized?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I love that!’”
While it’s unlikely that’s how The White Lotus pitch to HBO went, it’s interesting that White alludes to the ways in which prestige is not really so different from classic TV hits. “When you’re on HBO and there’s all this sense of, ‘It’s prestige TV and blah, blah, blah,’ I’m doing basically a reboot of Laverne & Shirley meets Fantasy Island with some Survivor dropped into it,’” he told NPR. “I think those early entertainment things that capture your imagination definitely stick with you.”
What seems to have stuck with White from those shows is that their guests are also seeking escape from the drudgery of real life. They also expect the best of everything. And they’re bummed or even outraged when the service, the rooms, the food, or the thrills don’t quite match their unrelenting expectations. And when pitted against one another for resources, shit gets dark.
But modesty aside, his twist on those formulas is absent in the original shows’ DNA. He’s bringing something entirely of his own here. This was, after all, an era of laugh tracks, tidy resolutions, and simplistic moral lessons about just being honest with your partner or finding a compromise in a relationship. Sure, some guests narrowly escaped death in fulfilling their deepest desires on Fantasy Island (fighting in a war; escaping a well-guarded prison and getting shot at), and the passenger problems on The Love Boat were titillating for the era (one woman desperately wanted to prevent her congressman fiancé from finding out she’d posed naked in Kitten Magazine). But by today’s standards, those are about as controversial as anything on The Brady Bunch. On both shows, though, everything could always be counted on to turn out just fine by the time the credits rolled.
Tracy Moore
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