White Lotus conversations prove how mindless the chattering classes have become

Telegraph

10-04-2025

What do the chattering classes talk about? Social justice, politics, school fees and the arts – at least that is the old cliché. Yet nowadays, such people (I know the chattering classes is a pejorative term, but it is a useful one, I think, for the point of this argument) are as likely to talk about what they have been watching on Netflix as the state of private-school provision for the academically precocious in north London.
The exact phrase I'm looking for is prestige TV, a fairly hideous term that sounds like it was coined by a marketing department on an outward bounds course in the Catskills. It comes from America, you see, but is overwhelmingly present here; the cultural equivalent of giant ragweed.
Let me explain. In the early 2000s, American television came of age. No longer were the knockabout, lowest common denominator action thrillers of my childhood such as The Dukes of Hazzard and The A Team acceptable. Television drama began to think big and thus, often courtesy of subscription service HBO, series such as The Sopranos, The Wire and Mad Men were made.
What set these series apart was their intellectual ambition, their psychological acuity, their literary scope. Here was Don DeLillo or John Updike in televisual form. And yes, they were very very good, respecting the intelligence of their audiences, and proving that the medium was finally catching up with cinema.
But cinema got left behind, its power as a medium sadly diminished. And indeed if TV was the hot topic at dinner parties, what did that mean for the usual fodder of conversation? The latest Tom Stoppard play, the Booker Prize shortlist, the state of the Royal Opera House. Slowly, such things were failing to become 'part of the national conversation', as those without much free time were beginning to turn to television in order to get their cultural kicks.
This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. I have culturally aware friends who admit they can't be bothered to engage with anything that requires intellectual scrutiny, a commute (lockdown made layabouts of us all) or most importantly in an age of dynamic pricing, deep pockets.
A further problem is that prestige TV no longer officially exists. Its demise was officially declared in the New York Times in 2023 and it is hard to disagree. Obviously in Britain, the main broadcasters are all in straitened circumstances and thus a series such as Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light – based upon Hilary Mantel's novel – which aired at the end of 2024 felt like a last hurrah for dramatic quality (recently its director Peter Kosminsky has said neither the BBC nor ITV could afford a series such as Netflix hit Adolescence). Meanwhile, America is still splurging; churning out series that are increasingly reductive and repetitive. They probably star Nicole Kidman, feature some nifty cinematography and impressive aerial shots, but are essentially hollow exercises in dramatic blandness.
Take The White Lotus, the anthology thriller set in a luxury hotel which ended on Monday: everyone I know seems to be dissecting as if it had the intellectual complexity of Finnegans Wake. The truth is that this is a bougie little series for people who belong to wine clubs and aspire to live in Chipping Norton. If the conversation is now revolving around a fairly obvious eat the rich satire, as opposed to, say, the mind-bending metaphysics of a Stoppard play, then we're really heading for the abyss.
There again, if quality TV is genuinely in decline, might we see a surge in interest for the rest of the arts? This seems unlikely. The sector has not recovered since Covid and, while recent reports prove that the West End is in rude health, this is not the case for the subsidised sectors which are now bracing themselves for government cuts, and the result of Baroness Hodge's inquiry into how Arts Council England is spending its money. Add to that, a decrease in arts education in schools, and a crisis in the humanities at our universities, and we will see generations without proper access to culture.
Certainly there are bigger enemies of the arts than prestige TV, but its malign influence cannot be underestimated. Next month, Barrie Kosky's Die Walküre comes to Covent Garden and promises to be the event of the year. Meanwhile the second season of Nicole Kidman's Nine Perfect Strangers will air on Amazon Prime, and that promises very little. But guess where the excitement lies?