most hateable characters from the white lotus season 3 episode 1

The White Lotus has become one of my favorite series for several reasons. I love a writer/writer’s room that tests themselves with new characters, settings and stories every season. There are similar throughlines and a couple recurring characters pop up with reduced or background roles, but it’s still a creatively admirable decision. I also love just straight up hating half the cast (or more).

Every vacationer represents a broad range of hyper-wealthy, privileged asshole and it’s funny and entertaining to see these cross-sections of people be terrible to each other and lose power and control in an unfamiliar setting. It’s a tried a true formula stolen from reality television, but with writers leaning into each character’s hateability in a more caricatured and potentially more genuine way because unlike reality shows, they don’t know we’re watching.

The job of the viewer is to hate a fair portion of the people they present and episode 1 of season 3 introduced us to some truly horrendous people. Here are my five most hateable characters from the season premiere.

5) Victoria Ratliff (The Mom)

The list is the list but ‘hate’ might be a bit strong here. Truth be told I think southern drawl wine mom is a hilarious personality and Parker Posey is nailing it in an annoying but hilarious way. However, she’s also horrifically blind to the awfulness of the people around her – which, spoiler alert, we’ll get to later. Her acceptance and nonchalance suggests a binary view of how people are supposed to be in her world, which reads as a cosigning of who and what they are.

She’s also definitely not there for any sort of cultural experience, and reverted back to her teenage self when Pam, their assigned wellness coordinator, mentioned a biometrics test. Victoria is in such a place of blind comfort that the thought of doing anything uncomfortable immediately reduced her nearly to tears and zapped all her energy. She was caught sleeping in two separate scenes afterward.

4) Kate (Superficial unfamous friend)

Jaclyn, Laurie and Kate are three middle-aged childhood friends on a decades overdue girls’ trip. For some reason related to being on television, one of them, Jaclyn, is famous enough to be recognized in public. Not mobbed, but recognized. It appears to be a sheepish level of fame that makes her lightly embarrassed every time someone admits that they know her. Kate and Laurie seem to have done well enough for themselves, but there are undercurrents of sadness and jealousy in each.

Kate is on this list because she very much seems to believe that she could or should be as famous as Jaclyn. They take turns dousing one another in superficial compliments, with Kate more seemingly trying to mine what it is that separates her from Jaclyn. As they do that, they also exclude Laurie from their doting. When they eventually remember she’s there the tone of the compliments change as they try to retrofit their superficiality to Laurie’s life as a corporate businesswoman and mom. “And your daughter seems like she is turning into a really cool girl,” is all Kate can muster, already looking beyond Laurie.

3) Timothy Ratliff (The Dad)

This guy sucks. He’s a terrific personification of a guy whose ability to shake the right white hands and speak Businessman™ got him to a position of wealth and power, not his intellect. Of course now his privilege and bravado refuses to let him ever see himself as he really is, except a pesky reporter from the Wall Street Journal keeps calling. Like a goober he thinks it’s to profile and celebrate him, until some pointed questions let him know that he might have said too much.

Given that, we already know he’s lying to his family and soaking in their adoration of him and his successes as a big brave business boy. All this is part of the reason he’s so resistant to Pam’s suggestions of meditation or self-improvement. If he ever truly sees himself he’ll fall apart, and chances are he’ll make it everyone else’s problem.

2) Rick Hatchett (If Trevor from GTA V struck oil)

I’ll admit, he might be a little high on the list but that’s because of a personal pet peeve. I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life because the smell of cigarette smoke has always given me an instant headache. The whole scared of cancer thing is the other reason, but I can’t deny that sometimes smoking looks really cool. Although, when I see someone smoking who not only doesn’t look cool, but is bothering other people with their cigarette smoke, like Rick did on a boat in a gorgeous tropical climate full of nature that’s only been lightly touched by humanity, it makes him extremely hateable.

He also spends the entire episode being incredibly grumpy. His much younger British girlfriend tries to redirect him several times but he seems completely annoyed by her very existence. No one wants to be in any setting – let alone a beautiful one – with someone so committed to making it ugly. He’s also there for reasons he has yet to reveal to anyone, and it seems his plan of meeting and talking to the person he intended has already hit a snag, which pissed him off even more.

1) Saxon (Walking reason lawyers have retainers)

In terms of perfectly crafting hateable characters, Saxon is this season’s masterpiece. He’s not super dissimilar from privileged frat boy characters in seasons 1 and 2, but there’s enough originality to make him stand out as exceptionally hateable. Also shoutout to the costume designer. Memes can be language and choosing to communicate his awfulness by making the ‘you know I had to do it to em’ his primary outfit throughout the episode is expert level stuff. If his Dad’s business tanks DOGE would hire him on the spot.

Saxon doesn’t so much crave his Dad’s approval as he craves his power and position. He already believes his best route to being handed the keys to the company (if it still exists after season 3) is by simply feeding his Dad’s ego. If that ingenuous plan doesn’t work I’m sure DOGE would hire him on the spot.

He’s also, quite annoyingly, heavily influencing his little brother in an attempt to cut away what little innocence he has left to indoctrinate him into being yet another shitty frat boy like himself. It may also not surprise you that his view of women is narrow and predictable. He claims that long flights make him horny so he tries to chat up the three middle-aged friends, to no avail. He then turns to Rick’s girlfriend, who gives him a hilarious answer to where to find drinks (at the bar) before turning her back to him. His fake machismo prompts him to deal with these embarrassments by telling Loch that it’s a numbers game. There’s no way Saxon’s YouTube algorithm isn’t full of nightmares.

He also claims his sister, the middle sibling who he says is “hot,” is curious and interested in Buddhism because she hasn’t been laid, which is a weird and gross thing to be thinking about your sister. Our introduction to him ends with a shot of his bare ass as he heads to the bathroom with an iPad to masturbate after asking his brother what kind of porn he’s into. Well done writers. Saxon, I hate you so much.

The trouble in the world of The White Lotus is that even seemingly sympathetic characters will have a secret revealed that will make you hate them a little bit, too. While I don’t believe it is physically possible for me to hate Carrie Coon, I know her character, Laurie, is going to turn out to be a hot mess. At the moment she’s the odd person out in her triad due to not being quite Yoga Mom Hot enough to play their game.

Piper seems to be intellectually curious enough to trust, but that feels like bait. Maybe she’s managed to carve out how to be a decent person by analyzing the negative space of the influences around her, it’s just too early to tell. She also seems to be situated in a prime spot for a pull of the rug by the writers. Lochlan, the youngest sibling, seems to be more interested in following his brother’s path toward shitbaggery. There’s time for him to juxtapose the kindness and freedom Piper shows him against the prodding of his older brother, but he already seems to be infatuated by the no-accountability everyone-should-be-at-your-service-especially-women worldview that Saxon is selling.

Chelsea, the Jordon Hudson to Rick’s Bill Belichick, is a little harder to pin down. She’s free-spirited and seems to be an undimmable ray of sunshine to her boyfriend’s black hole of grump. Besides having terrible choices in who to date, she was aware enough to instantly see through Saxon, who is much closer to her in age than her boyfriend, and be visibly disgusted by him. However that feels like a setup, too. It wouldn’t surprise me if they hooked up, because it would kickoff the scrap between Rick and Tim that started on the boat ride to the resort due to the cigarette. Eventually she’ll tire of Rick’s grumping around and do something vindictive, and then we’ll all hate her too.