The chief coddlers are Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), a soothing, long-suffering spa manager, who is perhaps the only truly likable character on the show, and Armond, a mustachioed dandy and a recovering addict whose sobriety is tested by his stressful job. There is also Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), a lonely alcoholic who carries around her dead mother’s ashes in an ornate gilt box. There is the obligatory newlywed couple-Shane (Jake Lacy), a real-estate scion in a Cornell baseball cap, and his wife, Rachel (Alexandra Daddario), a clickbait journalist who, hours into her honeymoon, is starting to have second thoughts. her beta husband, Mark (Steve Zahn) their porn-addicted sixteen-year-old son, Quinn (Fred Hechinger) and their daughter, Olivia (“Euphoria” ’s Sydney Sweeney, once again playing a parent’s nightmare), a bitchy, performatively woke college sophomore, who has brought along a friend, Paula (Brittany O’Grady). In the first of six episodes, Armond tells Lani to make each guest feel like the “special chosen baby child of the hotel.” These baby children include the Mossbacher family: Nicole (Connie Britton), a Sheryl Sandberg-like tech C.F.O. Much like the latter series, in which Laura Dern plays an executive who tries to make a comeback after suffering a public nervous breakdown, “The White Lotus” is an examination of what happens when the veneer of conventional sociability dissolves and the power struggles stoked by race, class, and gender erupt from beneath the surface of everyday life. White has written mass-market Hollywood fare like “School of Rock,” but he is better known for his work on small-screen comedies such as “Freaks and Geeks” and, more recently, “Enlightened,” a short-lived cult favorite, also on HBO. The series, called “The White Lotus,” named for the fictional resort where the action takes place, is a near-note-perfect tragicomedy, created by Mike White for HBO. Welcome to “Upstairs, Downstairs,” Aloha State edition. “We are asked to disappear behind our masks,” he says. Armond explains that the guests expect a kind of pleasant blandness, or an “impression of vagueness,” from the staff. “Wave like you mean it,” the resort’s manager, Armond (the Australian actor Murray Bartlett), instructs Lani (Jolene Purdy), a native-Hawaiian trainee. The groups face each other, as if they were equal expressions on two sides of a mathematical equation, but the equivalence is just an illusion. At the shore, the resort’s decidedly less wealthy, more ethnically diverse staff waits to greet the guests. A boat ferrying a gaggle of rich American tourists makes its way toward a Hawaiian luxury resort.