
Evan Ross Katz, 'White Lotus' Scholar
By Tobias Hess
Jan 16, 2025One of the most visionary images seared into our collective consciousness from the pandemic is Jennifer Coolidge as Tanya in those sumptuous sunglasses, arriving at a lush Hawaii resort in HBO’s breakout hit The White Lotus. The six-episode whodunnit by auteur Mike White (who previously wrote School Of Rock, Chuck & Buck and a personal favorite, Enlightened) could have simply been another niche classic, beloved by mainly queers and critics. But the 2021 show’s intriguing mystery (each season begins with unexplained deaths), alongside White’s ability to deliver a comedy of manners for our self-conscious age, meant that The White Lotus became true watercooler television. Season one was a hit, but season two — set with (almost all) new characters in Sicily, featuring the likes of Aubrey Plaza, Meghann Fahy and Michael Imperioli — became megawatt appointment viewing.
The rabid response to the show was largely buoyed by a word-of-mouth buzz, but Evan Ross Katz’s social media adoration stood out from the crowd: in the words of White, Katz’s promo for the showearned him the title of “TV’s most valuable hype man.” Katz – a writer, podcaster and general internet force — has been an Instagram mainstay for a long time. He’s well known for “memeing out” our favorite shows — that is, taking the best lines from shows like The View, Sex and the City and RuPaul’s Drag Race and formatting them as memes for posterity and sharing. He did so for The White Lotus, having been a previous fan of White’s and Coolidge’s work. But his celebration for the series reached another level of relevance when his page became a gathering place for the thousands of newly minted superfans. “I know it was energizing for me, but I felt like it was also energizing for the community of people that wanted something to talk about and to get excited about,” Katz tells PAPER. “This was still in the thick of COVID, so finding joy was not easy.”
Now, Katz is elevating the hype once again. He’s teamed up with HBO on The White Lotus Official Podcast, a lookback podcast where he interviews fellow writers, members of the show's cast and crew, and White himself to deep dive on the culture-shaping show.
Whereas many lookback-style podcasts approach shows by “recapping” them episode-by-episode, Katz and HBO decided to approach The White Lotus more holistically, weaving in numerous voices per episode to reflect on key themes. Be it the role that COVID had in shaping production, Coolidge’s centrality to the show, or the role that sex and money had in the series’s central plot lines, the podcast is a both panoramic and granular account of a show that touches on both the big and small of life, love and society.
This approach allowed Katz to get to the heart of The White Lotus and have the space to give us what we all desire: the total and complete sit-down with Coolidge on her character Tanya. “I got the sense that this is one of the last times Jennifer is going to sit down and talk about The White Lotus at length, so I found — and I'm not joking when I say this — that there was a sacred quality to me having this opportunity to sit down with her,” reflects Katz. Plus, most importantly (to me), he got to talk to White about how his time on the reality strategy show Survivor, shaped the series. “Going out and having this experience on an island with 17 strangers … I have no doubt that if I went and did that, I would be changed as a person,” Katz tells PAPER. “How cool is it that someone like Mike has this outlet where he can express some of these thoughts, ideas and different world views that he learned about by being around these strangers.”
Katz sat down with PAPER to chat about being a scholar of the Mike White-verse, the Mother Pantheon and who he’s keeping his eye on during The White Lotus’ forthcoming season.
I’ve followed you forever, but I think your content about The White Lotus really felt like a moment. What about that show activated you when it first came out?
I'd been a fan of Mike [White] for so long. Chuck & Buck was a formative piece of cinema for me when I was young. And then — like many a gay person — I had long followed Jennifer Coolidge, so when I saw those two names together, it activated something in my brain immediately. I knew I was going to be clocked in for the show. And then with the memeing — it's funny, I didn't even have a strategy around memeing the way I do now. But I was watching this show, and there were so many isolated moments throughout it where I was like, “Oh, my God, this is so funny.” And because of the speed of Mike White’s dialog, you’ll catch something on a second watch where you're like, “Oh, that's so brilliant. I didn't even realize that her reaction line is just as funny as the line that I initially thought was funny.”
I think that’s specifically true for a lot of the scenes between the family, the Mossbachers, in season one. They're all pinging off of one another, and they're all so themselves, and the way they're reacting to each other: I was so electrified. I thought, “Wow, this could really be framed.” That’s how I think about my work explicitly now, but I think it was more implicit at the time, which was that I see my role in meme making as framing, because it all exists already, right? Memeing is just isolating these moments and seeing how, when extracted, something can have, for lack of a better term, shareability.
But then what really gassed it all was just this feeling which is that we miss the days of water cooler television. We miss being able to find community in the things we love or the things that aggravate us about a show. What really juiced my The White Lotus content was the comment section and people just wanting to express what they were loving, or point out other lines that made them laugh. I got a lot of people saying, “Evan, can you meme this?” That was a big sentiment early on: people just wanted to communicate with one another about this shared love of this thing. I know it was energizing for me, but I felt like it was also energizing for the community of people that wanted something to talk about and to get excited about. This was still in the thick of COVID, so finding joy was not easy.
We take it for granted that The White Lotus is this cultural phenomenon. I was tapped in from the beginning, because I'm tapped into Mike White, but its rapid rise to popularity was quite surprising to me. When did you realize the scope of the fervor for the show?
I remember it being pretty immediate. That's a testament to Mike. By framing the show as this whodunit from the outset, he created a level of intrigue around where the show was going that gave it this larger arc that kept people coming back to it. But to answer your question, I saw that from the outset. I think that's because there's that moment with Sydney [Sweeney] and Brittany [O’Grady] with books by the pool in the first or second episode, that that kind of became its own meme that traveled so far with. Obviously, there was the Lukas Gage/Murray Bartlett ass-eating scene: these moments went way beyond my page. I was just able to highlight them in ways that other people were also doing on their platforms or Twitter. There was something about this show that inspired so much conversation in a way that is still very rare.
Also the way that we as gay people have created the mother-verse... that didn't quite exist then [in 2020]. Gay people were early adopters of building the... what's the antithesis of the “Khia asylum?”
A Mother Pantheon!
A Mother Pantheon. I love that. Jennifer [Coolidge] was an early entry into that. And now you look at — Jean Smart comes to mind immediately, as far as someone we were all behind, but there wasn't an ecosystem yet that celebrated these women the way that has become so normalized [when they began their career]. That was another thing: just people getting really excited about Jennifer Coolidge’s performance, and then people loved watching Jennifer get her flowers, which were so long deserved.
Photo via Getty
There's something about this show and Mike White’s work which has such a queer and gay sensibility, even though it's not about gay people per se. Have you thought about why exactly this show connects so deeply with a queer audience?
I think there's a sexiness to the show.The actors are sexy. There's a tantalizing energy about Hawaii, about the fire, about the pool: there's a glossiness to the show aesthetically that I think is really appealing to gay people, who I think are especially aesthetically aware. I think Mike White, as an openly bisexual man, infuses that sensibility into his writing. I mean there’s Sabrina Impacciatore’s character in season two, or Murray Bartlett’s character in season one. But I think about that scene late in season one between Steve Zahn's character and Murray Bartlett's character, where Steve Zahn’s character says, “I've never been with a man before,” and Murray Bartlett's character says, “Do you want to go upstairs right now and fuck?” That forthrightness is something else that is really appealing. Mike has this way of enacting ideas from our heads that we would never actually think to do. He does it in a way that's both quite sensational and grounded in a reality that works within the show, so it never goes to this campy place.
Also I just enjoy seeing Mike win, right? Especially as Survivor people like you and I, we know Mike White in a different way, having watched him for a season on reality TV. So yes, he's this auteur and he's this incredible creator, but we also know Mike White as the human being on Survivor. I think that creates a different level of investment that we feel in watching him succeed and watching him create this show that very much feels in the vein of Survivor, as we talk about at length in the podcast.
I've been aware of people saying that The White Lotus is based on his time on the Survivor. It sounds like it will be revealed in the podcast, but what do you make of that idea?
It's interesting, because I've always felt that way, so it was such a treat to go to the man himself and ask him about it. There are both implicit and explicit ways in which it finds itself in. The show, by design, has people coming together on this island of Hawaii. And then there are also ways like inviting [Survivor contestants] Alec Merlino, Angelina Keely and Kara Kay to be a part of the show in seasons one and two.
It's really incredible, because I'm such a big fan of Survivor. I'm so eager to see Mike back on Survivor, and it's so fun to hear him think about this adventure that he had and the ways that it informed him. Going out and having this experience on an island with 17 strangers … I have no doubt that if you and I went and did that we would be changed as people. How cool is it that someone like Mike has this outlet with which he can express some of these thoughts, ideas and different world views that he perhaps learned about by being around these strangers. I think that's my favorite thing about Survivor, and I love that Mike is one of the few contestants on Survivor that has an outlet where he can explore learnings or anecdotes or experiences from Survivor and put them on a show like this.
The podcast is really great. I listened to two episodes. When I first heard that you were doing a podcast about The White Lotus, I assumed it would be an episode-by-episode recap. That's just the format I'm used to. So I was surprised and excited that the podcast was this really, deeply reported, threaded together podcast that features so many voices.
Thankfully we had a lot of time on this, and we were able to be really thoughtful around pre-production. In the beginning, we didn't quite know what it was going to be. We knew we wanted to do a look back podcast. We knew we wanted to interview Mike, the creatives and the talent from the show, but the actual framework in which it would exist was less clear. As we were starting to have conversations about the podcast, it became clear that there were these themes that were emerging. For instance, Jennifer Coolidge kept coming up. So we asked, “Are we gonna get the most out of this to go episode by episode, or do we maybe just do a dedicated episode to Jennifer Coolidge?”
I think another thought that I had is there are plenty of fantastic, episodic recaps of The White Lotus seasons one and two that exist already. So that's one factor. I think we wanted a freshness to the angle. And we had the virtue of having all of this talent on hand who can speak to the experience of making the show. I know there were lots of conversations I was interested in getting to the bottom of that wouldn't have been facilitated by doing an episodic recap. For instance, we talk a lot about how COVID impacted the making of this show, both seasons one and two. That conversation wouldn't have found its way into an episodic recap. And so I think there were lots of avenues we could go down by making the show more focused on themes.
Was there anyone that you were particularly excited to get into the weeds with?
I think I was most excited with Jennifer Coolidge, which will come as no surprise. We have a really special personal friendship, but The White Lotus is not a part of our friendship. It's not something that we talk about when we're hanging out and at dinner. So I had a lot of meandering questions in my mind, especially ones from season one that had never been discussed at all. This was the one opportunity I had to sit down with Jennifer for two hours and ask every fleeting question that I had. And I got the sense that this is one of the last times Jennifer is going to sit down and talk about The White Lotus at length. So I found — and I'm not joking when I say this — that there was a sacred quality to me having this opportunity to sit down with someone who I admire so much, who has created one of these indelible characters in the pantheon of television; getting to essentially do something in the vein of Actors On Actors with her, where we could go long and be super focused about something that I think many people still have many questions about. And I thought it was cathartic, too, to give that swan song to the character of Tanya that so many of us love, miss, and want to hear from. It's so fun to get to hear Jennifer's perspective on bringing this character to life.
I know the podcast is a look back, so you're not going to be engaging with season three, but I'm sure you're excited and ready. What do you have your eye on this round of The White Lotus?
Many of the cast, but two come to mind especially. One is Natasha Rothwell. Like many fans of the show, it was so exciting to hear that we were going to get more of her character, Belinda. I'm just so eager to see who Belinda is now and how she finds her way to this White Lotus. I'm excited by the prospect of more Natasha Rothwell on our screens. I also had the great fortune of getting to know Natasha. I attended Jennifer Coolidge Halloween party several years ago, which is where I met Natasha in person. And anyone who knows Natasha knows she's an infinitely honorable human being. She is someone who is so talented and so deserving of this platform. I'm so excited to see her continue to get that The White Lotus boost. So I've got my eyes on Natasha.
And then, obviously, Parker Posey. This connects to what we were saying earlier about the Mother Pantheon. Parker Posey is absolutely a member of the Mother Pantheon. I am super excited for long time fans of Parker Posey — whether that be from Party Girl, House of Yes, Best in Show, etc. — to have an opportunity to once again see our fave lighting up the screen, as she did in The Staircase, as she did in Beau Is Afraid. But also, there's no doubt a legion of people who don't yet know Parker — for shame — who are going to get to experience the greatness that is Parker Posey. And there’s Carrie Coon, Michelle Monaghan, Leslie Bibb. There is a mother-off happening in this season.
Is there an element of the show that, through the process of making the podcast, changed your perspective on the show?
I am someone who is steeped in the world of television. I wrote an oral history of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One of my big takeaways after completing that book was that this was a show that was very difficult to make, and a lot of people had a lot of complicated feelings about the making of this show, and that really impacted my feelings on the show. One of my takeaways from doing this podcast and interviewing so many of the people involved with it — and I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to communicate this to Mike on the podcast — is that people love working with Mike White. There are a lot of people who you and I regard for their creative selves, but might not have reputations that are the most favorable. What gives me so much joy is knowing that the person that I wanted Mike to be in my head is the person he is, and it’s not just because of my experiences with him. Getting to hear from all of these people — costume designers, Cristobal Tapia de Veer [the show’s composer], the cast from seasons one and two. People love being around him. They love the aura of Mike. They love what Mike offers them creatively. So one of my takeaways, in terms of the kind of person I want to be in life, is that many of us want to be someone that people want to be around, that people feel energized by being around. And I think that was something that really came across in these interviews. I was really glad to be able to express that to Mike, because it's something that, when you're in the thick of production you’re thinking about. So I was glad to be able to data collect throughout these interviews, and then go and look at my notes and be like, Wow, people have a lot of good things to say about this guy. When we were wrapping up the interview, I was like, “You know what? Let me just take a moment and let you know that I am overwhelmed by the bullet points of things that people had to say favorably about you.” and it's something that I thought was important to communicate to him, so I was so glad to have that opportunity to do that.Photo courtesy of Evan Ross Katz
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