I was half-listening to a true crime podcast when the ad came on. I perked up when I realized it was for White Lotus branded coffee creamer. It promised something like a luxurious Thai vacation vibe without leaving your house, and I wondered if the ad writers had ever seen White Lotus.
Thatโs the contradiction of White Lotus, though. Itโs a show about terrible people doing shitty things and making their lives worse. Itโs also about having exactly one scene per season that makes you say, Holy fuck or I know this is HBO, but I didnโt realize they could show that.
What the White Lotus Thai Iced Coffee Mate collaboration is banking on is that you still wish you had these charactersโ livesโas long as you also get to go to Hawaii, Italy, or, in the case of season three, Thailand. Coffee Mate is betting you think youโre different. That youโre sure that if you were as rich as White Lotus characters, youโd be grateful for your wealth and nice to the staff, and wouldnโt need to learn any life lessons by dying an embarrassing death or getting mounted by an old guy.
The creamer comes in a purplish bottle covered in floral designs that match the showโs motif. A white lotus flower rests on a bamboo tray beside a tall glass of iced coffee. It isnโt available everywhere. I had to drive to a Walmart in the suburbs to get it. It was raining sideways, and the parking lot grit pelted me as I made my way to the store. So far, not an upscale Thai vacation vibe, though better than being bitten by a cobra released by your May/December addict boyfriend or being married to that douche from season one.
When I opened the bottle, the first thing I noticed was that it had no scent. It didnโt smell like milk or sugar or candy or anything remotely from nature. It seemed lab-created. Like an AI beverage that looks like real food, but something about it is fucked up. I tried a little shot of it. It was tooth-crackingly sweet and tasted like caramel, the old-fashioned kind that is basically just melted brown sugar. It was good, in the way that McDonaldโs tastes good. But it had a weird, bitter aftertaste that betrayed its unnatural origins.
After water, sugar was the second ingredient, but thatโs where the recognizable ingredients ended. Acesulfame potassium, which was parenthesized as โa non-nutritive sweetener,โ and sucralose were listed last. This explained how it tasted like the concentrated souls of a thousand Wertherโs Originals but only had five grams of actual sugar per serving. Between those sweet ingredients were micellar casein and gel and gum cellulose, which made me imagine I was drinking a slurry of sweet paper.
When added to coffee, it reminded me of the cappuccino machine from my college snack bar in the early 2000s. The sugar back then was possibly still sugar, but likely already corn syrup. It was probably not yet GMO beet sugar like we find in most processed foods today. It was coffee for children, perfect for nineteen-year-olds trying to stay up all night to write papers on how Ralph Nader had a real shot at winning the presidency. Overly sweet, frothy, and fake, but we were young and still possessed the robust gastrointestinal systems required to digest Taco Bell. We could handle it.
This was a time when โsmartโ people didnโt watch TV, or at least didnโt admit to it. Not like now, when you can get drinks with a party of five college professors and spend two hours exclusively discussing television.
I donโt actually think thatโs bad. I love television. And you canโt deny that somewhere around Big Love or Weeds, television exploded forward like early man picking up a stone and deciding to turn it into a hatchet.
I think a lot about the inner lives of television characters. Like the woman from episode one of The White Lotusโs first seasonโthe one who hid not only her pregnancy but the fact that she was in labor on her first day of work. Sometimes sheโll pop into my head, and Iโll wonder if sheโs okay. Iโll think about how crazy it was, yet how relatable, that she hid this from her employers. That she tried to act like she wasnโt in agony in front of many rich people so she could keep her job, possibly her health insurance (remember: season one was set in the US).
Lani, I hope it turned out okay for you. And that you got more of a break than whatever this cellulose-based non-nutritively sweetened drink is trying to give us.
