The team behind the ‘White Lotus’ TikTok account is embracing its inner fangirl for season 3

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When White Lotus first season debuted in 2021 and shot to near-instant acclaim, it was a sleeper hit for HBO. But now, four years later, HBO is well aware of just how enthusiastic White Lotus’s fanbase has become—and, to tap into the show’s highly online viewership, its marketing team has decided to officially don their tin foil hats and fangirl right alongside the rest of us.

White Lotus recently debuted its own TikTok page dedicated to stirring up conversation around the show’s third season, which just debuted. It’s the first time that the show itself will have a separate TikTok presence from HBO’s broader account. White Lotus’s marketing team is in a unique position, given that it’s joining TikTok after a culture of mining the show for meme fodder has already flourished organically on the app. (See: Jennifer Coolidge’s unforgettable delivery of the line, ”These gays, they’re trying to murder me” being the soundtrack to dozens of mash-ups and even a few original songs.) 

@thewhitelotus Vacation doesn't always go the way you planned. #TheWhiteLotus #HBO #StreamOnMax ♬ original sound – The White Lotus

As a result, the White Lotus TikTok account needs to offer something unique to stand out from the crowd—and their strategy includes pulling back the curtain on behind-the-scenes anecdotes, fan theories, actor perspectives, and hidden details from the show. It’s a move that taps into the growing culture of using TikTok as a site for exchanging detailed critical analyses of popular media.

“Especially in the White Lotus, when you see the craft that [director Mike White] puts into the details of everything, people want to dive in,” says Pia Barlow, EVP of originals marketing at HBO and Max. “Like, ‘Oh, did you see that that statue was turned this way?’ Or, ‘Did you catch that little aside that some character said that paid off later in the episode?’ It’s really a way for us to engage fans by tapping into memes and trends, but also theories and speculation.”

The new account currently hosts about 27,000 followers. Its most successful clips are digging into small anecdotes, like one video with 6.3 million views about how Jennifer Coolidge hated being on a boat in the show’s second season, or an in-depth analysis of a confrontation scene in season 1 that’s racked up 10.1 million views so far.  

[Photo: TikTok @theWhiteLotus]

These kinds of videos feed fans’ appetite for close-reading beloved series—especially those with a mysterious plot line—within a community of other viewers. A search for “white lotus fan theories” on TikTok produces dozens of results from the show’s last season, digging into everything from the subtle motifs of background wallpaper to how certain plot points might mirror Homer’s The Odyssey. TikTok users have similarly used the platform to hash out ideas during recent seasons of Succession, Squid Game, and, currently, the second season of Apple TV’s Severance.

“For TikTok in particular, it’s really about just being aware of whatever trends are happening in real time—which, as you know, changes weekly, or even daily,” Barlow says. “So it’s about behaving like a fan.”

For White Lotus’s marketing team, digging into the show’s small nuances on TikTok is a pretty smart way to cosplay as a fan. As of yet, it’s unclear just how much the account will attempt to harness the meme culture that’s bound to pop up around season three—a move that might be harder to pull off, given that the new account is pretty late to the scene. And, to be honest, we’d take a Gen Alpha teen’s fan edit of Jennifer Coolidge falling off of a boat over an in-house video from HBO’s marketing team any day.

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