Did ‘The White Lotus’ Just Reference This Season’s ‘Simpsons’ Parody?
Despite the fact that it’s clearly the most cursed tourist destination since Jurassic Park, people just keep checking into The White Lotus.
The third season of Mike White’s acclaimed HBO show boasts an impressive cast — including Parker Posey, Carrie Coon and Walton Goggins — as the newest batch of existential crises-riddled wealthy vacationers.
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A few months before the latest installment of The White Lotus premiered, the series was parodied by The Simpsons in the appropriately titled episode “The Yellow Lotus.”
Not much of what happened in “The Yellow Lotus” has been reflected in Season Three of The White Lotus so far. Like, there have been no fatal sea otter attacks, and Sideshow Bob has yet to make a single appearance. But, oddly enough, both shows share one specific thing in common: Barbra Streisand.
As longtime Simpsons writer and producer Al Jean pointed out on social media, the cartoon included a scene in which Marge reads Streisand’s memoir, My Name Is Barbra, while lounging by the pool. And in this week’s episode of The White Lotus, Jaclyn (the character played by Michelle Monaghan) is reading the very same book while hanging out poolside with her two alleged best friends.
Is this The White Lotus’ way of referencing the animated parody?
Well, Season Three wrapped filming back in August 2024, two months before “The Yellow Lotus” aired. So unless there was some kind of inter-network communication between the two shows, there’s no way that The White Lotus could have known what The Simpsons had in store.
Is it, then, another example of The Simpsons “predicting” the future?
Well, not unlike with the rest of the show’s so-called predictions, there’s likely a very simple explanation.
An episode of The Simpsons reportedly takes about six to nine months to make, meaning that “The Yellow Lotus” was likely in the works beginning in early 2024, which is also around when The White Lotus began filming. My Name Is Barbra was released in November 2023, so it would have been more in the public consciousness at that time. And the book serves very different functions in each show. In The White Lotus, it's a subtle detail that shades in Jacyln’s character. In The Simpsons, it’s included purely to tee-up a joke about the book’s excessive length (nearly 1,000 pages). Marge notes that, after packing the book, she didn’t have room for anything else, and then sets it on a side table that promptly breaks.
In other words, it seems very likely that this was all just a big coincidence that the vast majority of The White Lotus’ viewers didn’t even notice because there was a lot of other stuff going on in that episode.
