By Yasmin Jeffery, ABC
White Lotus season three is tinted yellow. Photo: YouTube / HBOMax
Seasons one and three of The White Lotus share something in common: they're both tinted yellow.
The first season of the satirical comedy drama from creator and director Mike White followed a group of wealthy Americans holidaying at the exclusive White Lotus resort in a deliberately warm depiction of Hawai'i.
The second season followed a new group at a sister resort in a sunny, but far more neutral, imagining of southern Italy.
For its third season, the anthology series jets to a yellow version of Thailand.
The internet has noticed the warm wash.
It's commonly accepted that yellow tints are used in films and TV shows to signal warmer climates. But Sicilian summers have just as much of a reputation for being hot as Hawai'i and Thailand.
So why is Italy the only White Lotus destination so far to be depicted with a neutral-leaning colour grade?
The often invisible art of colour grading
There are two main elements to the work of film and TV colourists.
The first is correction, which is the process of adjusting footage to ensure colours are cohesive.
The second is grading, which uses colour to create a visual style that gives a film or TV show an identity, and can be used to nudge viewers towards certain emotions, a bit like a musical score.
Melbourne-based film colourist Niklas Malkin said movies and TV shows would sometimes use an "extreme grade" as a sort of "creative power that transports people to another world".
Think: Twilight's washed-out blue or the saturated fury of Mad Max.
But a neutral colour grade is most common, with contrasting or noticeable hues used to differentiate between time or place.
A transition to black-and-white or sepia from colour signals a flashback scene, for example. And the use of colour filters has become cinematic shorthand to differentiate between places.
Tasmania-based film and TV colourist Juan Melara explained that when eastern European and Scandinavian countries were depicted in Western film and TV, there was a tendency towards cooler grades.
He said places like South America, the Middle East, parts of Asia and Africa tend to be washed in warm hues, while the US, the UK and western Europe generally receive more neutral grades.
This can be partly credited to natural environments: the light in London is diffused by cloud cover; whereas you're filming in direct, blaring sunlight in the Middle East.
But while natural palette might be part of the reason warmer or cooler tints are used for certain geographic locations, the exaggeration of those tints is a trope that was popularised around the turn of the century.
Steven Soderbergh's Traffic and the birth of the 'Mexico filter'
Melara, alongside many other colourists, thinks Steven Soderbergh's 2000 film Traffic played a significant role in how colours are graded for different locations.
The movie, which coincided with the widespread use of digital colour correction, saw Soderbergh use distinct filters to delineate between the crime drama's two US-based storylines and a third in Mexico.
The latter was tinted an exaggerated, sharp yellow, positioning Mexico as an entirely different world to the US; a lawless place where drug cartels ran wild.
"Traffic wasn't the first film to do this, but it was probably the first film to push these looks this far," he said.
"And because that's how it's been done for 25 years, movies and TV shows continue to use that established language because 'it's always been done that way'."
The grade has since been dubbed the "Mexico filter", and, as the name suggests, has since been used on Mexico plenty, from Breaking Bad to Saw X.
But it's also routinely applied to other countries that make up the Global South, from Bangladesh in Extraction, to Uganda in Queen of Katwe.
What does it mean in 2025?
Melara believed the Mexico filter had become a cinematic shorthand for more than just heat.
He said that, over time, the warm look had come to signify that a place has a lower socio-economic status (along with everything that comes with that) and was foreign to the filmmaker or characters.
Malkin would agree socio-economic status appeared to be associated with the warm look "to a certain extent".
"A lot of the warmer climates do happen to be developing countries."
But he doesn't think warm grades are used "to place a country in a lower view", or that the warm look is a shorthand for the Global South.
"It's always to be creative and to enhance the world of the series or movie. To put it simply, I don't think it's that deep," he said.
Head of communications at the Media Diversity Institute Rini Elizabeth Mukkath, researches the way the Global South is depicted in media.
She said it was absolutely that deep, and thinks adding the warm look to countries that belonged to the Global South had been done so frequently, with such negative connotations, that it was now tantamount to adding a "colonial gaze" to film and TV shows.
"Edward Said and his whole thesis on Orientalism from the 1970s talks about how the West portrays the Global South in a way that makes it almost dangerous, mysterious and I think it still applies today," she said.
"[These kinds of tints] feed into that narrative and add to the sense of otherness and divide.
"We're in 2025 and we still have media that portrays the Global South as exotic, backward and dangerous."
Melara cited 2001's Black Hawk Down as an example of a film that used the warm look to "reduce a country down to nothing more than a backdrop for a hero to save the day" and a place where "bad things happen".
Set in Mogadishu, Somalia, the Ridley Scott film followed American soldiers attempting to bring down a warlord. It used a warmer, desaturated grade with a high contrast.
"When you add contrast and you've got someone who's got dark skin, it crushes details and subtleties in their skin tone. They become less detailed and uniquely human, which aids in portraying them as the enemy, thus making it easier for the viewer to side with the Americans [over the locals]," Melara explained.
Mukkath said storytelling that doesn't take the time to show the actual complexity of people was "very dangerous".
Intentions aside, she believed filmmakers have a responsibility to consider whether their depiction of marginalised communities "already suffering from stereotypes, is pushing those stereotypes forward".
The warm look and The White Lotus
Malkin and Melara use words like creamy, dense, rich and vibrant to describe the colour grade of The White Lotus season three. Some scenes, particularly those at night, call on cool blues.
Given this, both colourists think the yellow grade during daytime scenes partly comes down to emphasising the oppressive heat and humidity of Thailand.
"But I think it's also being used as a way of showing that these characters are no longer in a Western country. This is exotic 'faraway land'," Melara argued.
Malkin, however, thought a warm grade may have been used again this season to help the narrative.
"The beauty of [the yellow] is it separates reality immediately and you can enjoy watching it like you're seeing it through a portal, and it's sometimes more enjoyable than having something that looks real, that you then try to imagine in a real context and then you're like, 'Well, that wouldn't happen.'"
But there had been no explanations as to why Sicily was graded differently.
The White Lotus is intended as a biting social satire that touches on themes of class, money, colonialism and exploitation.
Mukkath conceded that a yellow grade could be a visual extension of this, conveying the way a privileged group of mostly white Americans saw a place like Thailand while exploiting it for their own enjoyment, as a result of decades of exposure to the Mexico filter.
But she didn't think any of these potential reasons were justified.
"When someone watches a show [with this sort of colour grade], the idea you have of a place like Thailand is singular," she said.
"It's poor, it's got corruption, it's got crime, it's unsafe, but it has these pockets of beautiful resorts, which is really not what the country is about."
Binge/HBO was contacted for comment.
The White Lotus season three is streaming now on Binge, with episodes dropping weekly until April 7.
- ABC
