The White Lotus is exposing an uncomfortable truth about female friendship.

Sometimes you've just got to call it.

I don’t think I’m watching The White Lotus right. We’re four episodes into the third season of Mike White’s zeitgeist-setting murder mystery series and I couldn’t care less about who is the murderer and who is the… murderee.

This season is packed with terrible characters doing terrible things to each other but I only really care about one group of guests. I can’t stop staring at them and thinking about them and analysing them.

I’m talking, of course, about Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), Kate (Leslie Bibb) and Laurie (Carrie Coon) — three lifelong friends in their 40s who are ‘enjoying’ a much needed catch up at The White Lotus resort in Thailand.

There’s Laurie, a divorced lawyer from New York, Jaclyn, an actress from LA who has recently married a younger man, and Kate, the mum who is raising her kids amongst the church going people of Austin, Texas.

From the moment the three women arrived at the resort there’s been an underlying seething tension between them that occasionally bubbles to…