The White Lotus: Four Golden Globe Nominations but none for Meghann Fahy

There were lots of reasons to rejoice for The White Lotus creator Mike White and the cast when the Golden Globes nominations were announced on December 12. The show has received four nominations, in fact.

Season 2 of the HBO ensemble series about vacationers going through a week of first-class drama and hell, bagged three nominations for supporting actors Jennifer Coolidge, Aubrey Plaza, and F. Murray Abraham. It also copped a fourth for the series as a whole, under Best Limited or Anthology Series category.

It’s quite certain from watching this second season twice now that Plaza and Coolidge both deserve their nominations for their amazing portrayal of similarly put-upon wives Tanya McQuoid-Hunt and Harper Spiller, respectively. It’s less certain for me why F. Murray Abraham (who plays Bert, the patriarch of the Di Grasso family) was nominated in the male category.

Don’t get me wrong, Abraham is a great actor. You only need to look at his role as the amoral spy master Dar Adal in Homeland to realize his range and nuance.

But in The White Lotus he mostly plays a regular, albeit unrelentingly horny, gramps.

Nevertheless, fans of the series rather focus on the alleged snub of cast member Meghann Fahy. Her exclusion in the nominations list for Best Supporting Actress is, I must admit, pretty glaring.

Things become clearer if you watched how she turned in a nuanced performance in the seventh and final episode. Like many others, it floored me.

And it only took 30 seconds of acting. See, throughout season 2, Fahy has depicted Daphne as an airheaded, vote-forgetting, edibles-consuming trophy wife to finance bro Cameron Sullivan (Theo James).

But she’d been dropping hints of a deeper complexity to the character in a few episodes leading to the finale. Fahy eventually brought it all home when she found out from their friend Ethan Spiller (Harper’s husband) that Cam, her husband, has likely cheated on her during their vacation.

Before slipping back on her default “Daphne Mask of Feckless Nonchalance”, Fahy’s face and voice deliver a masterclass of bravura of thespianism, conflicting emotions and all, as she processes this betrayal and its “all normal” nature categorization in her silent suffering bubble. Again, it all took less than a minute for all that to take place.

But the surprise that Daphne is the deepest and intricately layered character in the whole of season 2, is the genius of Mike White and Fahy’s dark horse firing on a combo of shotgun cylinders.

I am officially a Fahy fan now! Is her exclusion from the list a deliberate snub or just one of those clerical omissions?

Whichever it is, I am sure that organizers will be face-palming themselves for years to come after they realize the gravity of their mistake. Setting aside the issue about Fahy, all three of the supporting actors face stellar competition in their categories.

Plaza and Coolidge are up against Claire Danes, who already has Globes and Emmys aplenty, in her role as theater agent and ex-wife Rachel to Jesse Eisenberg’s Toby Fleishman in Fleishman Is in Trouble.

Meanwhile Abraham is competing against Domhnall Gleeson (The Patient) and Seth Rogen (Pam & Tommy). And the series is up against big titles like moody serial killer drama Dahmer-Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and the Amanda Seyfriend-starrer The Dropout.

Will Plaza, Abraham or Coolidge bring home some new wins for the series? We’ll find out on January 10, when the 80th Golden Globe Awards airs on NBC.