Will ‘Survivor 50’ Impact ‘The White Lotus’ Season 4 Plot? Mike White Wrote It on Set

Mike White always has Survivor on the brain. The White Lotus creator has cast alums from the reality competition series in every season of the hit HBO show so far, and recently, he revealed that he came up with the story for The White Lotus Season 4 while sequestered on the set of Survivor 50. Will his time on the reality competition series — and possibly the complicated relationship dynamics that bloomed during it — have an impact on the story? Warning: Spoilers for Survivor 50 Episode 4 ahead.

White was voted out in a major blindside orchestrated by his David vs. Goliath friend, Christian Hubicki, in Season 50 Episode 4. White was trying to protect his good friend, fellow Season 37 alum Angelina Keeley, from elimination. White was sent to Ponderosa, where eliminated players wait to go home, but he told Entertainment Weekly that he actually paid to stay somewhere else nearby during his post-season sequester because of dietary restrictions. It was during this period of isolation that he came up with the story for The White Lotus Season 4, which will be set in France.

“I came up with the season” during this technology-free sequester, White told EW. “Because I was there by myself. I couldn’t use my phone, and I wasn’t even at Ponderosa, so I was totally alone. It was like a godsend, honestly. Because I have all this time where people think I’m somewhere else, I’m unreachable, and I could just sit and contemplate and think about what’s next. Survivor was perfect for me, even though it didn’t turn into what I wanted as far as an experience, within the game. It was a nice reset for me, to be honest. So I was grateful that I got to go back, even though it was not that fun.”

During Survivor 50 pre-season press, White said that he wanted to compete on the milestone season to get a needed break from the world before going location scouting for his Emmy-winning HBO drama. That, and because he loves Survivor and was honored to be asked to return. While the ideas for the story and characters came to him while in Fiji, White isn’t sure that his short time on Survivor 50 is informing any White Lotus plot. He does, however, acknowledge that there are some similar themes between his reality TV experience and the theme of Season 4.

The White Lotus Season 1 was about class, Season 2 about sex, and Season 3 about spirituality. White told W Magazine that Season 4 is “a bit about fame.” It’s “about who has the world’s attention, who is the plus-one, and how that can organize a relationship,” he explained. “Some people are satisfied with the love of just an intimate partner, and some people need the love of strangers and a bigger kind of attention.”

Robert Voets / CBS

“I came up with the concept of the show and the characters while I was there, but I don’t know if the experience itself really influenced it,” White said. “Shooting Survivor was hell. The second time, it feels like you’re going through it with a lot of reality show contestants. They’ve crowdsourced their personas. There’s relationships to the fandom. A lot of conversations are about experiences playing the game and life as a Survivor contestant.”

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“When you first meet people, there are no phones, there’s no social media. It’s completely unmediated. Then you come back from that experience, and you realize that they have strong social media presences,” he continued. “It’s why I got off social media around my first season of Survivor. People [whom] I really liked on the island, I came back home, and I was like, I’m blocking them. Just because of the way I experienced their social media presence. I don’t know if that’s exactly the theme of the next season of White Lotus, but it’s definitely something I’ve thought about a lot — prioritizing likes or the attention of strangers over creating real relationships.”

In TV Insider’s pre-season interview with White, he told us that everyone wants fame on Survivor — Survivor fame, that is.

“In this Survivor world, everybody’s a star. They all know each other. Everybody comes with a resume,” White told us. “I know that in a certain world, yeah, I have some notoriety and fame, but I’m hoping that it doesn’t color too much of how people perceive me in the game. If it helps me, that’s great. The only thing I worry about is that people are like, ‘He doesn’t need the money.’ Maybe that somehow becomes a reason to be a first boot.”

“Everybody on Survivor not only wants to win the game, but they also want to be the star of the show,” White continued. “My job, I feel like, is to treat them like a bunch of actors that I’m working with and make sure that they feel like I see them as the star of the show and put the spotlight on them and not try to put it too much on me.”

White was definitely ruminating a lot on the concept of fame throughout his Survivor 50 experience. While it seems that he’s not explicitly pulling inspiration for this upcoming season from Survivor 50, it’s hard to imagine that his observations about fame and the desire to get it won’t bleed into a season of TV that dramatizes that very topic.

Survivor 50, Wednesdays, 8/7c, CBS

The White Lotus, Season 4 Premiere, TBA, HBO