On Sunday night’s season finale of The White Lotus, creator Mike White proved two things: first, that there is near-animal satisfaction in watching Jennifer Coolidge brandish a gun; second, that he remains one of the sharpest satirists on American television.

In a cultural moment where limp “eat the rich” sentiment is lacquered over any property that would like to appear progressive in the long wake of Parasite’s Best Picture Oscar win, The White Lotus is the rare production that actually merits applause. In its first season, the HBO anthology series used a fine brush to paint its elite vacationers, rather than portraying them as contemptible caricatures so grotesque that no reasonable person could see them as analogues  — thus hitting much harder than blander, blunter class satires like this year’s Triangle of Sadness.

On its surface, season two shies away from class to zero in on sex. Yes, the guests at the titular luxury resort — located on the Sicilian coast this time instead of the Hawaiian Islands — are still rich, but, from the jump, White puts less emphasis on the divide between them and the hotel employees laboring to keep them comfortable. Instead, he pokes at their carnal anxieties and improprieties. There’s a grandfather-son-grandson trio, each with generation-specific woman troubles; season one’s spacey Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), who worries her husband might be having an affair; and a group of toned-and-tanned millennials (played by Will Sharpe, Aubrey Plaza, Theo James, and Meghann Fahey) that exudes fraught sexual tension from the moment they appear in the same frame.