If HBO creatives aren’t thinking right now about a White Lotus spinoff show called Blame It On The Ratliffs, they should be immediately fired.
An upper-middle-class family suddenly tossed into the horrific animal pit of financial Armageddon and the resultant loss of comfort, elevated status, having to land jobs, sell the house and move to a vaguely crummy neighborhood…pretentious swells forced to adapt to a lesser (dare we say “shitty”?) standard of living and hating every moment of it.
The sure-to-be-psychotic journey of Parker Posey‘s Victoria Ratliff alone…the unmitigated joy of watching Victoria suffer one social-station comedown after another…talk about a bomb cocktail! The Sopranos meets Absolutely Fabulous plus you-name-it. Initial periods of shock, denial and bargaining followed by a brush with catatonic depression. And then she becomes the angriest, most ferocious “Karen” of all time.
Victoria promptly divorces Jason Isaacs‘s Tim Ratliff, of course, as (a) he nearly Jonestowned the entire family with those poisoned pina colada smoothies…okay, four of them including himself…plus (b) she needs to find another sugar daddy pronto, or at least she has that goal in her mind. In reality she’s too old to find a sexually active husband, but she might get lucky with a pot-bellied 70something horndog…who knows?
Tim is looking at government prosecution, of course, plus enormous legal fees (Scott Galloway could play his attorney!) and a country-club jail term of three to five years. Plus, as noted, divorce with Victoria trying to shake him down for every last shekel.
But will his plight be as horrible as he imagined it might be back in Thailand? He’s presumably socked some assets away in anticipation of legal trouble but he might not have been cagey enough to have thought of that. All financially savvy fellows with shady associations know they have to covertly move liquid funds to foreign territories, and perhaps even keep a bag of cash and diamonds in an outdoor shed (maybe in a special below-the-floor safe a la Tony Soprano).
It’s safe to say that in prison Tim will experience a spiritual awakening.
Patrick Schwarzenegger‘s Saxon Ratliff will not handle poverty well. He said that in so many words in episode #7. He runs away at first….maybe a cross-country trip, maybe an escape to a bartending job in Key West, maybe a little drug-dealing, maybe a floor salesman gig at a BMW dealership. Stone-cold miserable at every turn, but then a possible spiritual growth spurt….actually learning to stand on his own two feet and become (we should pardon the expression) a man.
Sarah Catherine Hook‘s Piper Ratliff and Sam Nivola‘s Lochlan Ratliff will be the least affected or at least the most adaptable. Lochlan will be, for sure. Sarah is her mother’s daughter so we might expect a little freaking-out at first.
Get to work on an eight-part miniseries right now. And if they go for this, I want a “based on an idea by” credit.
