White Lines review, Culture Whisper
Many items in cultural history ripple in their time, resonating with politics or zeitgeist or emotional consciousness. It’s impossible to know where Álex Pena’s sun-soaked, Ibiza crime drama White Lines will go in the television pantheon, but its aggressive violence, elaborate sex, and colourfully extroverted atmosphere perfectly suits the self-isolated consciousness of the Covid-19 era. It’s a ridiculous but thoroughly enjoyable piece of guilty-pleasure escapism that absorbs you like chlorine to pool-water.
Ibiza is so beautifully lit, populated with such attractive people, that sometimes you don't notice the clichés. Maybe this is what attracts many to the bright and braindead holidays destinations of Love Island and Too Hot To Handle? There was fear from this critic, an avid hater of that bleak ‘reality’ TV cesspool, that White Lines would tread a similar path. Warning bells rang when the hero of the series, Zoe (Laura Haddock), says in voiceover, ‘I didn’t realise how destructive the truth could be… until now’. Oh, god, ten hours of this?
