Jason Isaacs said friendships were lost on The White Lotus season three, and boy howdy was he right. One relationship torn asunder was the one between composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer and showrunner Mike White. In an interview with the New York Times, Tapia de Veer said he would not be returning for season four. And like a lot of folks, he’s got beef with the season-three theme tune.
Tapia de Veer said that working with Mike White was like catering to the whims of histrionic drag performer Albin in La Cage Aux Folles (the Nathan Lane part in The Birdcage, for Americans). “You know how there’s Albin, which is like the star, and there’s Renato, who is the producer who is always taking care that Albin doesn’t lose his mind about something, because Albin is the diva and Renato is the guy who is trying to make everything work,” he said. “To me, the show felt very much like that.” Tapia de Veer says he and White butted heads over the mood of the music from the very beginning. He says Mike White didn’t like the show’s first theme and had to be convinced to use it. “Maybe I was being unprofessional, and for sure Mike feels that I was always unprofessional to him because I didn’t give him what he wanted. But what I gave him did this, you know — did those Emmys, people going crazy,” he said.
And with regards to the season-three theme and its lack of ooh-loo-loos, Tapia de Veer has put the extended cut of the opening on his YouTube channel. That has the classic White Lotus motif in there. “I texted the producer and I told him that it would be great to, at some point, give them the longer version with the ooh-loo-loo-loos, because people will explode if they realize that it was going there anyway,” he said. “But then Mike cut that.”