Jason Isaacs wears a Rolex Day-Date

Timothy Ratliff is the guest who would not give up his phone. The resort in the third season of The White Lotus runs a strict phone-free policy, and the family patriarch, played by Jason Isaacs, holds onto his to keep word of a serious lawsuit from reaching his wife and children. So he turns up again and again with the phone pressed to his ear and a gold Rolex on the wrist holding it, in a place where a wristwatch is the only clock most guests have left.

The watch is a Rolex Day-Date. Rolex has only ever made it in gold or platinum, never steel, and the rounded three-piece bracelet gave the model its nickname, the President. It reads as old, settled money. The detail the show kept quiet is that Timothy is not the only Ratliff wearing one. His wife Victoria, played by Parker Posey, wears the same gold Day-Date, and prop master Michael Cory told GQ the match was deliberate. By Cory's account it was Posey's idea that Victoria's came down from her father, an heirloom to mark her as born into money rather than married into it. The third episode opens on Victoria dreaming, and a longer cut of that dream showed her father wearing the watch before it was trimmed. Timothy owning the same model her father did, Cory said, plays into the family dynamics.

A solid-gold Day-Date is the watch of money old enough to be handed down, and the call Timothy keeps sneaking off to take is the news that his is about to be taken away. A phone can be surrendered at the door. The watch keeps perfect time the whole way down.