Better Late Than Never: Palm Royale

 

When I began looking at Gold Derby and contenders for Best Comedy Series this year, it didn’t escape my attention that one of the premiere contenders was Palm Royale the Apple TV comedy series with Kristen Wiig at the head. The ensemble included some of my favorite actresses of all time, not just comic ones: Allison Janney, Laura Dern and of course Carol Burnett. That said, it also had the make up of the kind of ‘star vehicles’ that we get so often on streaming and cable that can be a decided mixed bag, for every Only Murders In The Building, you get The Regime; for every White Lotus, you get Avenue 5. The early reviews have generally tending towards the mixed rather than enthusiastic and I decided to bide my time and wait until the Emmy nominations forced my hand.

Then last week they came out and sure enough Palm Royale was among the major contenders for Emmys, receiving a total of fourteen. I figured now was as good a time as any. So Saturday in the middle of a weekend with so much turmoil, I started watching it. I’ve since watched three and I’m genuinely surprised how entertaining I’ve found it. I might not have had I only seen the first – there were elements that worked and others I found off-putting but by the end of the third episode, I was smiling and laughing rather loudly at the increasingly ridiculous antics of Maxine Dellacorte Simmons as this woman whose talent was escape acts in pageants increasingly puts herself in societal situations Houdini would prefer being stuck in a water trap then this.

It’s 1969, Man is walking on the moon. The Vietnam War is raging. The feminist movement is beginning to unfold. A revolution is taking place and Maxine (Kristin Wiig) for reasons that are unclear to the viewer at the start, seems determined to go to the one place in the world which is moving backwards as past as possible: Palm Beach and its socialite circle.

I don’t know if Tate Taylor and Abe Sylvia came up with this concept before or after the second season of Feud but its hard not to look at the circle at the Palm Royale and not think of the Swans in full flower. Here all of these middle-age white wives of millionaires (though as Maxine loves to point out, one of them is the heiress to a sugar fortune) lounge around a pool, constantly try on gown, spend a huge amount of time drinking or taking pills (they trade them at a cocktail party) don’t eat at the brunches they go to, raise vast amounts of money for causes that are really more about themselves then fighting cancers, have affairs with the local tennis pro and go to balls so extensive Truman Capote would think they’re garish. 

Why Maxine wants to join a club that so pointedly doesn’t want her as a member is something that is hard for us to understand at first. It is the gift of Kristen Wiig that she finds a role that I honestly don’t know any of her belles from her time on SNL pulling off. Tina Fey is too worldly and Amy Poehler was still in the real world even as an optimist but Maxine is someone who seems the right combination of clueless on first look – and second look – but at a certain point you realize that there’s a hard shell beneath the cotton candy surface.

For much of the first episode Maxine seems ridiculously clueless, even by the standards of some of the characters in sixties rom-coms. She seems impervious to the forcefield of iciness that is put up when she first comes in (okay, breaks in) to the Palm Royale and she remains ridiculously naïve in the face of when she meets one of the women outside the club. Leslie Bibb (a favorite of mine since Popular) plays Dinah, the youngest member of the circle but still in her forties. Dinah has been having an affair with the club tennis pro and when Maxine comes across her (ok, hits her with a car) in a dire situation Dinah is just vulnerable enough to confide in her about her situation: She’s in a family way and she can’t have the child. Maxine still believes in love but Dinah is on her second husband and she knows how this ends if she reveals the truth. Maxine finds a way to handle the problem but she’s naïve enough to think that doing a favor this big is still enough to end up in the good graces of the Palm Beach circle. Maxine learns she’ll have to play dirty quickly.

Maxine spends the first two episodes doing everything she can to get in the good graces of a circle that despite all their style has no good graces. Evelyn Rollins (Allison Janney) is the queen bee and she knows every card Maxine wants to play before she can even think to lay it down. Maxine claims to be the heir to the Dellacorte fortune, which is true: her husband Douglas (Josh Lucas) is a pilot and it’s pretty clear their marriage is happy and loving. You get the feeling that Douglas would be happy living in a cheap motel room, drinking 7-up and eating Chinese food if he could just come home to Maxine. For much of the first two episode it seems that Maxine is just a fool for love – until you learn that she and Douglas got married when she got pregnant as  a teenager. They got married and she suffered a miscarriage which has led to him being disinherited. Doug doesn’t seem unhappy with this but its clear Maxine feels guilty that has been pushing her to make up for it ever since.

The problem with Maxine is that she seems to be clinging to an ideal that is about to go poof. Early in her travels in Palm Beach, she runs into Linda, who seems to be the version of every radical feminist cliché you can imagine – and as you might expect she also has the upbringing of so many sixties children as well. Maxine keeps coming back into Linda’s inner circle time and again and I have to say some of the most hysterical moments come when Maxine’s fifties housewife ideals keep coming into violent contrast with the feminist revolution – and she keeps being unable to see it.

Unlike so many of the characters in Royale, Maxine actually does have something beneath the surface. There’s a kind of idealism and optimism that wouldn’t be out of place in the sitcoms of the era as well as a certain farcical element to it as well. She decides to host a cocktail party and brunch at her mansion only to learn that rich people don’t eat. Her guests come asking for ridiculous cocktails which she manages to make, they grill her for questions she can’t possibly answer, and leave without eating a single item of the food she’s had to write a check that will bounce the moment it is cashed. Maxine is clearly a good person and she does recognize some of the good people there. Her purest relationship so far is with Mitzi, her manicurist who tells her about her problems with her boyfriend and seems to be the only guileless person she’s met. She’s willing to give the only $20 she has left to her just for the fact.

Now I have to admit that even if you are with me on all of this, much of Palm Royale is a series that is far more about style than substance. But what style! It didn’t take me five minutes into the first episode to comprehend why GALECA nominated this one of the  ‘Most Camp Shows of the Year’ and with all of the flowing evening gowns, luxurious balls and overwhelming mansions, it’s hard not to see it taking that prize. Stylistically this is the kind of TV series Quentin Tarantino would have made, absent so much of the violence: the lingering cinematography, the kinds of fetish like shots he’s fond of, the frequent cuts of contrast between Maxine’s antics and Nixon speaking about Vietnam. There’s also a certain darkness to the kind repartee even if it doesn’t have the profanities he is known for. (Maxine hates the idea of swearing.).

And that of course is before one comes to the cast. Wiig has become the third SNL alum  of the 2000s to have an Apple TV series as the lead and receive an Emmy nomination for it. (Jason Sudeikis for Ted Lasso and Maya Rudolph for Loot are the other two…so far.) We have known since Bridesmaids that Wiig is more than willing to humiliate herself for a laugh and she is more than willing to do so in this case. But there’s a ridiculous purity to what she does that you can’t help but admire.

Allison Janney once again proves herself to be one of the great comic actresses in history. (She worked with Tate Taylor, one of the showrunners in a different kind of role in The Help.) Janney has always been great with a faux Southern accent and here she gets to play one of the more pleasantly unpleasant characters she’s done in a long time.

I need no further convincing that Laura Dern is one of the greatest actresses of all time but she has been one of the great dramatic actresses for so long that she rarely gets a chance to do comedy. Here she plays Linda Shaw, the rebellious child of a socialite family herself who speaks in the kind of garbled metaphor we’ve come to associate with so much of the academic talk. But it’s clear there’s something deeper than this. In a discussion about the Vietnam War and chauvinism, she loses the thread when she starts discussing being left at the altar.. Her closest ally, Virgina puts her back on track and you get the sense that Virginia is committed to this revolution far more than Linda truly is.

It is true that so far Carol Burnett may not have done much in the first three episodes to merit the Emmy nomination she has gotten this year considering she has spent most of the series in a coma due to an embolism her character suffered last year. That said when Maxine comes to visit her (and loot her room to pay for her lifestyle) she’s enough of a presence that you can see it. The flashbacks and dream sequences also make it clear she’s earning her money. And even if she wasn’t there, some of my old favorites from years past most notably Mindy Cohn and Julia Duffy are more than willing to make up for it.

The men as you might imagine are window dressing but that’s actually to be hoped for. The most prominent one is Robert, played by Ricky Martin. Robert is a bartender and bouncer at the title club who was a former Marine. His primary job these days is caretaker for the Dellacorte Mansion, which he doesn’t seem to need a shirt to do. This troubles Maxine immensely as she having a hard time staying focus on the man she considers an interloper and he considers just as much. I’d assume they’re going to have an affair at some point but right now, it looks like this is closer to home.

I can’t tell you why Palm Royale strikes such a chord with me and other period comedies that have been exercises in style (Hulu’s The Great comes to mind) leaves me cold. Maybe it’s that even half a century after the events that happened here, society is still clashing between the two views of femininity, Maxine’s and Linda’s. Maybe it’s because that despite the advances in our society, there are always going to be people – women among them – who long more for the clubs at  the Palm Royale then the freedom that Linda looks for. Maybe it’s because I have always been a fan of period pieces that use the recent past to show the world that has either changed too much for some or not enough for others. Or maybe it’s just because I love these actresses so much they could just read the phone book and I’d be entertained.

Whatever the reason I think Palm Royale is a lot of fun. Perhaps it may not be the kind of quality show we used to wait for in the era of Peak TV. Maybe it’s nothing more than an amplified guilty pleasure. So what? Isn’t there a need for guilty pleasures too? In an era when so much of  even the best TV is dark and often punishing, is it that wrong to want to watch a show that’s bright and sunny and cheerful, even if the darkness is pulsing so low the characters themselves don’t feel it yet?

My score: 4.25 stars.