Palm Royale

The Price of Admission

There is an early moment in *Palm Royale* that tells you more about Maxine Simmons than a page of dialogue could. Shut out from the titular Palm Beach club in 1969, staring at the paradise she has decided belongs to her, she simply hikes up her skirt and throws herself over the wall. Kristen Wiig plays the scramble with the manic grin and desperate determination that made her famous, but here there is a bruise underneath it. Maxine lands, straightens the dress she more or less stole, and orders a Grasshopper without realizing the drink is already a relic. In her mind, none of that matters. She has crossed the line and entered heaven.



That hunger for belonging powers Abe Sylvia’s bright, sugary Apple TV+ series. On the surface, the show is a delirious production-design object. Every frame is loaded with Pucci prints, bouffants, caftans, and enough pastel décor to make you lose the thread of a scene while staring at the wallpaper. Women with money—Allison Janney and Leslie Bibb are especially lethal here—spend their afternoons planning charity events and quietly gutting one another over lunch. *The Independent* got the vibe exactly right when it called the whole thing "a popularity contest conducted with all the decorum of a saloon knife-fight." Nixon hums in the background, Vietnam is still raging, and second-wave feminism keeps knocking in the form of Laura Dern’s rogue heiress, but the series mostly wears that history like jewelry it has not quite figured out how to style.



Where the satire loses its nerve, the cast keeps things alive. Wiig makes Maxine into a proper mess of need and charm. She is a grifter, after all, pawning jewelry from the comatose aunt of her husband—a wonderfully formidable Carol Burnett—to bankroll this social ascent. But Wiig lets you see the panic under the polish. Her smile stays a fraction too fixed. Her posture is too careful. She carries herself like someone who knows the entire performance could collapse with one bounced check.

Then Ricky Martin walks in as Robert, the bartender-pool boy, and suddenly the show has a center of gravity. Against all the frantic scheming around him, Martin plays Robert with startling stillness. The character is hiding plenty, including a deeply repressed gay identity, and Martin lets that secrecy live in the body: the quick glance away when someone gets too close, the slight lock in the shoulders when Maxine’s chaos drags him into danger. He becomes the sad, grounded pulse inside a show always threatening to float off on its own froth.



Your patience with *Palm Royale* will probably depend on how much affection you have for overstuffed, soapy sprawl. The pacing sags, and by the end of the season it is hard to miss how much wheel-spinning the writers are doing instead of landing anything. Some scenes crackle like screwball satire; others sink into melodrama they have not earned. The plot holes are not small. Still, there is a strange pleasure in watching these elegant, miserable people scratch at one another under endless sunshine. Empty calories, absolutely—but a surprisingly easy cocktail to finish.