During a 2018 interview, The Wall Street Journal asked Aretha Franklin for a “lightning round” of her opinions on other women musicians. When the outlet brought up Taylor Swift, Franklin, in a now widely-memed response, merely replied, “Great gowns, beautiful gowns.” Replace “gowns” with “caftans,” and this sentiment also sums up the Apple TV dramedy Palm Royale’s beautifully crafted yet hollow slog of a second season.
Loosely adapted from Juliet McDaniel’s novel Mr. and Mrs. American Pie, Abe Sylvia’s (Dead To Me) series stars Kristen Wiig as plucky newcomer Maxine Dellacorte. Raised in a Tennessee orphanage, Maxine dreams of ascending to the upper echelons of Florida’s ultra-wealthy, late ’60s Palm Beach community. The trouble is, her husband Douglas (Josh Lucas)—the sole heir to the powerful Dellacorte family’s fortune—spent years as a black sheep estranged from his matriarchal aunt Norma (Carol Burnett herself).
Maxine’s scrappy attempts at ingratiating herself nearly succeeded by the Season 1 finale, only for her to suffer a public breakdown at a lavish ball where she finds out that her nail technician-turned-friend Mitzi (Kaia Gerber) is having an affair with Douglas and is now pregnant with his baby. Fellow attendee President Richard Nixon is also nearly assassinated, but that’s neither here nor there!
After kicking things off with a handsomely choreographed, dream ballet-style recap of last season’s fateful final ball, Season 2, premiering Nov. 12, finds pretty much everyone in dire straits. Douglas has had Maxine committed to a women’s institution, while her “radical feminist” friend Linda (an underused Laura Dern) has been wrongfully framed for the Nixon murder attempt that nearly killed Maxine’s friend Robert (Ricky Martin).
To make matters worse, Norma has recovered from the coma that she spent most of Season 1 in and is now determined that the family fortune passes directly to Douglas and Mitzi’s unborn child. But get this—she’s actually a woman named Agnes who assumed the real Norma’s identity decades earlier!
From that recap alone, you’d be forgiven that Palm Royale is a frenzied, madcap satire of mid-century high society. Unfortunately, its sophomore season squanders its A-list comedic cast—which also features the likes of Allison Janney and Leslie Bibb—once again, managing to somehow be both overstuffed and painfully overlong.
The first season toyed with incorporating bits of the era’s countercultural movements and political turmoil, however uneven those stretches may be. That element is nearly absent from Season 2, leaving nothing but Maxine and her frenemies’ constantly-shifting personal squabbles to fill 10 hour-long episodes.
For a season of television that’s filled with soapy mainstays ranging from faked deaths to secret twins, Palm Royale suffers from a truly shocking amount of dead air. It would be one thing if these escapades were slotted neatly into half-hour, sitcom-esque morsels. Instead, the series groans under the effort of attempting to give its starry ensemble something fresh to do week after week.
Characters will declare themselves mortal enemies one episode, only to become inseparable the next. Affairs start and end within a handful of scenes, and the rules of the Dellacorte inheritance shift so many times that I may as well be next in line. It’s bizarrely stakes-free yet too filled with convoluted conflicts to deserve a campy gay following—we quite literally have The Gilded Age at home!
Apart from a brief excursion to Switzerland, Season 2, at least, does away with scenes of Wiig and co. cavorting against an obvious green screen backdrop. Instead, the cast spends the bulk of their time enveloped in opulent, Florida pastel-laden baroque interiors. Dreamy jazz tunes accompany our leading ladies, who swan around in vibrant designer vintage, their hair coiffed to the gods.
Given Palm Royale’s beachy setting and leading lady, it’s hard not to think of Wiig’s beloved 2021 cult comedy Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar. That film also featured the actress as an outsider who ventures to the Sunshine State in hopes of making her dreams come true, only to be met with an onslaught of crime-ridden misadventures. The difference is, Barb and Star is able to sell a delightful screwball buddy comedy in under two hours. Given the more vulnerable, subtle work that Wiig is doing here, it’s a shame that her glossy streaming showcase isn’t stronger.
At the very least, audiences who plod through Palm Royale Season 2 will be rewarded with a predictably excellent nonagenarian Burnett villain performance (ironically, the protagonist of a far better new Apple show, Pluribus, was named after her). The comedy legend manages to imbue her scheming grand dame character with enough twinkly-eyed mischievousness and unexpected pathos that she manages to transcend her underwritten scenes in a way that even her highly capable co-stars cannot.
Watching Norma sing The Sound of Music’s “Something Good” under a blue spotlight is almost enough to give the season a pass, well-decorated flaws and all. On the whole, though, it’s hardly the vacation we were promised.
