Palm Royale: Stunning but a bit vacuous

Few shows can be credited with delivering consistent, visual eye cany across an entire season. But the Apple TV satire Palm Royale does exactly that, and its beauty compensates for the stop start pace of the show and, at times, a lack of layered storytelling.

The series is set against the backdrop of a late 1960s Palm Beach in the United States, a place of opulence and excess while, simultaneously, thousands of soldiers were being killed off in the Vietnam war and Richard Nixon’s brand of conservatism permeated through the country. Palm Royale’s intention is to blend comedy, drama, and mystery with a healthy dose of satire, and it succeeds, though in some respects only moderately.

Maxine is a newcomer to the town’s elite establishment circle, and she’s not from the right side of the tracks. She married into status and from the get-go had a hard time breaking into the mink and manure set that congregate at the Plam Royale country club. She’s a former beauty queen who used her title and her looks to slowly claw from her modest circumstances into a world obsessed with wealth and status and, later she’d discover, intrigue.

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Maxine’s journey is fraught with challenges and her tactics to ascend the social ladder include pawning stolen items from her wealthy aunt-in-law and trying to ingratiate herself with the influential women of the club. Characters such as the philandering socialite Dinah, the gossip-mongering Mary Jones and the show-villain villain Evelyn provide a mix of antagonism and social commentary on the superficiality friendships between these characters, it’s a satirical take that can make your toes curl while also recognising some of our own elevated personalities in South Africa through these dark portrayals of an artificial upper crust.

Ricky Martin, of Living la Vida Loca fame, makes a great star turn as the former war veteran turned Palm Royale waiter who moonlights as a housekeeper at Maxine’s aunt-in-law’s home. She’s in a coma. The pair are at loggerheads for much of the first part of the season, because Martin’s character Robert called Maxine out for what she really was; a wannabe. Her pilot husband Douglas is the only living relative of the filthy rich aunt Norma, stands to inherit her fortune on the proviso that he fathers a son to continue to the Delacorte family name.

The only way to continue sponging off Norma’s money was for the couple to keep her alive. Because without an heir, Douglas wouldn’t get a penny, as then her boodles of cash would go to an animal shelter.

About halfway through the series the plot becomes a little bit bizarre, but it recovers two episodes later when events prior is unpacked a bit more sensibly. Some aspects of the storytelling remain unresolved though, live Evelyn and Maxine’s interaction with a beached whale, probably intended as a spiritual awakening thread, or something like that. But it’s nonsensical and contributes very little else to the plot bar wasting time as a pointless segue.

Kristen Wiig is fantastic as Maxine Simmons-Delacorte and her performance is never overstated for the period, instead, it is believable and attractively engaging. So too is Laura Dern who plays a feminist, anti-war activist who stood to inherit her father’s fortune over his wife at the time, the conniving Evelyn. The latter is excellently played by Allison Janney with veteran comedian Carol Burnett as the comatose aunt Norma. The cast along with the collective of supporting players is excellent.

It’s the direction and storytelling in Palm Royale that fails viewers. And while the high production values that make it such a beautiful piece of television as a period piece compensates, and the satire is never lost, there is a feeling that threads through the series; one of a bit of a lack of substance. Not all the characters are developed fully, and it leaves part of the plot thinly layered. The narrative execution or storytelling is also somewhat frivolous at times, not paced well enough and the focus seems to be more on setting up an atmosphere. But it comes at the expense of progressing the viewer’s journey.

All the wealthy characters are painted as shallow and manipulative which is okay, but the failure to strip back and reveal a bit more about their humanity leaves it all a bit wooden.

Palm Royale is an entertaining watch, the satire is thrilling and the visuals truly atmospheric and cinematically pleasing. But it’s not enough to cultivate a loyal fan club or to binge-watch the series, which was rolled out weekly over the past two months. It’s a six out of ten kind of show, but great to turn to when you’ve watched everything else you wanted to see on Netflix, Amazon Prime and Showmax.

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