TV Review: "Palm Royale" is the Queerest Thing I've Seen This Year
The new series from Apple is a delightfully silly and deliciously queer confection.
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Warning: Some spoilers follow.
It might be a bit premature for this, but I’m going to go on record and say that Palm Royale, the new Apple TV series starring Kristen Wiig, might just be the queerest thing on TV this year. I can hear you rolling your eyes at yet another superlative from yours truly, but here me out. This show is like some unholy queer amalgam of The Gilded Age, The White Lotus, and Feud: Capote vs. the Swans. It’s campy, it’s fun, it’s ridiculous. In short, it’s simple queer joy from start to finish.
When the series begins, Kristen Wiig’s Maxine (Dellacorte) Simmons is newly arrived in Palm Beach, where she is desperate to insinuate herself with the upper crust. However, the Palm Beach doyennes turn their nose up at this parvenu in their midst, and Maxine has to resort to increasingly desperate measures–including pawning the jewels of her husband’s wealthy aunt Norma (Carol Burnett) and eventually taking the old lady under her conservatorship–in order to get the high life she believes she and her husband richly deserve. Along the way she contends with vicious Evelyn (Allison Janney), as well as Norma’s suspicious and devoted pool boy, Robert (Ricky Martin).
As just this summary makes clear, there is enough queerness and camp here for any gay to feast upon for the rest of the year. Wiig is in fine form as the desperate social climber Maxine, and I agree with those critics who’ve pointed out that this is the role that Wiig was born to play. She somehow manages to precisely thread the needle between camp and sincerity. Beneath Maxine’s ridiculous antics and overwrought southern twang–she was a beauty contestant in Tennessee before she married the handsome heir Douglas Dellacorte (Josh Lucas)--there is a genuine well of longing. This is a woman, moreover, who understands the complex performance that all women have to give in a patriarchal world, and a great deal of the series’ pleasure comes from watching Maxine demonstrate, in camp fashion, her manipulation of the codes of gender.
But it’s not as if Wiig is the only one mothering her way all over the screen. Elsewhere there’s Allison Janney’s Evelyn, a woman who, like Maxine, is a bit of a social climber and who seems to relish nothing so much as a well-delivered zinger at Maxine’s expense. It’s clear that Janney is channeling some Agnes Moorehead in her performance, from her unnatural shade of red hair to her blue eye shadow. She delivers each devastating line with precise venom, making sure each rhetorical blow lands just as she intends. This being Janney, however, she keeps it from sliding into outright camp, and there are times when, like Wiig’s Maxine, she lets us get a little glimpse of the pain lurking underneath that bitter surface. As Janney has repeatedly shown in her recent career–most notably, perhaps, in I, Tonya–she is truly a master at playing complicated, flawed, and deeply human women of a certain age.
Also worth noting are Laura Dern (a mother to us gays if ever there was one), and the grande dame of comedy herself, Carol Burnett. Dern plays Linda, a Second Wave feminist who chafes against Palm Beach Society, even as she also has more than a few secrets of her own. Though she is a rather unreliable ally to Maxine, she proves more reliable to Robert, even going so far as to guide the (obviously closeted) poolboy to the gay section of her feminist bookstore. For her part, Burnett is her usual hilarious self, even though she has had little to do in the first four episodes except be largely unconscious and utter monosyllables. Even that, though, is more than enough for the redoubtable Burnett to show why she deserves her title as the first lady of television comedy.
However, the series’ queer appeal doesn’t just stem from its engaging female characters (though that’s appealing enough). Much to my delight–and that of my other geriatric millennial and Gen X gays, I’m sure–these first four episodes include quite a few shorts of Ricky Martin in speedos, a gift to the gays if ever there was one. And, having carried a bit of a flame for Josh Lucas ever since I saw him as the blue-eyed and husky-voiced love interest in Sweet Home Alabama, I was happy to see him appear as Maxine’s loving but rather vacuous husband. And, just as the series gives us plenty of time to feast our eyes on Martin’s scantily-clad body, so we get the chance to do the same to Lucas.The fact that Douglas is something of a middle-aged himbo just makes him that much more appealing. And rounding out the male contingent is the always-reliable Dominic Burgess as the fussy but keen-eyed clothier Grayman, who adds just the right amount of camp to the scenes in which he appears.
Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about the sheer look of this series. Say what you will about Apple, but the streamer isn’t afraid to throw money at its productions, and Palm Royale looks gorgeous. Whether it’s the pink confections which Maxine favors, the haute couture of the various dames of the hotel, or the draperies of Linda and her fellow feminists, this is a show that nails the aesthetic of the 1960s.
Now, to be fair, I’ve only seen the first four episodes of the series as of this writing, but Palm Royale already has its hooks in me. It’s the kind of show where the stakes are almost ridiculously low–once again the comparison to The Gilded Age feels apt–and there’s just so much delicious bitchery going on in every episode that you can’t help but just settle in and enjoy the ride. I didn’t even have time to talk about Julia Duffey and Mindy Cohn, who both play supporting characters. Seriously, there is just so much glorious queerness in this show that I simply can’t wait to see what transpires in the rest of the season.
Rest assured, dear reader, that when I finish it, you’ll be the first to hear my thoughts!