Television, Review
Tedious Mediocrity: Palm Royale
An Apple TV series to avoid
The final episode of the ten-part miniseries Palm Royale airs May 8, and I am embarrassed to say I’ll be watching. Having already wasted nine hours, why not finish embarrassing myself?
Palm Royale is a failed attempt to recreate the magic of HBO’s The White Lotus. The formula seemed simple. Write a black comedy about rich people, set it in a scenic location, and hire talented actors to play it.
The Palm Royale producers fumbled. The series is a ten-hour Saturday Night Live skit. The characters are caricatures that could well have been plucked from SNL—maybe some of them were. Kristen Wiig, best known as a SNL cast member, plays the lead role. If the show were performed as a series of two minute skits as part of SNL, isolated parts of the tedious plot would have been tolerable, even funny. Stretched to ten hours of one-hour torture sessions, Palm Royale is funny’s antithesis.
Set in Florida in a town that could be Palm Beach, the series pokes fun at the snobbery and shallowness of the country club set. Wiig’s Maxine Simmons is an unwanted outsider who finagles her way into membership in the club. Much of the rest of the plot consists of women trying to undermine her.
