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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
16
Mixed:
20
Negative:
3
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Critic Reviews
ColliderNov 7, 2025
Season 2 Review:
As more characters help expand the universe, it’s as if the pacing issues are gone and have now evolved into something richer: a study of how people rebuild after the masks crack. It’s this aspect that helps the sharper humor hit harder while grounding the emotional stakes. Never missing a beat on its comedy and heart, Palm Royale is proof that when the claws come out, so does the show’s best self.
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ColliderMar 18, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Funny and wicked with very mature humor, Palm Royale is a throwback to yesteryear classics but with more intricately pointed nuance. Whereas a lot of comedy today is about making the audience cringe and feel uncomfortable, Palm Royale plays like the best old-school, slapstick charm, with humor and depth that makes you feel good at the end.
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IndieWireMar 19, 2024
Mar 19, 2024
Season 1 Review:
“Palm Royale” is above all Wiig’s show, and she is terrific and genuine, alive in her role from moment to moment. It’s a complex performance, funny and painful and endearing, shot through with hope and fear, sass and sadness. .... But even characters who in a lesser piece would be frozen into caricatures are granted some depth and fluidity, which helps sustain the series over 10 episodes.
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The Daily BeastMar 18, 2024
Mar 18, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The self-aware soap is an increasingly popular format, and Palm Royale adheres to familiar conventions. But showrunner Abe Sylvia (Dead to Me), loosely adapting Juliet McDaniel’s novel Mr. and Mrs. American Pie, makes it feel fresh by nailing both the comedy and the melodrama, in a punchy first season that gets weirder with each episode.
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Nov 7, 2025
Season 2 Review:
Mitzi is a cardboard cutout of a backstabbing cheater. Still, these shortcomings aren’t dire enough to dim Palm Royale’s frothy appeal, which is all the more delightful this time because the writers know that the show’s sheer ridiculousness is exactly what makes it sing.
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Mar 18, 2024
Season 1 Review:
While a few of the middle episodes might test your patience as the storyline meanders this way and that, this is one great-looking and stylish period piece, popping with sunny colors and often hilariously accurate and quite ridiculous fashions and hairstyles of the time.
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Mar 19, 2024
Season 1 Review:
It’s still annoying to watch an entire season of TV and feel absolutely zero closure for every minute twist and head-spinning plot that just unraveled over 10 hour-long episodes. But even in its flaws, Palm Royale is still a hell of a good time, and a sudsy, campy series to carry us through the spring TV season.
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Mar 18, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The first half stumbles as much as Maxine does, but as she gets closer to inserting herself into high society, the lengths to which she’s willing to go to achieve her dream give Palm Royale a much-needed shot in the arm. That makes this another Apple TV+ series to stick with as it heads toward a satisfying finale.
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The IndependentMar 20, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Wiig fanatics will find much to admire in Palm Royale, which is every bit as indulgent and lavish as the lives of its characters. But what Palm Royale lacks, compared to the very best dynastic battles, is the ability to make the drama about more than just the internecine wranglings of a privileged minority.
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Mar 19, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Ultimately, it all starts to feel redundant, even pointless, as Maxine keeps trying to wear the ladies down in episode after episode. At times, there doesn’t seem to be enough story line to fuel 10 hourlong episodes. A little more drama — or even some heavier satire — might have given the show more weight and purpose. Still, it’s an enjoyable, if forgettable, romp.
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Mar 20, 2024
Season 1 Review:
There are a lot of moving pieces on this show, and so far everyone is pretty one-dimensional with the exceptions of Robert and Linda, who are both hiding ulterior motives and thus strike me as the most interesting. While I love watching Allison Janney being a ruthless bitch, she could use a little more to do. Otherwise, Palm Royale is stunning, but it’s not as funny as it clearly wants to be.
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Mar 20, 2024
Season 1 Review:
At its best, when it leans into the caricature it sometimes seems to be going for, the show can approximate the verbal pleasures and visual delights of a Coen brothers comedy (think “Intolerable Cruelty”). But with a plot as overstuffed as its characters are thin, the result can be perplexing when it isn’t simply predictable — or ploddingly bureaucratic.
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Nov 12, 2025
Season 2 Review:
We still appreciate Wiig’s performance as Maxine, as well as the performances of Janney, Duffy and more. But Palm Royale is so in love with its own sense of late-’60s, early-’70s kitsch and piling on characters and plotlines, that those performances often get lost under a blizzard of words.
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Mar 18, 2024
Season 1 Review:
While there’s plenty going on in Palm Royale, including back-stabbings, torrid affairs and attempted murders, there’s precious little true substance lurking beneath its candy shell. At ten hour-long episodes, the comedy takes an awfully long way to get nowhere very interesting at all.
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The TelegraphMar 18, 2024
Mar 20, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Palm Royale feels surprisingly cynical and empty for a prestige TV series with such a blockbuster cast. There is some potential for the show to get deeper than what we’ve seen, but enduring the rest of it to get to that depth isn’t something we’re willing to sign up for.
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Mar 19, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The problem is that very little of it lands. With the exception of Dern (as a feminist trying to discourage Maxine from becoming one of the Stepford Wives) and Martin (as an employee of the titular club who is wise to Maxine’s game long before everyone else), everyone is playing a cartoon, and giving a performance to match.
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