Palm Royale

Paired with Burnett (flexing her physical comic chops) and Dern (who draws out a few tears), Janney and Wiig make sure a highly anticipated combination of stars doesn’t disappoint. Together, they help ensure the “Palm Royale” is where you’ll want to be.

A deft mix of social commentary and campy social climbing, Palm Royale is one of the year’s smarter comedies and a great vehicle for Kristen Wiig.

“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.

While its side narratives about the burgeoning women’s rights movement fall flatter, Palm Royale has enough Aqua Net and quaaludes to buoy the series. A bewitching performance by Wiig ties the whole affair together in one big discount store bow.

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.

By the time the series ends, Maxine is someone viewers want to root for. Watching her follow her materialistic-centered dreams is a joyfully delicious experience.

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.

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.

Even if it never quite gels (and the finale leaves open the possibility of future seasons that strike a better balance), that doesn't make Palm Royale unsatisfying. It's a pleasant visit, even if few watching would be allowed to live there.

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.

Palm Royale is perfectly watchable if you don’t demand too much of it.

Palm Royale is so gorgeous to look at, the story is almost secondary. Funny and frothy, Palm Royale is an indulgent watch not unlike gorging on colorful and beautifully decorated pastries.

fter six hours “Palm Royale” didn’t make me care enough to continue, though I did skip to the last episode and discovered the show does not wrap up in a way that suggests it’s intended to be a limited series.

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.

Great cast, great performances, but they are in a series whose episodes somehow feel both overstuffed and overlong at the same time. Fun, perhaps, but it could have been so much more.

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.

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.

“Palm Royale” nevertheless feels like an underachiever, a wannabe that doesn’t earn a place in the exclusive elite-series club to which it aspires.

If the show were funnier, all the grasping wouldn't be so dispiriting. But again, the series may not be a comedy.

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.

A social satire lacking bite or even a point of view, “Palm Royale” is as substance-free as the froth and foam left by waves on the beach.

By the middle of the season, all the charm of the casting and design elements have worn off, leaving nothing but a hollow exercise in style. Like so much of the world of wealth and excess, it looks great but means nothing.

Despite a top-notch cast, Apple TV+’s Palm Royale is a middling soap that lacks laughs and emotional depth.

It isn't funny enough to be a comedy, but it isn't serious enough to be a thriller. I have read that this promises to be the new White Lotus. Spoiler alert: it isn't.

Palm Royale is a show about the dangers of excess, but it doesn’t practice what it preaches. Beautiful gowns, though.

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.

But style isn’t substance, and “Palm Royale” is lacking in the latter if not the former. For one, not much even happens for the first two-thirds of the season.

The plot is slight, and attempts to give it more heft by throwing in Richard Nixon, politics, and Laura Dern as the leader of a local women’s rights group are tiresome, dragging the show down when it would be better embracing the silly campness of it all.

Not having a strong central character sets the series adrift with nothing for the audience to cling to. “Palm Royale” never comes together, and that’s a shame, given the tone-rich performances by Burnett and Martin.

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.