Some she wears. Some she pawns. But Maxine’s chattiness is key to what Abe Sylvia’s adaptation of Juliet McDaniel’s novel, “Mr. and Mrs. American Pie,” is trying, albeit unevenly, to pull off. Maxine’s monologue to an unconscious audience is there to calibrate how we should feel about our protagonist. Because it amounts to an “anti-performance,” one that can’t be tarred as manipulative precisely because it lacks an audience, the scene clarifies (or should) whether Maxine is malicious or dangerously deluded. In this instance, it partially exonerates the scheming underdog at the heart of this series. Maxine seems quixotically earnest, as if she’s trying to convince herself that what’s happening is consensual and even friendly. She seems like a misfit. She seems lonely. The larcenous prattle is, in this sense, a typically Wiig-ian set piece: sunny, strained and flailing for dignity.
Wiig is a comedy legend, and she does a lot with scenes like these. But it’s symptomatic of the massive talent “Palm Royale” amasses and then inexplicably wastes that the woman lying comatose in that bed is none other than Carol Burnett.
This is a series about a cringeworthy Gatsby figure who refuses to cringe. That’s an intriguing premise: It’s hard to imagine someone with that particular combination of social guile, rabid ambition and total cluelessness. Enter Maxine, a Tallahassee native and borderline bumpkin who wants to conquer Palm Beach — specifically, the Palm Royale, a fancy club whose circle of haughty doyennes she desperately wants to join. The women she’s determined to conquer as friends include Evelyn Rollins (Allison Janney), the usual “queen of the season,” her up-and-coming rival, Dinah Donahue (Leslie Bibb), and Mary Jones Davidsoul (an underused Julia Duffy).
Maxine pingpongs from humiliation to humiliation while aping their hauteur and sunnily rejecting their rejection. She’s the kind of social climber whose schemes include literally scaling the fence of the club she hopes to join, and her initial sallies are easily parried by the snobs (and by Ricky Martin’s Robert, a bartender/waiter/bouncer at the club) who size her up as something between a misfit and an impostor. But Maxine, whose dim but pleasant husband (Josh Lucas) bears the impressive name D’ellacourt — a shibboleth of sorts to the Palm Royale set, signaling wealth and pedigree — keeps on pulling off improbable coups (and acquiring social leverage) until they start wondering whether they’ve misjudged her.
Rounding out the social world of 1969 Palm Beach is Laura Dern’s Linda, Evelyn’s stepdaughter, an antiwar activist who rejected the shallow, rarefied world her stepmother occupies to open a feminist bookstore where she and her friend Virginia (Amber Chardae Robinson) work on consciousness-raising and building community. And Grayman (Dominic Burgess), at whose boutique the ladies gather to gossip and shop.
The ingredients here are good. The costumes are great, the sets sublime. The script, alas, varies. Some of the dialogue is quippy and enjoyable — Janney gets some great lines, and Bibb and Burgess do exquisite work with what they’re given. There are some genuinely terrific moments between women wherein an adversarial exchange collapses into exhausted and amusing intimacy. 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. The show sometimes takes Maxine’s quest to find her place in the world so seriously it drifts into dramatic and earnest territory (this is true of Martin’s character, too), while at other times reveling in the extent to which everyone is a joke.
Speaking of jokes: My biggest critique is that this series should, given this astounding cast, be funnier. But there’s so much atmospheric rollicking that “Palm Royale” never quite gets its sea legs. Or settles on a point of view. There’s also a good-hearted indeterminacy at the show’s core that keeps the catty premise from gelling with its nobler themes. It’s unclear what it wants to say about feminism, or the queen of the season, or Maxine herself, who sometimes seems to bumble guilelessly toward the social success she craves while at other times displaying a cutthroat instinct for trumping her rivals.
None of this is necessarily disqualifying. Wiig is great fun to watch — and good enough that she can almost reconcile all that into a coherent character chasing the American Dream.
Palm Royale will premiere with three episodes March 20 on Apple TV Plus. Subsequent episodes will air weekly.
