Summary
Palm Royale hasn’t lost a step in Season 2. “Maxine Drinks Martinis Now” provides a surreal return to Florida, but one with the same heightened drama and zinging comedy.
Most shows require a bit of detective work when they return after some time away, but it took me longer than usual to reacclimatise to Apple TV+’s Palm Royale. This is probably due to a couple of reasons. One is that the first season operated at such an exaggerated level of operatic high camp that it felt like a gaudy fever dream, something best consigned to the half-full dustbin of media memory for the sake of your sanity. But the other is likely that Season 2 opens with a ridiculous, imagined song-and-dance number that collapses the events of the Beach Ball into the gyrations of Ricky Martin’s hips. Episode 1 isn’t interested in easing you in. It assumes not only that you recall the events of the first season finale, but that you’re intimately familiar with all the attendant shenanigans, which you probably won’t be.
Allow me, then, to remind you. The plot was kick-started by Maxine Dellacorte-Simons’ efforts to ingratiate herself into Palm Beach high society, finding herself floating in and out of a country club clique, including Evelyn Rollins, Dinah Donahue, and Mary Davidsoul. Maxine is married to Douglas, the nephew of Norma Dellacorte, the former queen bee of the titular country club who spent most of the first season in a coma, but Douglas impregnated Maxine’s manicurist, Mitzi, behind her back, and it turned out that Norma, who eventually awakened from that coma, wasn’t actually Norma at all but an imposter named Agnes who had stolen her identity.
In the finale, all of this came together in a ridiculous way when Mary tried to shoot Nixon – yes, that Nixon – at the Beach Ball, but was thwarted by Linda, the radical feminist secret stepdaughter of Evelyn, and ended up accidentally shooting Norma’s secretly gay caretaker Robert instead (who was dressed as an astronaut for colour). Maxine had a very public breakdown, and Linda was arrested on suspicion of pulling the trigger. Fin.
Palm Royale Season 2, Episode 1 picks up in the midst of this chaos, with Maxine dreaming up the song-and-dance opener as one of her delusions as she’s shuffled off to a ritzier portion of the same facility where Linda, thanks to some string-pulling by Virginia, who reveals herself to be an FBI agent whose book store was a front to entrap radicals, has been housed in lieu of rotting in jail. Robert is alive but in a coma, which is a problem for Norma, since he knows about the whole Agnes thing, and she’s trying to lock Maxine out of the family by pushing pregnant Mitzi into the spotlight. Oh, and Mary is hiding out in some eerie bootlegger tunnels underneath Palm Beach.
Thanks to the circumstances, a lot of this premiere takes the form of Maxine’s daydreams, which tend to involve cocktails – martinis, not her usual grasshoppers, which is a giveaway – and hodgepodge versions of previous events and betrayals. It’s Linda, locked up nearby, who’s able to snap her out of her straightjacketed daydreaming, leading to a stretch of very funny physical comedy where Maxine escapes, takes a pratfall into a hedge, and sneaks into the ICU where Robert is, only to have to hide under a bed when Norma turns up to visit and promises to take revenge on her.
Maxine manages to call Douglas to tell him this, and when he arrives to visit her, there’s a tremendous sight gag where she turns around and is trussed up like Hannibal Lecter because she bit an orderly on the ankle. This stuff is Palm Royale at its ridiculous best, and I’m pleased to report it hasn’t lost a step. There are zingers aplenty, too, with multiple laugh-out-loud one-liners coming from virtually the entire all-star ensemble.
But there is no shortage of soapy plot developments either, which works to kick-start the new season. For instance, just as Mitzi is being announced as the newest member of the Dellacorte family, Dinah finds Axel dead – and the last time we saw him alive, it was with Norma, who seems entirely unsurprised by the news. Robert also wakes up from his coma, and the first word he utters is “Agnes”. And Maxine is finally released to be picked up by her new, albeit reluctant ally, Evelyn, and both have designs on securing Palm Beach for themselves.
It’s plenty to be going on with, presented in the silliest of ways, and it’s mostly just good to have Palm Royale back like it never left in the first place.
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