Palm Royale
Whatever happened to Ricky Martin? You remember him, Puerto Rican pop star, had a huge hit 25 years ago with the impossibly catchy Livin’ La Vida Loca.
It turns out he was cryogenically frozen at the turn of the millennium, and has just been defrosted to play a vindictive waiter at America’s snobbiest spa club, in the hilarious Palm Royale (Apple TV+).
Suspended animation in liquid nitrogen is the only plausible explanation for 52-year-old Ricky’s age-defying features, but the same can be said for most of the cast.
Comedian Kristen Wiig, 50, bounces around like a teenager, climbing over walls and through windows on her way up the social ladder as the relentlessly upbeat Maxine.
Even Carol Burnett looks great at 90, and she’s playing a billionairess in a coma.
Everything about Palm Royale looks great, in fact. Loosely based on the novel Mr & Mrs American Pie by Juliet McDaniel, it’s set in the super-rich Florida enclave of Palm Beach in 1969, drenched in colour like a David Hockney painting.
Everything about Palm Royale looks great. Loosely based on the novel Mr & Mrs American Pie by Juliet McDaniel, it’s set in the super-rich Florida enclave of Palm Beach in 1969. Pictured: Amber Chardae Robinson
Nastiest of the bunch is Dinah (Leslie Bibb, pictured), who sneers, ‘Your clutch bag is from Gucci’s 1960 collection. Kinda gives you away’
Comedian Kristen Wiig, 50, (pictured) bounces around like a teenager, climbing over walls and through windows on her way up the social ladder as the relentlessly upbeat Maxine
The swimming pools are so blue and Maxine’s outfits (‘borrowed’ from comatose Carol) are so pink and so yellow, that it makes your eyeballs tingle, like swallowing a fistful of E numbers.
But as Maxine orders a bright green grasshopper cocktail from Ricky, the other ladies at the club scent a fraud. Though she longs to be part of their world, Maxine isn’t a member. They turn on her like a gaggle of mean girls, competing to humiliate her.
Nastiest of the bunch is Dinah (Leslie Bibb), who sneers, ‘Your clutch bag is from Gucci’s 1960 collection. Kinda gives you away.’
But Dinah has her own problems. She’s pregnant, by the club’s tennis pro. If her boorish husband finds out, he’ll divorce her which would be a disaster as she’s waiting for him to have an affair so her lawyers can take him to the cleaners.
It could all be painfully spiteful and shallow, if Maxine weren’t such an irrepressible optimist.
She’s determined to make Dinah like and confide in her. She’s defiantly proud of her own origins as a beauty pageant queen from Tennessee, and she’s genuinely in love with her dim husband, whose wealthy family has disowned him.
The era is lavishly evoked with vintage cars and clothes, and enough hairspray to claw another hole in the ozone layer
Palm Royale sends it up, with Laura Dern (pictured) as a fearsomely earnest women’s libber
The era is lavishly evoked with vintage cars and clothes, and enough hairspray to claw another hole in the ozone layer.
President Richard Nixon is constantly chuntering away on the cathode-ray tube. Even the title sequence is playfully kitsch, with paper cutout figures designed to remind us of the classic opening sequence of another 1960s retro-series, Mad Men.
Mad Men celebrated the birth of feminism. Palm Royale sends it up, with Laura Dern as a fearsomely earnest women’s libber.
Maxine can’t see the point of feminism. Giving a pep talk to the girl doing her nails at the beauty parlour, she urges her to find a rich husband: ‘Don’t you wanna grow up some day and not work?’ Right on, sister.
