[Editor’s note: The following contains major spoilers for Palm Royale.]

The Big Picture

The Apple TV+ series ‘Palm Royale’ captures the essence of 1960s high society with fierce competition and intriguing secrets.
The 10-episode series features an incredible cast, resulting in 11 Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Lead and Supporting Actresses.
Season 2 will continue to challenge the production design and costumes, promising new ways to stimulate creativity.

The first season of the 10-episode Apple TV+ series Palm Royale brought the glitz and glamour of Palm Beach high society in the late 1960s to life, as Maxine Simmons (Kristen Wiig) fought so hard to be accepted by a group of women not particularly interested in outsiders. Married to the heir to the Dellacorte fortune and not one to be dismissed easily, Maxine’s does everything she can to accumulate the type of society secrets that give her the leverage she needs to make her mark. But all that didn’t stop the chaos of the finale, which included an identity reveal, a pregnancy announcement, and a shooting.

The incredible cast and impeccable design have resulted in a total of 11 Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Comedy Series, Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series (Wiig), and Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series (Carol Burnett). Collider recently got the opportunity to chat one-on-one with show creator Abe Sylvia about bring the characters and events of Season 1 to life, layering the story, assembling this top tier cast of actors, how Bruce Dern ended up in scenes with his daughter Laura Dern, the whale, answering questions in Season 2, exciting upcoming guest opportunities, and expecting the unexpected moving forward.

Collider: I am obsessed with this show. It’s so fun to watch and gorgeous to look at, with a cast that’s to die for.

ABE SYLVIA: We were certainly aiming to capture folks’ hearts and imagination, and hopefully we did that.

Creator Abe Sylvia Says the Vision for a TV Series Should Allow for Informed Surprises
Image via Apple TV+

Considering the finished product, when you think back to the start of all this and what you hoped the show would be, is that what we got to see in these episodes? Were there any significant changes that happened from those early days, before you actually started shooting, or any characters that didn’t exist that you can’t imagine the show without now?

SYLVIA: My job, as a showrunner, is to allow the show to show you what it wants to be and not necessarily wrestle the show into submission. That’s been my guiding principle, as a showrunner, on all the shows that I’ve done. You’re always writing. You’re writing in the writers’ room, you’re writing on set, you’re writing in the edit. The show is a living, breathing, organic thing, and you have to allow it to be one. I’ve been in experiences where showrunners are totalitarian and tell you exactly how it has to be, and I think that can be a mistake. That’s not necessarily vision. Vision can also include allowing the informed surprise. I call it an informed surprise and not a happy accident because I think that implies chaos. With an informed surprise, you’ve really thought about your story, you’ve turned over every rock, and then you’re prepared, all your departments are prepared, and the actors come in with a point of view. And then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, comes this magic that was the thing that none of you had planned, but everybody had put in the work for, to allow the magic to happen. That’s the guiding principle of the show.

Things happen along the way. In episode two, we had a one-off day player, Benny Barnhill, who’s the announcer at the auction, and he was only supposed to be in episode two. But he just cracked us up, so I was like, “Well, that guy now is gonna be the MC at every party.” That’s a great running character and a great face that we love seeing. He delighted the cast and crew and was just another fun person to have at the party. It’s not like we were in the writers’ room and went, “Okay, who is our masters of ceremony, every time?” But then, this wonderful Wesley Mann character shows up on set, and we were like, “This guy belongs in our world. Let’s make space for him.” That was our approach, all along. Carol Burnett’s character was originally supposed to be in a coma for eight episodes, but then Carol read it and said, “I’ll do it,” and you go, “Okay, we have to recalibrate. We can’t have Carol Burnett lying still for that long.” So, you go back and you say, “Okay, in episode two, we’ll have Carol wake up in a dream sequence with Kristen [Wiig], and Kristen imagines murdering her. That’s a great moment that these two great American treasures and great comedians can share. And there’s Carol’s entrance into the Beach Ball in episode three. We wanted to have little moments where we can say to the audience, “You’re going to get Carol Burnett, just to reassure them, even as she stayed in the coma for as long as we intended, if that makes sense.

You didn’t want to just make this about escapism. You’re also examining all these other aspects of the time period and society, and all these other layers. Why was that contrast important to you??

SYLVIA: Writers’ rooms are full of idealistic people who are really smart and, because we have a platform, we do have a certain amount of power to shape public opinion, and we all take that responsibility very seriously. But that can quickly turn from the modus operandi being, “We are making entertainment,” to “We are making a polemic.” I’m very conscious of not doing something where we’re saying, “Take your medicine. It’s good for you. We’re teaching you a lesson here.” As long as you’re leading from a place where we’re seeking to delight and entertain with our show, the other stuff is gonna come naturally because it’s the stuff we care about. If you lead with, “We’re gonna make a political point here,” then you can watch the news. I can tune into any cable news show and get that right. It’s gonna come through because those things are deeply felt by the writers, so in some ways, it’s incidental. In terms of you political layering, we were inspired by several events of the late sixties and early seventies, but that’s more context of place.

What was interesting was, I wrote the pilot maybe in 2019. It takes several years to get one of these things going, if you get it going at all. It was long before Dobbs was overturned, so the pilot was all about back in the day when a woman couldn’t get a legal abortion. So, I came up with this pilot where, in order to get into the club, Maxine helps a woman get an illegal abortion. I was like, “Oh, that’s interesting. That’s something of that time that we can use and say something, but also, it’s sinister in the right ways.” And then, lo and behold, Dobbs is overturned. We didn’t start out from a standpoint of, “Let’s say something about what is a very important issue to all of us,” but it ended up that way in the pilot because the political sense shifted so terribly in the opposite direction. Our show is now airing in 2024, and I didn’t know that the political landscape would shift.

Spoiler alert, Julia Duffy’s character, when she decides to wake up one day and kill Richard Nixon, was inspired by Sarah Jane Moore, who was, in the same period of time, a housewife who one day woke up and didn’t know why, but she decided the best idea in the world was to go shoot Gerald Ford. It’s about suburban malaise and getting through your life and not having any impact or any importance, and the radical dis-ease of the time. The more we focused on the period, the more we realized that there were parallels to today, but we didn’t consciously go in and say, “Let’s do a 2024 parable,” because we were making this long before 2024. One other example is that we were pitching out the idea of Norma’s rolodex that has all of the world’s secrets that she’s collected and she’s hiding in her closet in Palm Beach. We were shooting this scene and I was even going, “This might be too silly for our show. No one’s gonna believe that somebody’s got all the world’s secrets in some bathroom in Palm Beach.” And then, my AD comes over to me and says, “The feds just raided Mar-a-Lago. Apparently, Trump’s been keeping all these classified documents in a bathroom in Palm Beach.” I was like, “Okay, let’s just keep going. We’re doing something right here.”

The ‘Palm Royale’ Character of Maxine Was Originally Conceived for Laura Dern
Image via Apple TV+

Laura Dern was there from the beginning because she and her producing partners had optioned this book, but did you have any of these actors in mind for their specific roles? Are you someone who writes while thinking about a specific actor, or do you write and then cast and then figure out how to adapt a character to that actor?

SYLVIA: It’s all of the above. For this one, Maxine was originally conceived as a vehicle for Laura. And then, because of timing and when Apple was ready to go, she was like, “Okay, I’ll play a part in it because, as a producer, it’s helpful for me to be here.” And so, we pivoted to the genius that is Kristen Wiig. Kristen read it and responded, and then we had Kristen and Laura attached. That’s an amazing calling card, as you move on to other actors. So, with this, I didn’t have anyone in mind. But we have a fantastic casting director, Kerry Barden, and he really encouraged us to shoot for the moon. It was his idea to go after Carol Burnett for Norma. I said, “I don’t know. She’s in a coma. Does that feel too small?” And he was like, “Let’s just ask. There’s no hurt in asking.” And when Carol said yes, I went into my office and cried with the biggest imposter syndrome. I was like, “Who am I to be at this party?” But once the actors were cast, I looked at it like a costume fitting. If the script is a costume, the actor comes in and tries it on, and you’re gonna take it in, you’re gonna raise the hem, you’re gonna put a dart in, you’re gonna lower the neckline. Actors have rhythms, especially in comedy, and you start to tailor patterns of speech to the particular actors you’ve cast. And then, as we got to know the actors, there were these reserves of talent, even in the depths of talent that we were dealing with, with our particular cast. As we got to know them, we realized, “There is this reserve of this person that the world has never seen, so let’s make sure we showcase it.” Julia Duffy was making us giggle, right and left, so we wanted to keep giving her more to do because she’s a sniper. And so, moving into Season 2, it’s really exciting because we’re able to start from the get-go knowing all of the wonderful places our extraordinary cast can go.

If Laura Dern had been Maxine, would we have just never seen her and Bruce Dern together, or would you have found some other way to make that happen?

SYLVIA: I don’t know. We’ll never know, I suppose. Honestly, when we sold the pilot, it was just the pilot. I pitched out a three-season arc, but in that original three-season arc, Linda having an arc with her father wasn’t a part of it. And then, as we got into the writers’ room and we had this wonderful part for Laura, we asked, “What are the things that would excite us?” We didn’t know Linda was an heiress. That came later. We were like, “Okay, let’s make her part of this world. Her father is this very wealthy man, so maybe he’s right next door. Oh, she’s Evelyn’s stepdaughter.” You find those connections as you go. You don’t necessarily have all those things when you’re pitching out the three-season arc. It changes, and you have to allow for that change as you start to bring more creative minds into it. We built out this wonderful character Skeet and the writers were like, “Wouldn’t it be amazing if we got Bruce Dern to play this part?” But I would never be so bold to go to Laura, my producing partner, and say, “Hey, how about your dad?” I wouldn’t be so tacky. I don’t know their relationship. That’s a very tender place to ask an actor to go, so I wouldn’t assume it. The writers were all like, “Oh, that would be wonderful, wishing upon a star,” but we didn’t bring it up, Laura did. She said, “I’ve been reading these scripts and I just think my dad would be wonderful. What do you think? Do you think my dad would be wonderful in this part?” I said, “Oh, thank you! We’ve been hoping and praying you would say that.” So, we were thrilled that she came to that on her own with no suggestion from us, even though we were wishing upon a star that maybe such a thing could come true. We were so honored that it did and so grateful to both of them.

What was the scene or the aspect of the series that you were most concerned about actually being able to pull off, and was it the whale storyline?

SYLVIA: The whale didn’t concern me, primarily because we knew that it was an Allison Janney storyline and she can do anything. In talking about the wells of reserve that we had untapped in our actors, Evelyn had gone along as this villain in the series, and then we give her this moment of absurdism to crack open her emotional interiority. We were like, “Let’s tap into this other superpower of Allison’s.” So, I wasn’t concerned about that working. The writers were very taken by the poetry of it. We also loved what it was saying as a climate story. We also loved that it was a big impediment for Maxine and the party. But also, it actually took this turn with this society woman who is recently widowed, who’s about to lose it all, and in her grief, she’s taken back to her organic self, in all of this crazy. Yes, it’s weird and absurd. Be careful when you scroll because I did see somebody commenting on Instagram. There were some wonderful think pieces about that episode that I really appreciated, but there was one comment on Instagram that was like, “I love this show, but this episode jumped the shark.” It was all I could do not to write back, “Actually, it was a whale, man,” But I restrained myself. So, the whale didn’t concern me.

I don’t think I went into anything particularly concerned. We have this wonderful cast. We had a fabulous crew, we had artisans working at the top of their game. I would say Havana Nights, the big ballroom sequence in episode four was daunting with all those dancers, but I was also a dancer and choreographer and had come out of that world. It was something I was really eager to direct and put together because I knew the level at which we could execute it with this team. We’re not afraid to dream big over here because the folks that we’ve assembled have the talent to pull it off.

‘Palm Royale’ Season 2 Will Answer Questions While Raising the Bar

Last season, you left us wondering what comes next, now that we know Norma is really Agnes. Has Robert survived? What will happen with Mitzi and her pregnancy? What could happen with this attempted assassination of a president? How far along are you with figuring out Season 2? Will we get all those answers?

SYLVIA: We start shooting Season 2 at the end of September. We’ve been writing Season 2 for the last seven months. We’re well into it. When we broke the season finale of the first season, we knew where we were going. We were already breaking episode 201, even as we were building to this big climax where there were five cliffhangers, all within the last 15 seconds. We knew where we were going to pick up in Season 2, so it wasn’t a situation where we were just doing twists for twists sake. Much like Maxine, as writers, we go, “Let’s create the most impossible situation, and then say to our audience, ‘Watch us get out of it,’” which is basically what Maxine does, every episode. Maxine has a whale wash up on her beach, the day before her party, so how does she solve her problem? We just took that to the max in the finale, and we are so excited to dive into Season 2 and take people on the journey of what happens next.

How much will Carol Burnett’s character’s identity take center stage for the season, and how will that affect what comes next for Maxine?

SYLVIA: I can’t answer that. You’ll have to wait and see. We have a rule in the writers’ room that nothing is wasted. Nothing happens just because. Especially in a show that has so many storylines, we try to be as economical as possible, so anything that you’re seeing pays off.

You have such an incredible cast already, but are you going to add new faces? Will this cast be getting even bigger? Can we expect more guest stars? Who wouldn’t want to work with these actors?

SYLVIA: Yeah, it’s a real treasure trove. We have a few very exciting guest opportunities. I’ll just leave it at that. Nothing is finalized. We’re still making our way through scripts, but we do have our ideal archetypes that we’re tailoring roles for. We’re just getting into that now. It’s very exciting to see what the next layer we add on will be.

This show is so incredible to look at visually and the wardrobe is just perfection. What are you most excited about with the aesthetic for the second season?

SYLVIA: Well, to answer that fully, I’d have to give away some plot points. All I’ll say is that we will take a look into more of the women’s homes. We will travel around Palm Beach and see a little bit more of Palm Beach. You should be ready to expect the unexpected with the story, and also a leveling up, even from here. Season 1 is our baseline, from a design standpoint. What I said to the writers and my fellow producers and to Apple, was that we have to continue to challenge Jon Carlos, our production designer, and Alix Friedberg, our costume designer, who are just so brilliant, every season, so that they’re not coming back and doing exactly the same thing. So, I think we’ve come up with new ways to stimulate the creative juices of our amazing and brilliant partners.

Palm Royale is available to stream on Apple TV+. Check out the trailer:

Watch on Apple TV+