How a 90-year-old TV legend wooed Ricky Martin

From the opening frames of the technicolour beach soap opera Palm Royale, it’s clear there’s a lot more going on that acting. The frames look hand-painted in bright primary colours. And the dialogue has a wildly musical style, rhythmically bouncing from scene to scene.

“There’s definitely a rat-a-tat quality to the dialogue,” the show’s writer and producer Abe Sylvia says. “It’s very shaped and very musical. And what’s wonderful is then you have these actors singing our dialogue is and then running away with it, too.”

Kristen Wiig (left) plays a socially ambitious woman wanting to break into the Palm Beach social set with her husband, played by Josh Lucas.

“These actors” include Kristen Wiig as Maxine, a socially ambitious woman wanting to break into the Palm Beach social set in the late 1960s, Allison Janney, who plays Evelyn, Palm Beach’s reigning society queen, and television legend Carol Burnett, who plays Norma, Maxine’s mother-in-law, one of Palm Beach’s grand dames.

“Once we knew the essential quality that everybody was bringing, we started writing towards the rhythms of each actor, the spirit of the actor, because I love performers, and I love watching performers perform,” says Sylvia.

“I think everybody has a sort of central metronome, so once you clue into that, there was roister, especially when you have these folks. The opportunity to have Kristen Wiig and Carol Burnett improvise with one another? It would be a fatal flaw on my part to not allow that to happen.”

The series, set in 1969, is based on the 2018 novel Mr & Mrs American Pie by Juliet McDaniel. It charts the arrival of relative outsider Maxine Simmons (Wiig) and the battle she undertakes, with husband Douglas (Josh Lucas) in tow, to break into the ruling social circle of the town’s most exclusive resort club.

Carol Burnett plays Norma, one of Palm Beach’s grand dames, in Palm Royale.

The first challenge when developing the show, Sylvia says, was working out whether McDaniel’s very funny book felt more natural as a half-hour comedy, which is a staple of American television, or a one-hour format, which leans more to drama-comedy. Sylvia went with the latter.

“The world is so delicious and all of these people are so delicious that we could spend three hours an episode with them and be still wildly entertained,” Sylvia says. The decision was ultimately shaped by the fact Wiig has a range that pushed the concept into more layered storytelling.

“Kristen is a once-in-a-generation talent who can thread the loop between comedy and silliness, and then break your heart in the next moment,” Sylvia says. “There’s real pathos to what she does and it’s a unique talent. I think that’s the seed and [everything] grows from that.”

Recruiting Burnett, a legend in Hollywood, was perhaps easier than expected. Burnett is best known as a comedian but like most serious actors who yearn to be rock stars, Burnett’s secret ambition was always soap opera.

In the late 1970s, 1980s and 1990s she occasionally appeared in the US soap opera All My Children. It was her favourite soap and its creator had written the character, Verla Grubbs, specifically at Burnett’s request. In one of her later appearances, the secret the audience had known from the beginning, that she was the illegitimate daughter of the show’s patriarch Langley Wallingford, was revealed.

Burnett, 90, who was speaking to media at an event in Los Angeles with Sylvia and other members of the cast, says she was always drawn to the musical component of performance. “When I got the chance to do my own show ... I wanted music, I wanted dancers, I wanted guest stars,” Burnett says.

“We wound up doing an original musical comedy revue every week, we had a 28-piece orchestra, we had 65 to 70 costumes a week, no network would let us do that now with that kind of money. I feel very fortunate that [The Carol Burnett Show] happened at the time it did. I don’t think it could be done today.”

The upside is that Burnett can indulge her love of soap in Palm Royale. And without giving away too much, her storyline gets her involved with one of the country club’s employees, Robert, played by 52-year-old Puerto Rican singer-songwriter Ricky Martin. Burnett coyly described the scenes as “playing doctor”.

Laura Dern (left) and Ricky Martin in Palm Royale.

“To work with Ricky in those scenes was just heaven,” says Burnett. “The look of [the series] is incredible, the scenery and all, and then with all the costumes, it’s better than any great, big motion picture that you would see. It is eye candy.

“And on top of the script, everybody scores in this. Everybody has these wonderful moments, and it was just a joy to go to work, you know. At my age, it’s a joy to be anywhere. But this was really something for me and I loved it.”

From a story perspective, the series makes one substantial shift from Juliet McDaniel’s Mr & Mrs American Pie by shifting the setting of the story from Palm Springs, California, to Palm Beach, Florida.

The reason was that Palm Beach was, in the 1960s, “an undiscovered world that spoke to [the idea of] a rarefied world that people are always trying to get into,” Sylvia says. “It’s a place that the society people built. It feels safe and sheltered.

“[Palm Beach] felt like there was this impenetrable thing that people are trying to get to. This feeling of safety and luxury in America and setting it in 1969 when the world was on fire, but not in Palm Beach. I thought that was a really exciting place to start from.”

The series also assembles one of the most extraordinary female lead casts in recent memory: Wiig, Janney and Burnett, plus Laura Dern, who plays Linda, a politically and socially minded woman who lives in Palm Beach, and Leslie Bibb as Dinah, Evelyn’s arch-nemesis, who is plotting to dethrone her.

“This world is extravagant, it’s luxurious, there’s a lot of pattern, there’s a lot of just over-the-top design, but you never lose the women,” Sylvia says. “You never lose the women under the clothes or behind the jewellery, and I think that’s a very, very hard thing to pull off and speaks to the mastery of their art.”

Palm Royale is streaming on Apple TV+ from March 20.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.