The more you watch of Palm Royale—the brand new Apple TV+ show starring Kristen Wiig as a wannabe socialite attempting to make it into the upper crust of 1969 Palm Beach, Florida—the more it could feel as if a microdose of LSD is beginning to kick in.
Though Wiig’s sunny caricature of a Southern accent won me over from the pilot, I knew I used to be onto something special when, midway through the miniseries, Allison Janney’s queen bee falls in love with a beached whale while a handsome man soon falls, quite literally, from outer space. In what other show, pray tell, would we get to listen to Wiig utter the magnificent lines “Take me right here on this ethnic rug. Go get your trumpet. I want you to play ‘Edelweiss’ in me real slow”? That’s right. I’ll wait.
Thanks to a sense of self-awareness and a commitment to not taking itself too seriously, Palm Royale is a fast, fun, and infrequently quite funny series that charts the efforts of Maxine (a sensible Wiig, whose ditzy charm has rarely been higher deployed) to interrupt into high society on the eponymous Palm Royale beach club. Her chief rival is Evelyn (Janney), who is perpetually wearing a series of stunning silk caftans while she sits atop the social milieu within the absence of Maxine’s ailing aunt-in-law Norma (comedy icon Carol Burnett, who proves she will be able to still make us laugh with only a few lines of discernible dialogue). The show begins to feel overstuffed in its later episodes, as Maxine and husband, Douglas (Josh Lucas), scramble to maintain afloat of their latest world, nevertheless it’s never boring.
In fact, Palm Royale shares a lot of its DNA with a certain other period series starring an ensemble of fabulous middle-aged women. I’m talking, after all, about HBO’s The Gilded Age, albeit imbued with the nice lightheadedness of having downed a few poolside mai tais. Indeed, it appears that evidently camp is having a moment on television: With the recent release of buzzy, star-studded shows like Palm Royale, FX’s Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, and the newest season of The Gilded Age, we’re positively drowning in shows concerning the glitzy world of the well-to-do that I can only—facetiously, after all—describe as being catnip for a gay man with a streaming subscription.
There are obvious similarities between the three series. The Gilded Age follows the battle between latest money and old in Eighteen Eighties New York, while this latest addition to the Feud anthology is based on the fallout between author Truman Capote and his bevy of rich female friends following his lampooning them in a gossipy 1975 essay. In all these shows, we follow groups of elite, wealthy, and catty women who’re fighting to take care of their grip on social power to the exclusion of all others. In all these shows, the extravagances and intricacies of this moneyed class are each venerated and vilified. And in all these shows, the wardrobe budget is the true star.
But the similarities transcend the surface, touching on a slippery sensibility that has been famously defined by Susan Sontag in her landmark 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp.’ ” First, Palm Royale and its ilk enjoy the artifice, theatricality, and visual glamor of the wealthy worlds they inhabit—what Sontag known as “the spirit of extravagance.” That glamor is on display not only in the themes’ lives and storylines but additionally within the style through which they’re depicted on screen. There is nothing natural concerning the homes wherein these wealthy characters reside, whether or not they be seaside belle epoque estates in Rhode Island decked out with murals of the sky, or warm Mediterranean Revival palazzos which can be drowning in stuffed birds and fern wallpaper.
When we watch these shows, we’re tuning in as much for the over-the-top costumes and production design as for the plot. It’s what Sontag would call our “visual reward”—and boy are we rewarded. Indeed, the costumes on this season of Feud were so sumptuously camp that they were even highlighted in a New York Times style piece detailing how the show depicted Capote’s 1966 Black and White Ball and the way designer Zac Posen re-created among the gowns for New York’s high society ladies.
The actual fact of the Times’ interest in a show like Feud (the brainchild of Ryan Murphy, the present king of TV melodrama, who prefers the word baroque over camp to explain his work) points to a different element of camp in these series’ appeal: a unique mix of high-low culture. Contrast the chatter surrounding these shows with the reception of the long-running soap operas concerning the wealthy that were synonymous with the ’80s and ’90s, from Dynasty to The Young and the Restless to The Bold and the Beautiful. Those soaps were typically viewed as trash popular television, but this current slate of shows, while equally lavish, entertaining, and catty, are framed as prestige productions with big stars and larger budgets. They take viewers into a high-culture world of exclusive balls, pricey art auctions, and martini luncheons, but through the historically low-culture medium of television. The stakes—box seats on the opera, beach club membership—are deadly serious for the characters, at the same time as they’re remarkably silly for us viewers. To cite Sontag, these shows are “serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”
However, there are different planes to camp. Sontag distinguished between “pure” or “naive” camp and “deliberate” camp, observing, “The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious.” Feud and Palm Royale fall more inside the “deliberate” category, possessing some measure of fun and self-awareness (even when Murphy’s series does wallow in Capote’s addiction problems somewhat movingly, thanks mainly to a sensible, preening performance by Tom Hollander). The Gilded Age, in contrast, must fall under peak camp by virtue of taking itself seriously. Although HBO’s period drama imagined itself to be sumptuous, necessary television, it failed spectacularly, particularly in its bloated, boring first season. But it was that failure—“the sensibility of failed seriousness,” per Sontag, in a production that had the “proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naive”—that also made it so splendidly camp. In short, the right series for a large swath of cynical viewers who happily called it “the worst show on television,” while still tuning in every week, hooked on hating it as much as they loved it.
There are loads of other TV shows concerning the world of the rich and people attempting to infiltrate it, but they don’t quite rest on the “innocence” that Sontag ascribed to camp. Netflix’s Ripley—the upcoming black-and-white adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley, starring Andrew Scott—is too dogged and dour; HBO’s Succession, while at times sardonic, had a jagged fringe of seriousness; The White Lotus, although funny, was too consciously satirical to be camp. (I’d argue, nonetheless, that Jennifer Coolidge’s award-winning turn as Tanya in each the primary and second seasons was camp at its finest.)
There’s an ineffability to campiness, a special quality that you recognize if you see it. The best camp, similar to the grasshopper cocktail that Wiig’s character sips throughout Palm Royale, may seem to be a ridiculous order, nevertheless it goes down easy with just the appropriate balance of alcohol and sugar. Just chill, calm down, and let the booze settle in.
Credit : slate.com
