(Bloomberg) -- Palm Beach, Florida, has had an improbable renaissance. Miami and West Palm Beach have each claimed the aspirational moniker Wall Street South while home values in the area have doubled in price. And of course, it now has the dubious distinction of being synonymous with Donald Trump and his private club, Mar-a-Lago. 

Yet the heyday of Palm Beach was still more than half a century ago, when Slim Aarons was photographing Wendy Vanderbilt wearing Lilly Pulitzer. The glitz of that era is why Apple TV+’s lavish limited series Palm Royale is set in 1969. Today, most people aren’t exactly desperate to get into Palm Beach’s snooty Everglades Club; back then, it meant you’d arrived. 

Palm Royale follows Kristen Wiig’s Maxine Simmons, an irrepressible former pageant queen who tries with all her might to infiltrate Palm Beach high society. If you think the barrier island is a magnet for wealth now, well, Palm Royale presents it as an Eden of Rolls-Royces, updos and catty bon mots. Loosely based on Juliet McDaniel’s novel Mr. and Mrs. American Pie, the show is a dishy delight; even when its plot meanders, it’s sustained by wildly entertaining performances. 

The show is created by Abe Sylvia, who in the past couple of years has specialized in dramatic ladies. He wrote the Tammy Faye Bakker biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye and the Tammy Wynette series George & Tammy, both starring Jessica Chastain. Here he gets to flex his fictional muscles beyond the Tammy-verse by offering even more outlandish situations for arguably even more elite actresses: Allison Janney, Laura Dern, Leslie Bibb and, in the coup de grâce, Carol Burnett. 

Wiig’s Maxine is an interloper we first meet literally scaling the walls of the country club for which the show is named. Originally from Chattanooga, Tennessee, she had been living in Atlanta with her spouse Douglas (Josh Lucas); they move to Palm Beach after Douglas’s wealthy aunt, Norma Dellacorte (Burnett), suffers an embolism. 

Maxine’s spoken purpose for being in Florida is to care for Norma, but as with Palm Beach today, it’s all about the money, specifically securing Douglas’s inheritance. As Norma rests immobile and unresponsive in bed—somehow Burnett makes being in a coma funny—Maxine helps herself to her jewels (for pawning) and outfits (for wearing).

Decked out in pilfered finery, Maxine makes it her mission to get membership at the Palm Royale. (The fictional club isn’t a stand-in for any one club. An opening aerial shot shows the Bath & Tennis Club, according to the Palm Beach Daily News, although the article notes that “architecture used in closer exterior and interior shots is reminiscent of the Mediterranean style of the Everglades Club.”)

Even though Maxine is initially scorned by the ladies who lunch who immediately (and correctly) peg her as an arriviste, her chirpy personality and sneaky ingenuity eventually allow her to make headway with the right people. In the premiere, she becomes a confidante for Leslie Bibb’s Dinah, who’s having an affair with a tennis pro that results in an unwanted pregnancy. Maxine helps Dinah get an abortion. In return, she gets a handy little bit of blackmail, which she uses to get Dinah to sponsor her for membership. 

Maxine’s biggest enemy in her quest for acceptance is the haughty Evelyn Rollins, whom Janney plays with an icy tongue and a nasty glint in her eye. But Maxine also has allies, including a group of feminists operating out of a bookstore in downmarket West Palm Beach. One of these so-called hippies is Linda (Dern, also an executive producer), who turns out to know more about the dealings of the rich than she initially lets on.

For all the Oscar winners packed into Palm Royale, this is really Wiig’s vehicle, and she shines. On Saturday Night Live, she became a fan favorite for her goofy characters and zany physicality; since leaving for Hollywood, she has proven adept at dramatic work, including layered turns in the indie films The Skeleton Twins and The Diary of a Teenage Girl.

Maxine requires Wiig to combine comedy and drama, and she steps up to the challenge, imbuing her character’s machinations with pathos: Even though Maxine’s goals are frivolous and her methods duplicitous, in Wiig’s hands she comes across as genuine and even a touch naive. She’s just a gal who wants to be accepted. 

Not to worry, though: Wiig also remains very funny, with an elastic quality to her face. When she’s paired with Burnett (who, yes, eventually wakes up), they yield comedic bliss. 

But other characters are frustratingly underwritten. There’s a whiff of tokenism to the way the show treats another of the West Palm Beach feminists, Virginia (Amber Chardae Robinson), a Black woman who serves to remind the White people around her of their privilege. Many of the Palm Royale doyennes are booze-guzzling, pill-popping caricatures, and Ricky Martin’s pool boy, Robert, functions mainly to become collateral damage in Maxine’s schemes. His own inner life is given short shrift with a halfhearted storyline about his queer identity. 

At 10 episodes, each about an hour long, the series somehow both overstays its welcome and feels unfinished. Despite being billed as a miniseries, it ends abruptly after taking a circuitous route to its grand finale. Maxine gets into high jink after high jink… and then it’s over, concluding on an unearned sour note. 

So yes, Palm Royale may succeed in capturing the undeniable allure of the Palm Beach of yore, but it ends up feeling more like the Palm Beach of now—a very expensive, very hollow imitation of a more glamorous era, with some undeniable delights.

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