Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for Palm Royale, Season 2, Episode 6.
Summary
- In an exclusive interview with Collider, Abe Sylvia says Palm Royale ’s twin twist came from asking what it would mean for Maxine to meet the version of herself she might not want to be.
- Sylvia explains that Mirabelle’s murder wasn’t just shock value, but a tonal shift inspired by ’60s hag movies, pushing the series into darker, psychological territory.
- Kristen Wiig playing opposite her own “mirror reflection,” Sylvia says, lets the show raise the emotional stakes and force Maxine into grief and identity reckoning.
Palm Royale Season 2 is past its halfway point, and it’s clear that Episode 6’s “Maxine Finds Herself” redefines what kind of story the soap opera comedy is telling. Through Kristen Wiig’s magnetic performance as Maxine Delacourte, we see another layer open up as her identity is shaken to its core when a woman who looks exactly like her appears in Palm Beach — a twin sister named Mirabelle (also played by Wiig), raised by the parents who abandoned the wannabe socialite.
It’s a shocking twist that reframes everything we thought we knew about Maxine’s past. But as the episode ends, just as she is grappling with the addition of a sibling, that chance for a relationship is gone as quickly as it arrived, leaving us with a far darker version of Palm Royale than we expected. In a swift and brutal blow, Mirabelle is murdered while dressed as Maxine and left floating in the Delacourte pool. With everyone led to believe Maxine herself has been killed, the mistaken identity isn’t just a plot turn but a tonal shift that series showrunner Abe Sylviabreaks down as a necessary direction.
“What do we want to see Kristen Wiig do?” he said of the writers’ room challenge, explaining how the thought of Maxine playing opposite someone who could have been her — someone she might not actually want to be — became the emotional engine of the episode. “If our show is about identity and how women define themselves… what if Maxine actually did find some family?”
That question becomes devastating when Mirabelle meets her “tragic end,” pushing the series into a psychological space inspired by Sylvia’s favorite ’60s “hag movies,” the dark, glam thrillers that blur camp and menace. And as Sylvia puts it at the end of that shocking revelation, “All of our characters are going to end up in a place that they never imagined for themselves emotionally.”
Sylvia Explains Raising the Stakes for Maxine With a Killer Twist
Sylvia digs into building a story around Wiig playing against her own “mirror reflection” while leaning into ’60s thriller vibes.
COLLIDER: It does feel like, in Episode 6’s “Maxine Finds Herself,” that the show kind of reinvents itself. How did you want that episode to shift our understanding of what kind of story Palm Royale really is?
ABE SYLVIA: That particular episode came from a brainstorming session in the writers’ room, and it was really like, “What do we not just want to see Maxine do, what do we want to see Kristen Wiig do?” It’s set in the ’60s. She has to play her own twin. If our show is about identity and how women define themselves, and we have this character, Maxine, who’s never known her family, so she has to invent this idea of herself to survive, it’s like, well, what if Maxine actually did find some family? And who are those people? And would she even want to be them? And poor Mirabelle meets a tragic end.
But I do think the whole season, of all the genres that we’re playing with, one that we’ve added to the mix this season is sort of the hag movie, those movies that were made in the ’60s — Whatever Happened to Baby Janeor Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte. So, to have something where you’re playing with the elements of mystery, that episode, certainly in the way that it ends, is much darker than we’ve gone before. But not only was it exciting to just watch Kristen play her own mirror reflection on the show, [but] to murder her at the end of it is quite cruel of us. So then to have Maxine sort of grapple with that, not only does it keep with the tone of the movie genres that we’re playing with, it also sort of raises the stakes for the character.
Sylvia Breaks Down the One Line That Sums Up ‘Palm Royale’
Sylvia talks about using wild genre shifts, visual excess, and comedy to keep Palm Royale fun to watch while still letting its sharp, feminist social commentary quietly land.
I will say something that really spoke to me that I thought was so beautifully said by Maxine in Episode 4, was she said, “If a woman falls and no one catches her, does no one hear her cry?” I felt like that was the show’s thesis, especially throughout this season. How do you balance such biting social commentary with the show’s signature absurdity and the visual extravagance? There’s so much that’s juxtaposed through it.
SYLVIA: Well, hopefully that’s all there and all working in concert all the time. That is certainly a balancing act. The litmus is always, is this fun to watch? Is this a fun experience? Is this reflection meaningful enough? I’m not bound by tone. I’m not bound by genre. I think it can get limiting. It’s funny, we have Carol Burnett on our show, as everybody knows, and if you watch The Carol Burnett Show, she plays with genre. So, we have this actress on our show that can do noir and absurdity and musical comedy, and all these things. She’s the master of it, and Kristen’s the master of it. We can go to all these places all at once because of the talent of the actors that I’m working with.
Palm Royale streams every Wednesday on Apple TV.
- Release Date
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March 19, 2024
- Network
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Apple TV+
- Writers
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Abe Sylvia
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Carol Burnett
Norma Dellacorte
