‘Palm Royale’ Boss and Kristen Wiig on Whether That Finale Wedding Twist Means the Show Is Over

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from the Season 2 finale “Palm Royale,” “Maxine Does Something Good,” now streaming on Apple TV.

At first glance, Apple TV’s “Palm Royale” is a visually lavish, 1970-set satirical look at society climbers in south Florida. While Season 2 has kept its foot on the gas with the same stylish fun, it also digs much deeper. It peels back the glitz of the time and place to reveal a timely story about the power of women supporting each other and, as showrunner Abe Sylvia puts it, “The ways in which women band together to make their way in the world.”

The season finale dives into Norma/Agnes’ (Carol Burnett) mind, exploring a lifetime of choices and haunting regrets. Maxine (Kristen Wiig, who’s also an executive producer) shoots and kills Jed (Ryan Dorsey), who was in the act of trying to kill Evelyn (Allison Janney). It forces Maxine and Evelyn into a desperate but comedic “Laverne and Shirley”-like alliance, bonding them through shared secrets and a very big problem to get rid of.

The overall theme of female empowerment in the context of what was happening in the real world in the late-‘60s and ‘70s was a natural fit. “It creates enough distance for the audience so that we’re not telling a contemporary tale that’s overly moralizing,” Sylvia says. “We can have fun, we can set it in this fairytale universe, but still be extrapolating on really contemporary, evergreen themes.”

The evolution of that premise didn’t happen overnight. In the show’s pilot, Maxine helps Dinah (Leslie Bibb) get an illegal, albeit safe, abortion in order to get find her way into the club. “I wrote that, thinking it was something that would’ve happened in that time. And that was before Dobbs was overturned,” Sylvia says. “Then it was like, the more things changed, the more they stay the same. And as we got into Season 2, we really leaned into that.”

A pivotal moment comes as Douglas (Josh Lucas) and Mitzi’s (Kaia Gerber) wedding approaches, and Maxine tells him that he isn’t the father of Mitzi’s baby. He tells Maxine he wants his life with her back the way it used to be, but she’s not interested, and tells him, “I don’t care what you want.”

“It showed the real Douglas, because he’s a little scary,” Wiig says. “It felt really good for me as Kristen to be able to tell Douglas, you know — ‘Fuck off!’” Wiig says with a laugh. “It’s heartbreaking, because it’s always been Maxine and Douglas, and you don’t want them to stop. But at that moment you’re like, ‘Oh no, they need to not be together.’”

Maxine wants Douglas to marry Mitzi for the sake of the Mitzi’s pregnancy. That moment, when Maxine turns to him and says, “Don’t just do this for me, do it for all women in Palm Beach,” is an important step for her. “Maxine never thought she would ask him to go marry another woman and ‘Do it for me, do it for Evelyn and for Dinah and for a Mitzi. I owe these women this. After all I’ve done for you, will you do this thing for me?’” Sylvia says. “Not to moralize too much, but we were writing and shooting this in the middle of the election, and I remember Michelle Obama giving that wonderful speech where she’s appealing to men. That’s really what we’re touching on in that moment.”

“The moment when she, in a sense, finally says, ‘I’m not doing this anymore,’ it’s truly devastating at a level that’s incomprehensible to him,” Lucas says. “So then his only option — and this goes to this very specific kind of rich white male [mentality] — ‘Well then, I’m going to destroy you.’ If there’s a Season 3, the drama’s gonna come out of that moment. That’s where I think Douglas saw himself. My assumption is that that’s now when Douglas is gonna descend into the worst side of himself.”

Maxine’s life changes in a very big way after that — she and Norma exchange apologies and, in a final, audacious twist rooted in Robert’s (Ricky Martin) custody battle for Rapheal (Ben Palacios), a surprising proposal surfaces that suggests Robert and Maxine get married. That neatly ties up more than one issue.

“I think she doesn’t wanna be alone, and she kind of was alone with Douglas,” Wiig says. “Now she’s trying to create this other family with her friends. And I think she just wants people around her that love her, and she wants to have fun. She just wants to know her place and feel secure in it, rather than always trying so hard.”

Sylvia says that they knew from the very beginning that Robert and Maxine were going to get married in the finale. The question then became, he says, “Other than the fact that this is a non-traditional relationship between two people who love each other more than probably most married people do, how do we tell this in a different way?” With music, that’s how. As Norma reflects on her life, she expresses her feelings in song, with assorted couples voicing in shorts segments how they see their life playing out.

“Let’s tell it from the perspective of people watching the wedding and what’s going through their minds, because at any wedding, that’s the most interesting thing,” Sylvia says. “It’s the feelings that the act of a marriage brings out in everyone else. That was the interesting thing to me. So when the lights go down and it falls out of time, Norma’s reflecting on her life — she can’t imagine that for all the bad that she’s done in her life, that it’s come to this beautiful moment.” Evelyn, Mitzi and Dinah all have similar moments of introspection.

In the end, Evelyn comes to terms with Eddie’s (Jason Canela) true feelings, Perry (Jordan Bridges) has political aspirations with Dinah at his side, Norma and Linda (Laura Dern) begin a life as mother and daughter — and Maxine and Evelyn take over Palm Royale, and set their sights on bigger adventures.

All wrapped up in a pretty bow? Think again. Sylvia reveals there are plenty of places take this cast of characters, should Apple TV want “Palm Royale” to go on with a Season 3.

“Happiness is fleeting,” Sylvia teases about potential new stories. “You have to live in your happiness, but trouble’s just around the corner. We wanted to leave the characters in a moment of suspended bliss. We’ve got a perfectly positioned Russian mole in Patti Lupone [Marjorie]. You’ve got Robert’s son, who is not all that he seems to be. You’ve got Maxine barreling towards motherhood. Is it going to be what it’s cracked up to be? The thing that she’s always wanted was to be a mother. Well, now she is one, and the son’s most likely some kind of plant coming for her money. Dinah is now a political wife, and that’s not necessarily a happy ending for her.”

He adds: “While we leave on an effervescent note, they live in Palm Beach. When Maxine and Evelyn are looking at each other and Maxine says, ‘We’re at the center of the town that runs the world, so what’s next?’ And Evelyn says, ‘The world,’ we planned it that way. So it’s like, let’s go out on big applause, but we’ve got lots of places we can go.”

Wiig puts it this way: “I honestly don’t know what Season 3 has in store, but I think with any of the women, the more power they have, the more dangerous they are.”