Make Friends and Influence People

Forget baseball the new series Palm Royale proves that America's true national pastime is social climbing. 

- MIKE ALBO

Call it Society Physics 101. If you gather a bunch of rich, powerful people behind a wrought iron gate or a velvet rope— whether at Versailles in 1685 or Zero Bond last week—you’ll have outsiders desperate to get in. (Similarly, as Julian Fellowes wrote in his novel Snobs, “Leave three Englishmen in a room and they will invent a rule that prevents a fourth joining them.”)

The desire of have-nots to make it through a forbidden door has long been a driving force in the stories we tell. Literature and film are lousy with arrivistes: Becky Sharp, Undine Spragg, Lily Bart, Eve Harrington. Just last winter, Bertha Russell ended season two of The Gilded Age in a voluminous green gown selling her daughter off to a duke to cement her standing in society.

Add to this roster of parvenues Maxine Simmons, in the new series Palm Royale (premiering March 20 on Apple TV+). Maxine is a desperate pilot’s wife who will do anything to enter 1960s Palm Beach society and gain access to the series’s titular, and very hard to join, country club—as well as the glittering, powerful, and mysterious people who circulate inside it.