In a career that’s spanned 70 years, Carol Burnett has been a gifted comedian and singer on television, the silver screen and Broadway. But until she signed up for “Palm Royale,” she had never tackled a role that would require her to spend a large chunk of time speaking in incomprehensible babble. At 91, she’s thrilled to still experience professional firsts.
“Abe Sylvia, the creator and showrunner, [told me] I can’t really form words because I’m just coming out of [a coma],” she recalls over the phone. “And I said, ‘What do I do here?’ He said, ‘Oh, just do gibberish’ — but then he said, and I totally agreed, ‘Even though you’re doing gibberish, if you had the lines, how would you emphasize what you want to get across?’ So that’s what I did — you can’t write gibberish in a script, so I had to make all of that up. I was improvising — I had a lot of fun gibberishing, if there is such a verb.
” If Carol Burnett says it’s a verb, then it is. Few stars are as beloved or influential, and in the Apple TV+ series, she’s delightful as Norma Dellacorte, the vindictive queen of upper-crust society in Palm Beach, Fla., circa 1969 — even though she’s slipped into a coma after an embolism.
For the first few episodes, Norma is unconscious, but once she awakens, Burnett shows off the skill at physical comedy that has been her trademark since before her pioneering variety series, “The Carol Burnett Show.” Some of “Palm Royale’s” fu.