Apple TV+ review: 'Palmer' starring Justin Timberlake is an effective Southern drama

Justin Timberlake is a southern boy- Tennessee. The Memphis metro area to be a little more precise. So he has a pretty good grip on southern culture.

I live in the Memphis metro and remember seeing him out and about years ago- Memphis tends to be one of those places where being famous and still being able to get out and about is not unheard of.  Considering about half of the people in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame have a work or life connection to the city, the locals tend to be a little more chilled out when someone famous pops up.

I remember seeing him and Brittney Spears years ago literally hanging out in a record store just having a good time and people were cool enough to not bother them. By all accounts he is a pretty nice guy.

AppleInsider said:

Singer Justin Timberlake returns to the movies on Apple TV+ in the engaging "Palmer," a Louisiana-set drama about an ex-con who becomes an unlikely father figure.

While some of the characters are a bit one-dimensional -- especially Dean Winters as Shelly's one-note violent redneck boyfriend -- Palmer is both a better film, and a much more respectful portrayal of small-town American life than Netflix's recent drama Hillbilly Elegy.

As for its position in the culture wars, Palmer is a film that's respectful of churchgoing and Southern culture, although it also has considerable sympathy for the recently incarcerated, and for the plight of a bullied, gender-nonconforming child.

Yeah ... no. I have stated several times in the past that Apple TV+ programming is going to struggle to find an audience because - unlike Netflix which is legitimately broad based - Apple TV+ programming is aimed at a coastal, progressive feminist audience. There is virtually no programming aimed at different audiences or truly challenges its target audience. So yes, they have a film set in the south. Big deal. It still solely depicts:

1. rural areas despite Texas and Florida being #2 in population (to California which really should be 3 different states) which Georgia and North Carolina also being in the top 10. Add Virginia and Tennessee and 6 of the top 15 states in population are in the south.
2. poverty ... despite Texas, Florida, Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina undergoing economic booms for the last 30 years, generally outstripping the economic growth of much of the west coast and northeast. South Carolina and Tennessee have transforming economies due to automobile - and in the case of SC, Boeing - manufacturing plants also.
3. crime and football. Any movie about southern whites - do movies about southern blacks, Hispanics or Asians exist at all? - is going to have an ex-football player (hello, people play basketball, golf, tennis and even soccer in the south) and this movie simply goes with an ex-football ex-con as the same character
4. severe family dysfunction (movies set in other regions generally more positively depict family relations, even blended family/divorce situations)
5. rednecks and other violent/bigoted people

This isn't "a movie about the south" but rather a movie that only depicts the south in a way that western and northeastern progressives insist on seeing it. What you will never see depicted in a movie set in the south:

A. research universities
B. urban life
C. educated, highly paid professionals especially in the tech sector
D. cosmopolitan, urbane people who attend symphonies, ballets, opera, museums and regularly travel etc.
E. interest in sports and other activities other than football and NASCAR (Atlanta alone is the #3 market for the NBA, regularly hosts NCAA Final Fours and has MLB and pro soccer teams as well as hosting significant ATP, WTA, PGA and LPGA events)

Meaning movies set in Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Charlotte, Tampa etc. (though Miami is fine because it isn't really considered southern) aren't going to happen. This is despite so many movies actually being filmed there because of lower shooting costs an increasing number of movies are shot there! That is the really frustrating part. These directors, producers, actors, writers etc. now regularly go to Georgia, North Carolina and Florida to shoot movies. Several state of the art studio facilities are there now, as well as cutting edge animation and VFX startups. Lots of talent has actually moved there full time. Yet we still get the south depicted the same way by Hollywood. 

Wake me when we get a legal thriller set in Austin/Atlanta/Charlotte where Luke Wilson is a law professor at Texas-Austin/Emory/Duke and Constance Wu is his cybersecurity researcher wife at Texas-Austin/Georgia Tech/Duke and they track down extremists who operate on the dark web or expose some bitcoin scam or something. Or maybe starring John David Washington and Awkwafina as medical school students - there are multiple such schools in the metro areas of all 3 southern cities - who uncover collusion between big pharma and big insurance.

But that would never happen because it would actually challenge the stereotypes that folks on the west coast and northeast insist on having about the south even as major employers - including again the film and TV industry - has spent the last 30 years relocating there. End result: movies like this only inflame the culture wars. And I am not an innovator here. Instead USA Today had an oped about how Monster's Ball and other Hollywood movies and TV shows depicted a one note version of the south meant to cater to coastal progressives and that was 20 years ago. Another thing: since Halle Berry in Monster's Ball no other black actress has won a major Academy Award (best Actress, best director, best film which goes to the producer, best original screenplay or best adapted screenplay) since which shows that despite their progressive pretensions, Hollywood isn't nearly as different from the southerners that they scapegoat as they think.

Sorry, but this is yet another example of why most viewers are going to pass up Apple TV+ in favor of content on Netflix, Disney Plus etc. that doesn't insult them.

Another thing: 

Tim Cook. From Mobile, Alabama. B.S. in industrial engineering from Auburn University in 1982. MBA from Duke University in 1988. 
You know something? The southeast played a huge role in the development of Internet and web 1.0 and was the single most important region for it - companies like Hayes Microcomputer, U.S. Robotics, Scientific Atlanta and Mindspring - until the dot.com crash and the web 2.0 relocating to Silicon Valley. Not only does Tim Cook know this but he almost certainly went to school with some of the people who made it happen as well as worked with some of them during his time at IBM! Yet he allows his company to traffic in these same stereotypes that he personally knows are not true.

cloudguy said:

AppleInsider said:

Singer Justin Timberlake returns to the movies on Apple TV+ in the engaging "Palmer," a Louisiana-set drama about an ex-con who becomes an unlikely father figure.

While some of the characters are a bit one-dimensional -- especially Dean Winters as Shelly's one-note violent redneck boyfriend -- Palmer is both a better film, and a much more respectful portrayal of small-town American life than Netflix's recent drama Hillbilly Elegy.

As for its position in the culture wars, Palmer is a film that's respectful of churchgoing and Southern culture, although it also has considerable sympathy for the recently incarcerated, and for the plight of a bullied, gender-nonconforming child.

Yeah ... no. I have stated several times in the past that Apple TV+ programming is going to struggle to find an audience because - unlike Netflix which is legitimately broad based - Apple TV+ programming is aimed at a coastal, progressive feminist audience. There is virtually no programming aimed at different audiences or truly challenges its target audience. So yes, they have a film set in the south. Big deal. It still solely depicts:

1. rural areas despite Texas and Florida being #2 in population (to California which really should be 3 different states) which Georgia and North Carolina also being in the top 10. Add Virginia and Tennessee and 6 of the top 15 states in population are in the south.
2. poverty ... despite Texas, Florida, Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina undergoing economic booms for the last 30 years, generally outstripping the economic growth of much of the west coast and northeast. South Carolina and Tennessee have transforming economies due to automobile - and in the case of SC, Boeing - manufacturing plants also.
3. crime and football. Any movie about southern whites - do movies about southern blacks, Hispanics or Asians exist at all? - is going to have an ex-football player (hello, people play basketball, golf, tennis and even soccer in the south) and this movie simply goes with an ex-football ex-con as the same character
4. severe family dysfunction (movies set in other regions generally more positively depict family relations, even blended family/divorce situations)
5. rednecks and other violent/bigoted people

This isn't "a movie about the south" but rather a movie that only depicts the south in a way that western and northeastern progressives insist on seeing it. What you will never see depicted in a movie set in the south:

A. research universities
B. urban life
C. educated, highly paid professionals especially in the tech sector
D. cosmopolitan, urbane people who attend symphonies, ballets, opera, museums and regularly travel etc.
E. interest in sports and other activities other than football and NASCAR (Atlanta alone is the #3 market for the NBA, regularly hosts NCAA Final Fours and has MLB and pro soccer teams as well as hosting significant ATP, WTA, PGA and LPGA events)

Meaning movies set in Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Charlotte, Tampa etc. (though Miami is fine because it isn't really considered southern) aren't going to happen. This is despite so many movies actually being filmed there because of lower shooting costs an increasing number of movies are shot there! That is the really frustrating part. These directors, producers, actors, writers etc. now regularly go to Georgia, North Carolina and Florida to shoot movies. Several state of the art studio facilities are there now, as well as cutting edge animation and VFX startups. Lots of talent has actually moved there full time. Yet we still get the south depicted the same way by Hollywood. 

Wake me when we get a legal thriller set in Austin/Atlanta/Charlotte where Luke Wilson is a law professor at Texas-Austin/Emory/Duke and Constance Wu is his cybersecurity researcher wife at Texas-Austin/Georgia Tech/Duke and they track down extremists who operate on the dark web or expose some bitcoin scam or something. Or maybe starring John David Washington and Awkwafina as medical school students - there are multiple such schools in the metro areas of all 3 southern cities - who uncover collusion between big pharma and big insurance.

But that would never happen because it would actually challenge the stereotypes that folks on the west coast and northeast insist on having about the south even as major employers - including again the film and TV industry - has spent the last 30 years relocating there. End result: movies like this only inflame the culture wars. And I am not an innovator here. Instead USA Today had an oped about how Monster's Ball and other Hollywood movies and TV shows depicted a one note version of the south meant to cater to coastal progressives and that was 20 years ago. Another thing: since Halle Berry in Monster's Ball no other black actress has won a major Academy Award (best Actress, best director, best film which goes to the producer, best original screenplay or best adapted screenplay) since which shows that despite their progressive pretensions, Hollywood isn't nearly as different from the southerners that they scapegoat as they think.

Sorry, but this is yet another example of why most viewers are going to pass up Apple TV+ in favor of content on Netflix, Disney Plus etc. that doesn't insult them.

The most absurd rambling I’ve seen lately. Snoopy is Midwest, Ghost Writer is east urban, SEE is another land/world, of course there’re movies of blacks in the south, like The Color Purple, and on and on. Not even going to bother with replying to the rest of this nonsensical and uninformed drivel. 😒

cloudguy said:

Another thing: 

Tim Cook. From Mobile, Alabama. B.S. in industrial engineering from Auburn University in 1982. MBA from Duke University in 1988. 
You know something? The southeast played a huge role in the development of Internet and web 1.0 and was the single most important region for it - companies like Hayes Microcomputer, U.S. Robotics, Scientific Atlanta and Mindspring - until the dot.com crash and the web 2.0 relocating to Silicon Valley. Not only does Tim Cook know this but he almost certainly went to school with some of the people who made it happen as well as worked with some of them during his time at IBM! Yet he allows his company to traffic in these same stereotypes that he personally knows are not true.

Mindspring, now there’s a name I haven’t heard of in a long time. Somewhere I have a brand new, unwrapped Visor in a box. They were the bomb at one time.

You nailed the “coastal, progressive feminist audience.” The only program I can get in to on AppleTV+ is Ted Lasso which somehow managed to slip by the required stereotypes. Even Amazing Stories had to have progressive storylines artificially injected in to it. Our family went and watched the original series in anticipation of the new one and it went from a great family experience, to something radically different.

Until this mindset changes the service will continue to flounder. There are a lot of normal people that live between the two progressive coastlines that aren’t interested in what Apple has to offer.