‘Étoile’ review: Amy Sherman-Palladino brings us to the ballet

Gilmore Girls and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel creator Amy Sherman-Palladino delivers a delightful new TV binge with the ballet-centric Étoile.

Co-created by Sherman-Palladino and her husband Dan Palladino, Étoile takes its name from the French word for star, or the term for a ballet company’s principal dancer. And while the series may not immediately shine as brightly as Sherman-Palladino’s best-known works, it’s still a frothy fun look into the breakneck world of dancers fighting to make art on their own terms.

What’s Étoile about?

Charlotte Gainsbourg in “Étoile.”
Credit: Philippe Antonello / Prime Video

For a show about ballet, Étoile kicks off on a dour note about the art form: It’s dying. Two of the world’s most renowned ballet companies — France’s Ballet National and America’s Metropolitan Ballet Theater, both fictional — have seen their ticket sales plummet in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. How can these companies bring eyes back to their work?

Le Ballet National’s interim director Geneviève Lavigne (Charlotte Gainsbourg) presents a bold solution: a trans-Atlantic talent swap. Le Ballet National and the Metropolitan Ballet Theater will run complementary seasons and exchange choreographers and dancers. Geneviève, for example, brings brilliant (and eccentric) choreographer Tobias Bell (Gideon Glick) to Paris. Meanwhile, Metropolitan Ballet Theater director Jack McMillan (Luke Kirby) demands étoile Cheyenne Toussaint (Lou de Laâge) come to New York. Her star power and extraordinary dance skills will surely bring crowds back to the ballet, but her fiery stubbornness threatens to tear the company apart from within. Bring on the balletic culture shock!

Étoile is an engrossing tale of high-strung artists.

Yanic Truesdale and Charlotte Gainsbourg in “Étoile.”
Credit: Philippe Antonello / Prime Video

Splitting its time between New York City and Paris, Étoile weaves a tale of two very different companies facing similar issues: big egos, pressure from boards and governing bodies, and the sheer worry that no one cares about ballet anymore. Sherman-Palladino brings these problems to the fore with her trademark rapid-fire dialogue, so perfectly calibrated that every exchange calls to mind the show’s highly choreographed, lovingly shot dance sequences.

Sherman-Palladino has a background in dance, and Étoile isn’t even her first foray into making a TV show about ballet. (That would be 2012’s short-lived Bunheads.) That past dance experience lends Étoile a reverence for ballet that shines in its dance scenes (and its dance-centric cameos), but that never overshadows the comedy at the show’s heart. The dancers and directors we encounter over the first season aren’t the tortured ballerinas of, say, Black Swan, but instead drama kings and queens looking to make their art, their way. Cheyenne scares off her prospective dance partners by telling them bloody tales of murder, while Tobias heckles his own piece on opening night in hopes of fine-tuning it.

Perfection drives characters like Cheyenne and Tobias, for whom dance is everything. Yet there’s a larger force orchestrating these artists’ every move, one that Jack and Geneviève are all too aware of: money. The entire talent swap is set in motion by of a need for profit, yet it requires money to even get off the ground. That funding comes courtesy of the uber-wealthy (and uber-shady) Crispin Shamblee (Simon Callow), who’s of the mind that funding something good like ballet could offset the less-savory ways by which he earned his money. His involvement rankles eco-warrior Cheyenne, but in classic villainous fashion, he asks whether they’re so different after all, especially when Cheyenne is so willing to cast others aside in her pursuit of greatness.

It’s a fascinating idea, as is the push and pull between art and commerce (see also: The Studio), albeit neither get explored to their fullest extent in what often feels like an overstuffed first season. There are simply too many story threads and not enough time to devote to each, with the Paris half of the show especially feeling short-changed in the season’s first few episodes.

Still, Étoile finds its rhythm fairly quickly thanks to a wonderful ensemble cast. Previous Sherman-Palladino performers like Kirby, Glick, and Yanic Truesdale are immediately at home, while new collaborators like de Laâge and Gainsbourg fit right in in this crackling world Sherman-Palladino has built. Chemistry (both comedic and romantic) bursts out of damn near every scene, and the combination of both English and French dialogue helps emphasize the show’s trans-Atlantic scale. The overall result is an engrossing, if occasionally self-indulgent, treat.

All eight episodes of Étoile premiere April 24 on Prime Video.