From the first episode, it’s clear Étoile benefits from Amy Sherman-Palladino’s extensive ballet knowledge and Prime Video’s budget.Philippe Antonello/The Associated Press
Étoile does not mark the first time Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband, Daniel Palladino, have tiptoed into the world of ballet. The Gilmore Girls and Marvelous Mrs. Maisel creators were also behind the project Bunheads, which ran for a season on the late ABC Family in 2012.
From the first episode, it’s clear Étoile benefits from Sherman-Palladino’s extensive ballet knowledge (Sherman-Palladino auditioned for a role in Cats before pivoting to a career of putting pen to paper) and Prime Video’s budget. Where it fails, however, is in its inability to self-edit.
The series, shot in New York and Paris, follows two world-renowned ballet companies struggling to regain relevancy in the wake of COVID, confronted with slow ticket sales and skyrocketing costs. So Metropolitan Ballet Theatre executive director Jack McMillan (Canadian Luke Kirby) and Paris’s Le Ballet National interim director Geneviève Lavigne (Charlotte Gainsbourg) hatch a plan to exchange their top dancers for a year and boost visibility. They also make a deal with an unsavory funder (played by Simon Callow) who has a rough history with Jack.
From there, a dizzying number of characters and dialogues unfold.
For all of its Easter eggs and signature style, Étoile lacks the warmth of the creators’ previous series. Yanic Truesdale, left, and Charlotte Gainsbourg in Étoile.Philippe Antonello/The Associated Press
Fans of the Palladinos’s signature style won’t be surprised by the fast-paced script, delivered by characters with extreme idiosyncrasies, nor by actors from their other shows popping up here. (Yanic Truesdale, who played the heavily accented Frenchman Michel on Gilmore Girls, is now a lightly accented Frenchman in Étoile, for example.)
Yet for all of its Easter eggs and signature style, Étoile lacks the warmth of the creators’ previous series. None of the leads draw you in, yet they all have a ton to say. And the pontification doesn’t end with them. Rather than telling stories through the two company leads – their internal struggles with the dancers and external battles in business – Étoile takes every opportunity to introduce new, larger-than-life characters with complicated backstories. Each new episode introduces performers, funders, board members and other players whose rapid-fire patter doesn’t reveal much, leaving you with the feeling that most of these people just like to hear themselves talk.
It’s as though the large budget and ability to create sweeping sets took precedence, and the series went for spectacle instead of story. One episode, for example, introduces a character during a storm at sea, which required the Étoile team to film in a water tank in Brussels and construct an actual boat.
The juxtaposition of the French and English companies is an interesting launch point that never quite takes off. Instead, unique cultural traits are played for laughs and then ignored as the series moves on to the next character or side plot.
For all of these stumbles, there are a few notable moments to watch for. The performances themselves are beautifully captured to the point that even non-ballet fans can appreciate the fluid movements and camerawork. Some characters leap off the screen, including Cheyenne Toussant (Lou De Laâge), who could have been the next Mrs. Maisel or Lorelei Gilmore.
Unfortunately, Étoile reaches for the stars without ever anchoring itself. Extreme world-building like this only works when the story is grounded in reality or when the audience cares about the characters living in it. Without either, this series feels like an overreaching and self-indulgent exposition that, were it a production on a real stage, would fail to make it past opening night.
