Twenty-five years ago, Amy Sherman-Palladino burst onto the scene with Gilmore Girls, which earned critical acclaim for its quirky characters and rapid-fire dialogue. After Gilmore Girls, it took Sherman-Palladino a while to land another hit. She and Daniel Palladino, her husband and creative partner, created The Return of Jezebel James, which was canceled after just three episodes. Then came Bunheads, which developed a cult following but only lasted one season.
Finally, in 2017, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel premiered on Amazon Prime. Like Gilmore Girls, Mrs. Maisel features a plucky heroine, beautiful set pieces, and lightning-fast dialogue so loaded with cultural allusions it could make your head spin. The move to streaming seemed beneficial for the Palladinos. They had more money and more creative control. The costumes are better, the episodes are longer, and some of the plots are more outlandish. When Mrs. Maisel concluded its fifth season in 2023, it did so to great acclaim.
So, when it was announced that the Palladinos would return to Amazon Prime, fans were thrilled — all the more so because their new show, Étoile, marked a return to the world of ballet, which Sherman-Palladino, a classically trained ballerina, first explored in Bunheads. The plot has all the makings of a hit: two ballet companies, one in New York, the other in Paris, agree to swap stars for a season in a desperate bid to boost ticket sales. Jack Macmillan (Luke Kirby), the hangdog director of the Metropolitan Ballet Theatre, gets Cheyenne Toussaint (Lou de Laâge), the bad girl of Parisian ballet. In exchange, Genevieve Lavigne (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Le Ballet National get eccentric choreographer Tobias Bell (Gideon Glick) and Mishi (Taïs Vinolo), a French ingenue Lavigne had cut from her company and shipped off to Manhattan.
Unfortunately, the Palladinos seem to have fallen once again into a kind of sophomore slump. Étoile has a solid cast and some funny moments, but lacks the engaging plot, charm, and wit we’ve come to expect from a Palladino production. In their defense, dance is a hard art to make a television show about. Most of us aren’t familiar with it and don’t know how to think about what we’re seeing.
This is not an insurmountable problem. Another Amazon Prime offering, Mozart In The Jungle, circumvents the fact that most viewers don’t know anything about classical music by having characters talk about classical music: how to whittle an oboe reed, how to conduct a symphony, and what being a professional musician is actually like. In so doing, the show gives every viewer the requisite background knowledge to appreciate the medium at its heart.
Étoile takes a different approach. Rather than engage in a single bit of exposition, the characters simply talk, at length, often insufferably, about how important ballet is.
Here’s an illustrative bit of dialogue:
“Have you ever met a ballet dancer before? We’re weird. We do weird things. We stand on our toes on purpose. Why? I don’t know … Our whole lives are spent in disgusting, unsanitary places. We smell — all the time … Dancers don’t know what day it is, or what the weather’s like outside. We are part of a cult.”
It’s a lot of that. Cheyenne, the prima ballerina who delivers that little monologue, terrifies everyone she meets. Why? Because she’s so committed to ballet. Why? Because she was born to do it.
In a later episode, Cheyenne opens up and tells Jack that she’s alone because ballet left no room for love in her heart. We’re just supposed to take this as a given and something artists do.
This would maybe be forgivable if the difficult artist weren’t such a worn-out trope. But Étoile‘s biggest sin is that nothing is really original. Characters are either moody or quirky. Some are both. Tobias the choreographer dances in traffic, oblivious to the honking horns. Cheyenne’s mother, Bruna, is, for some reason, a steampunk tinkerer who is mean to everyone. Rarely do we get a hint of motivation or backstory.
The Palladinos’ strength is that their quirky, pigheaded characters are always balanced by realists. Lorelei Gilmore’s blind faith in her daughter’s perfection is neutralized by her parents’ hard-nosed realism, and the kookiness of Stars Hollow is cut by Luke, the surly diner owner. Mrs. Maisel strikes a similar balance between its protagonist and pretty much everyone around her.
The problem is that this is a delicate balance — one that the Palladinos seem to miss more often than not. In Netflix’s four-part Gilmore Girls revival, A Year In The Life, we see what happens when things tilt too much toward the quirky. The plot is thin, the characters are unbelievable to the point of absurdity, and the episodes have unnecessary Technicolor musical numbers.
Étoile has the opposite problem. Everyone is an unlikable purist, and it’s a drab world. The Palladinos dropped their trademark pitter-patter dialogue and cool-kid cultural references. Things are so serious that, though the show takes place in Manhattan and Paris, we barely see much of either city. Étoile is dimly lit and grayscale, save for the intricate ballets mounted every few episodes. How’s that for a central metaphor?
Still, Étoile is a fine enough show. The first half of the season drags. However, once it picks up, it’s as good as anything else on streaming, if not as good as what we’ve come to expect from the Palladinos. Cheyenne’s character takes some getting used to. But when she warms up, she’s pretty funny. Kirby is delightful as Jack, though one wishes he had more to work with. And Simon Callow is absolutely sensational as Crispin Shamblee, an arms dealer turned ballet patron and the show’s marginal villain, whose antics shine against the show’s otherwise monotonous tableau.
Ultimately, it feels wrong to render a final judgment on Étoile. Amazon ordered two seasons off the bat, and the eight episodes feel more like the first half of a season than a proper first season. There’s plenty of room for the plot to advance, and the cast, which includes a number of the Palladinos’ favorite featured players, is top-notch. If Étoile is a frustrating watch, it’s only because the show has a lot of promise. You know it could be great with a bit more focus, like a promising young ballerina who has yet to master her grand jeté.
Tim Rice is the deputy managing editor of the Daily Wire.