It turns out that not even a “two-season” order from a major streamer can break the single-season curse on ballet TV from Amy Sherman-Palladino: Étoile, created by the Gilmore Girls alum with her husband Daniel Palladino, has just gone the way of Bunheads, having been canceled at Prime Video after just one season.
This isn’t entirely unprecedented, or even wholly unexpected: Shows with multi-season pickup orders still get subjected to the same “cancel or not?” evaluations that dog other series, even if they’re expected to be gentler. (Deadline notes that even stuff like The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power has to get assessed, despite operating under a deal for a 50-hour “commitment.”) Sherman-Palladino herself raised the possibility during a panel earlier this week, noting that “When they say two-year pickup, they don’t mean it. They mean one year and then we’ll see who’s still working at Amazon by the time the second year comes around to be greenlit.” (This, despite the duo having scored pretty massive amounts of goodwill from the streamer after their previous effort, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, became such a signature series for Prime.) But goodwill can only go so far, and Étoile reportedly fell victim to that coldest of calculations: “How much does this cost us to make?” vs. “How many people are actually watching it?”
And so, eight episodes of Étoile is all we’re getting. The series followed two prominent ballet companies (one in New York, the other in Paris) who swap their performers in the interest of drumming up ticket sales in a post-COVID world. In her B+ review of the series, Christine Izzo praised the show’s “sumptuous” settings and costumes, and noted that Sherman-Palladino and her husband haven’t lost a step in crafting quick-witted dialogue. (Izzo also notes that the slow-moving show will, at least, have two full seasons in which to find its footing, which, uh, whoops.) Although streaming ratings are always tricky to pin down, the show didn’t pop up on Nielsen’s Top 10 Originals chart even in the week it debuted back in April; the following week, it got knocked off of Prime’s own rankings, falling behind month-old episodes of Reacher.
