Étoile takes a while to find its groove—but when it does, it soars
Prime Video's ballet comedy gets off to a promising start.
Photo: Philippe Antonello/Prime Video
If you experienced a bit of TV déjà vu when you heard about Étoile, Prime Video’s new ballet dramedy from the creators of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Gilmore Girls, you’d be forgiven. Amy Sherman-Palladino and husband-partner Daniel Palladino already dipped a pointed toe into the world of tutus and turnouts with their 2012 series Bunheads, which starred theater favorite Sutton Foster and Gilmore great Kelly Bishop and ran on ABC Family for one season.
It certainly looks like the Palladinos haven’t shaken their preoccupation with pliés and pirouettes. (Sherman-Palladino started training in classical ballet when she was just four.) Étoilen (French for “star”) follows the professional dancers and artistic staff of two of the world’s most storied ballet companies (one in New York, the other in Paris). With both institutions struggling to fill theater seats in a post-pandemic and tech-possessed society (“Our dancers have abandoned toe shoes for TikToks,” one character bemoans in an early episode), they’ll need a miracle to get the public caring again about the endangered, and admittedly stuffy, art form.
Or, apparently, they just need a savvy marketing move. Geneviève Lavigne—the interim general director of l’Opera Francais and Le Ballet National, played by the ever-chic French actor/musician Charlotte Gainsbourg—proposes they drum up much-needed attention by having her Parisian dance company swap some of its top talent with that of New York City’s Metropolitan Ballet Theater, which is helmed by executive director and Geneviève’s sometimes paramour Jack McMillan (Maisel star Luke Kirby).
Given that the series is populated entirely by neurotic New Yorkers and fussy French folks, it’s no surprise that the single-year swap does not go over well with either company’s main players, especially when word hits that Jack wants to snatch up France’s superstar principal dancer Cheyenne Toussaint (Lou de Laâge). All that melodrama isn’t completely warranted, TBH; in real life, swapping ballet dancers isn’t an entirely uncommon practice among the discipline’s most elite establishments.