Amy Sherman-Palladino’s Amazon Ballet Dramedy

Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has the Emmys and The WB’s Gilmore Girls has the two decades of snowballing affection, but if I’m feeling contrary — and I’m usually feeling contrary — I’ll say that my favorite Amy Sherman-Palladino show is Bunheads. 

Because Bunheads only consists of 18 episodes, it’s all potential. It started bumpy, found its voice completely and then ABC Family canceled it, so I can eternally believe it never would have been marred by Sherman-Palladino’s inevitable flirtations with tweeness or her insatiable appetite for ramming her characters into narrative brick walls. It’s pure, delightful, perfectly cast Sherman-Palladino goodness. 

Bunheads was also a show about potential. Its key characters were budding ballet dancers, which allowed the show to avoid the challenges of depicting excellence — pressures that Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino struggled with when it came to Midge Maisel and her comedy — and concentrate, rather, on youthful enthusiasm.

Sherman-Palladino and Palladino return to the world of ballet with their new Amazon dramedy Étoile, which, for me, triggered some initial concerns of self-seriousness with its title and focus on, well, excellence in an international context. I was more than prepared to write a “It’s no Bunheads” review, but it’s a relief to report that, at least initially, Étoile doesn’t take itself too seriously. 

As a result, for six or seven episodes, the hour-long series is likably light-on-its-feet, infused with its creators’ love and admiration for this world and boasting strong lead performances from Luke Kirby and Charlotte Gainsbourg as well as a knockout English-language debut from co-star Lou de Laâge. 

A season-concluding downward spiral follows, one that will be familiar to even the most devoted and forgiving of Sherman-Palladino fans — that thing where characters behave in unjustifiable ways just to set things up tantalizingly for the next run of episodes. Some of the things that happen in the Étoile homestretch are so pointlessly dumb they soured me on a show that I’d mostly been enjoying.

Kirby plays Jack, executive director for the Metropolitan Ballet Theater in New York City, while Gainsbourg is Genevieve, interim director of Le Ballet National in Paris. Their respective institutions are struggling and if their new seasons flop, ballet could die forever. Or something.

Genevieve offers a solution: They’ll swap companies, or at least parts of companies, as somebody puts it, “to give Paris a jolt of New York City energy and New York City a splash of Parisian style.”

To help with the process, eccentric billionaire and possible war criminal Crispin Shamblee (Simon Callow, devouring scenery) agrees to pay. Jack is wary.

Jack and Genevieve, who have a romantic past and a flirting present, select members of the other’s company to filch for this one-year experiment. Genevieve snags the Metropolitan’s brilliant-but-odd star choreographer Tobias (Gideon Glick) and French dancer Mishi (Taïs Vinolo), who was cut from the Parisian company years earlier. Jack drafts Paris’ étoile, the no-bullshit Cheyenne (de Laâge), who is introduced as an environmental warrior and then, by the end of the first season, is flying back and forth from Paris to NYC at a moment’s notice because lots of characters on this show are introduced with core characteristics that eventually fizzle away.

“Etoile” means “star” in this context, but don’t worry about a necessary learning curve. Étoile is fueled by a love of ballet, its movement and its music — Jack and Genevieve are introduced debating Tchaikovsky vs. Aaron Copland — but this is not a piece of extreme immersion packed with intimidating ballet terminology or references. 

Nor does Étoile aspire to be some sort of gritty examination of ballet’s dark underbelly. There’s a show to be made about ballet’s crushing physical toll and institutional restrictions, centered on rampant drug use, screwing and abuses of power. I know this, because I watched Starz’s Flesh and Bone and found it properly harrowing, if not particularly good.

Étoile features jokes about dancers being overworked and about their messed-up feet and whatnot, but acknowledging elements of this world that could be interpreted as physical and psychological exploitation through a different prism is not on the agenda. Instead, it’s a Sherman-Palladino-friendly combination of fast-talking whimsy and graceful direction — Amy and Daniel wrote and directed much of the season, though there’s a midseason pause for other scribes and director Scott Ellis — in the service of what is, more than anything, a fish-out-of-water workplace comedy about people devoted to an elite art form.

The creators’ general enjoyment, rather than eagle-eyed interrogation, of the milieu carries over to how Étoile handles dance itself. Several members of the cast have extensive ballet experience, including Vinolo and David Alvarez (West Side Story), who plays the only American dancer strong enough to partner with Cheyenne. But most do not, and there’s enough doubling in the dance numbers that those with only a casual interest in the art form probably won’t notice who actually is doing their own dancing and when (attentive viewers surely will). 

Étoile is very selective when it comes to how much dance it actually shows. After the first episode, there’s a long stretch in which we only get fleeting rehearsal footage, before a fourth episode with six featured performances, then another gap before a dance-heavy finale. Either way, it’s a show that more frequently than not asks you to take the dialogue at its word that certain performances are exceptional or certain creative forces are brilliant. The dance sequences are generally simply shot, lots of full-body and full-stage framings, very few sweaty close-ups — all fitting for a show that aspires to a little distance rather than uncomfortable intimacy. Everything is photographed with a handsome fluidity; it’s the rare series that gives the Steadicam operator a prominent position in the credits. 

Kirby, an Emmy winner as a somewhat excessively lovable Lenny Bruce in Mrs. Maisel, steps into the lead role here and it’s no surprise that he vibes completely with Jack’s stream-of-consciousness irritation — which, one could argue, he treats as performatively as some other characters treat their dance moves. Gainsbourg matches Kirby’s nervous energy, and they have a chemistry that justifies their steady flirtation.

It hurts Gainsbourg and the show a tiny bit that in dividing the narrative between New York and Paris — a largely landmark-free version of Paris, complete with a joke mocking Emily in Paris for the ubiquity of the Eiffel Tower — the Paris company gets the socially uncomfortable Mishi and the highly withdrawn Tobias, and therefore lacks the energy of the New York chapters, driven by the animated de Laâge.

De Laâge is a well-established French screen presence with a pair of Cesar nominations to her credit, but this is her first English-language TV role. Jumping into English-language television with an Amy Sherman-Paladino show is like walking in a snow flurry for the first time and then deciding to heli-ski down the Matterhorn. And this is not a light Amy Sherman-Palladino role. Cheyenne is a storyteller and the writers are sticking these long monologues in de Laâge’s mouth and saying, “Sell this!”

And she does. More than half the laughs I got came from moments like de Laâge’s dolphin impression or a lecture she gives to Jack’s groin, while the most effective emotional arc of the season is probably between Cheyenne and SuSu (LaMay Zhang), a young girl whom Cheyenne steers into ballet classes. That Étoile largely fails Cheyenne by the end of the season takes nothing away from de Laâge’s breakout performance.

Favoring levity here, the broadly comic supporting performances work best for me, especially Callow, whose Crispin exists in a far wackier and wilder series, and David Haig as the Metropolitan’s artistic director, who has early hilarious moments and definitely gets let down in the season’s climax. The show never figures out what to do with Alvarez’s Gael, leaving a bland center to several more of those twists in the last episode. The writers are much more confident with getting brief value out of a handful of Sherman-Palladino regulars, including Yanic Truesdale and Kelly Bishop, who show up and steal a scene or two, unsaddled with any of the concluding missteps. 

I’ve watched and loved enough Amy Sherman-Palladino shows that I should know that questionable seasonal cliffhangers are part of her storytelling vernacular, and I should know better than to be this disappointed by the end of a season that I mostly enjoyed. Maybe that’s why I like Bunheads as much as I do. Sure, it ends badly, but I can blame ABC Family for that.