Years after Bunheads, Amy Sherman-Palladino has returned to the barre with Étoile, now streaming on Prime Video. The bilingual drama follows two ballet companies––one in New York, the other in Paris––as they navigate the precarious, post-pandemic arts world. Sherman-Palladino, who created the series with husband Daniel Palladino, draws from her usual repertoire, including talky, oddball characters and cameos from Gilmore Girls and Maisel alumni. But where Bunheads was scrappy and small-town, with Sutton Foster guiding moody teens through memorable routines, Étoile is glossier, more ambitious. It moves between gilded studios and grand stages, where dancers, choreographers, and administrators are fighting to keep ballet alive. The series aims high, but doesn’t stick the landing. It’s no Bunheads, after all.
At the heart of Étoile is the partnership between Jack (Maisel’s Luke Kirby), artistic director of the New York Metropolitan Ballet, and Geneviève (Charlotte Gainsbourg), interim head of the Ballet National in Paris. Both companies are in trouble; ticket sales are down, funding is scarce. Their solution: swap their dancers to drum up publicity for the season, and take a lifeline from Crispin Shamblee (Simon Callow), a billionaire whose philanthropy extends to war crimes and ecological ruin. Ballet, it seems, needs his blood money. What choice do they have?
Étoile circles a central tension: What are we willing to sacrifice to preserve an art form? Why does dance even matter under late-stage capitalism? It’s a zeitgeist-y premise, keyed to the same anxieties around art and commerce that animate The Studio and the latest season of Hacks. But while Étoile gestures at the cost of Shamblee’s patronage, it never fully engages with it. His demands wear on Jack and Geneviève, but the show treats them as punchlines, sidestepping any real exploration of the power dynamics at play. Ultimately, Étoile is more interested in the aesthetics of its world––ballet’s pageantry––than in its own stakes.
The series also sidelines its strongest material. Lou de Laâge’s Cheyenne, the prickly étoile, or prima ballerina, shares an electric scene with Tobias (Maisel’s Gideon Glick), the eccentric choreographer––an artistic clash that Étoile never revisits. Mishi (real-life dancer Taïs Vinolo) is similarly underutilized. After years with the Metropolitan Ballet, she’s sent back to Paris in the exchange, adrift at 19, with no life beyond the company. In episode six, “The Disaster,” written by Please Like Me’s Tom Ward, an acquaintance casually asks Mishi about Brooklyn––a place she’s never been, despite living in New York. Flustered, she ducks into a bathroom, skims the borough’s Wikipedia page, then returns and blurts out trivia as if it’s just occurred to her. It’s a funny, excruciating beat—the kind of cringe-humor Ward excels at—hinting at a larger narrative about the cost of devoting your life to art. But like so much in Étoile, it’s a thread left unspooled.