Like the art of ballet, “Étoile,” a television show about ballet, has its ups and downs. Sometimes you want to toss confetti in the air to celebrate how deftly it dives into the intelligence and humor of ballet culture. It lives largely in the world of comedy, which is rare for a ballet story. Yet it also shows a commitment to world-class dance, with snippets from classic works like George Balanchine’s “Rubies.” And it arrives with a narrative miracle — nary an eating disorder in sight.
But then comes a scene, or sadly a dance, that makes you want to throw that confetti in the trash. The first time the show seesaws between paradise and purgatory happens in its first five minutes. “Étoile,” on Amazon Prime Video, begins on a poignant note as a young girl, alone in a dark studio, follows along to a ballet class saved on a smartphone. A cleaning woman appears in the doorway to let her know that she has only one more floor to get through. This is the dancer’s mother, who has been secretly recording company class for her.
“I’ve barely gotten to frappés,” young SuSu (LaMay Zhang) says to her mom. With a heavy heart, SuSu fast forwards to petit allegro, and an overhead shot pulls back, rendering her tinier and tinier as her feet cross back and forth in springy jumps. Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” its beat echoing her rhythm, takes over, and we’re dropped into a pulsating nightclub.
There, a tipsy and inane conversation about Tchaikovsky and Aaron Copland ensues: Who would win in a fight? (Who cares?) And that generates a new topic: famous composers who had syphilis.
SuSu, come back! (She does eventually. And her part gets better and better especially after Cheyenne, the leading French ballerina, sees in a studio “this little girl who appears only at night like a fairy” and takes her under her wing.)
Scenes like the one in the nightclub are deflating, especially for a series created by the imaginative husband-and-wife team of Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino. In previous Sherman-Palladino creations like “Gilmore Girls” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” actors weave gestures and words to give them an eccentric, choreographic flair, employing dialogue so muscularly arranged that when it really takes off, it swings. Characters are sometimes cartoonish, but rhythm gives them life. The best scenes almost always remind me of a dance. (And that doesn’t even include the gem “Bunheads,” the wonderful, short-lived comedy from 2012 about a ballet school.)
As for “Étoile,” it is anchored more by a setup than a plot. Two directors of ballet companies, Geneviève (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in Paris and Jack (Luke Kirby) in New York, decide to swap talent, partly as a way to sell tickets. Ballet, as Geneviève says, was dealt a huge blow by “the mighty reign of king Covid.”
That’s true. And “Étoile” often pops with observant, real-world details. Jokes, like fresh musical accents, are slipped in nimbly. When Jack finds out that the theater’s expensive etched Champagne flutes are being pocketed by wealthy donors, he demands that all further etching be stopped.
“But they won’t match!” one employee says, his voice raised to tinny heights. “What are we, Cleveland?”
“Étoile” takes on a lot — the impossible business of running a dance company in 2025, smarmy donors, institutional infighting and more — but it can also live in the weeds, where there’s space to crack a joke about regional ballet. There are also real-world dance people, including Tiler Peck, the virtuosic, self-assured New York City Ballet principal, who plays the fictional Eva, a dancer who loses her focus during a performance of “Swan Lake” and now must be shadowed by Dr. Speer, a whispering therapist in charge of getting her back onstage.
Peck is a riot. She never drops the act. In Season 2 (the show has already been renewed), she could carry an episode.
In the main character department, though, there are problems. Jack and Geneviève are better served in scenes that keep them apart; their banter feels forced. The New York company’s aging artistic director, Nicholas (David Haig), with his affected, wistful voice as he gasses on about the old days, is perplexing: No part of him is funny or endearing.
And then there’s the next generation. Tobias (Gideon Glick) is a young, innovative choreographer who lacks social skills and, as far as I can tell, lasting talent, though he is considered a boy genius. (This, of course, happens in life.) Tobias wears headphones, listens to metal at full blast and has tantrums. His biggest meltdown happens during the premiere of a new ballet: He stops the performance and remakes the dance in real time in front of the audience.
Like most of the contemporary ballet on the show, Tobias’s creation is anything but inventive. (Much of it is by Marguerite Derricks, but there are also contributions by Christopher Wheeldon.) After the new version is finally performed — complete with portable ballet barres in a derivative William Forsythe touch — Tobias dashes onto the stage for a passionate kiss with his lead dancer. This was unforgivable. “Étoile” went Hallmark.
But the show has something crucial going for it: The guiding star that is Cheyenne (Lou de Laâge), the French étoile traded against her will from the Paris company to the New York one. She’s a bulldozer, a climate activist-ballerina who has been sent away, to her horror. “They’re going to make me do ‘Stars and Stripes,’” she says, referring to Balanchine’s patriotic 1958 ballet.
She rejects dance partners without even bothering to swipe left. “You think I don’t know what I need?” she asks Jack. “You think I am a baby ballerina new to the world, stumbling around, stuffing lamb’s wool into my shoes to stop the pain? There is no stopping the pain.”
De Laâge, chin lifted like the Degas ballerina, is a tender tornado. The best part of “Étoile” is how ruthlessly serious Cheyenne is about ballet.
Wise and irritable with an inability to lie, Cheyenne possesses the vulnerability that comes from passion. She may be Parisian, but she also seems like a real New Yorker and is reminiscent of another City Ballet principal, Sara Mearns, who isn’t in “Étoile” but whose spirit seems to be part of the moral fiber of the series. Cheyenne, who sometimes appears to be styled like Mearns with her loose hair and baggy clothes, shares with her a raw, absolute dedication to ballet’s expressive truth.
“Étoile” has no connection to the ballet horror of “Black Swan” or, worse, the backbiting, eating disorders and sexual abuse found in “Tiny Pretty Things” and “Flesh and Bone.” While it makes reference to “Fame,” the Alan Parker film, and “Ballet,” the Frederick Wiseman documentary about American Ballet Theater — even lifting dialogue from both — “Étoile” shows, at its base, a kind of fortitude that reminds me of “Billy Elliot.” For Billy, as for Cheyenne, dancing is breathing.
During a performance of “The Nutcracker,” Cheyenne, who never slips, slips. When the idea is floated that she could become the company’s next artistic director, she suddenly has the possibility of a new beginning, a path that she has already embarked on, as SuSu’s biggest champion.
That doesn’t happen, and Cheyenne (her dance double is Constance Devernay) throws herself into a new creation by Wheeldon, playing himself. The solo, “I Married Myself,” set to music by the pop and rock duo Sparks, shows that Cheyenne is, for better or worse, married to her art.
Unfortunately, it is a slight and melodramatic work that begins with the dancer’s back to the audience as she stretches her arms behind like tentacles. She darts about the stage — it almost has the feel of a floor exercise in gymnastics — and gets stuck in a burst of stationary speedskating. She hugs herself from behind. And when it’s over, Cheyenne races off the stage crying and after a tirade — “I don’t want to be hollow!” — falls into Jack’s arms.
It’s all very Luke and Lorelai in “Gilmore Girls” (surprisingly not in a terrible way), but that’s not the point. Ballet doesn’t make Cheyenne feel hollow, it makes her feel too much. “I Married Myself” is a dance of futile agitation, but Cheyenne’s turbulence is real. In an earlier episode, during an onstage interview with Isaac Mizrahi (great choice), she gives a defense of ballet that gets to the heart of “Étoile”; that defense is part of why Sherman-Palladino, a former dancer, wanted to make the show in the first place.
Dancing, Cheyenne says, got into her brain, “like a song that won’t leave.”
“People today want to fight,” she continues. “They want to be angry. OK. But how do we express that anger? How do we turn it into something better? How do we create hope when no one listens? Maybe they watch, maybe you dance, you feel, you change the story. Dance can do that. Dance lets you float above it all. It lets you play in the clouds.”
Throughout his life, Balanchine referred to himself as a cloud in trousers, a line taken from the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. To the critic Arlene Croce, this meant Balanchine was “a creator of airy ephemera.”
That airy ephemera is vital, not just to see on a stage but to have in one’s life, and to know the reference is to understand the best parts of the show. “When I dance,” Cheyenne says, “I want the audience to play with me, to dance in the clouds, to feel what I feel. To hear my song.”
Gia Kourlas is the dance critic for The Times. She writes reviews, essays and feature articles and works on a range of stories.
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