Before I could even finish watching the first season of Étoile, the new ballet-themed show from Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, Prime Video pulled the plug on it.
On paper, the decision to cancel Étoile seems surprising. After all, Amazon MGM Studios heavily touted its deal with Sherman-Palladino and her writing partner/husband, Daniel Palladino, after the success of their first Prime Video show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. The studio spent millions on Étoile, which featured a huge ensemble cast and filmed in both New York City and Paris. But watch an episode or two of Étoile, and you won’t be surprised by the cancellation news at all.
None of the dialogue is particularly funny. None of the characters pull at your heartstrings. And despite being a show about saving ballet, Étoile and its creators entirely misunderstand why ballet is beloved.
Étoile bounces back and forth between many characters, but there are four main ones. Jack McMillan (Luke Kirby) is the director of a prestigious New York ballet theatre. Tobias Bell (Gideon Glick) is an eccentric choreographer working there. Genevieve Lavigne (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is the artistic director of a historic ballet company in Paris. Cheyenne Toussaint (Lou de Laâge) is the Paris ballet’s étoile, or star dancer. Hoping to reverse faltering ticket sales, Jack and Genevieve agree to swap their talent, including Cheyenne and Tobias. Chaos ensues.
There are a lot of dance movies and even dance television shows (Sherman-Palladino has made one before – her ABC Family show Bunheads was also cancelled after one season). Sherman-Palladino tries to break the mold by focusing on characters behind the scenes of ballet instead of on up-and-coming dancers. As a result, the show ends up being less about dance and more about marketing and fundraising. The dance sequences are beautiful, especially the ones set in the ornate Paris opera house, but they are few and far between. Étoile is not #balletcore escapism. Instead, viewers spend more time in offices and boardrooms than in rehearsal rooms.
The most surprising thing about this misstep is that Sherman-Palladino has a lifelong love of dance. She trained as a ballerina as a child. As an adult, she had the opportunity to work as a professional dancer, but she chose to pursue writing instead. Her show Gilmore Girls had little to do with dance, unless you count quips from loud-mouthed local dance teacher Miss Patty, and everything to do with family.
Sherman-Palladino writes family better than almost anyone, which is what makes her decision to sideline the theme of family in Étoile so surprising. Sure, we meet Cheyenne’s mom and Jack’s sister, but their relationships are mostly played for laughs. The mother-daughter relationships in Gilmore Girls felt real. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel also focused on family relationships, which felt a little less real due to the exaggerated nature of the characters, but you didn’t feel like you were watching a cartoon. The characters and relationships in Étoile, however, fall as flat as 2D animation. As Daily Wire’s Tim Rice writes, “Étoile’s biggest sin is that nothing is really original. Characters are either moody or quirky. Some are both … Rarely do we get a hint of motivation or backstory.”
Speaking of quirky, Étoile’s caricature of a villain may be the most fun, yet confusing, part. Crispin Shamblee (Simon Callow) is the rich patron of the arts whom all the other characters love to hate. He finances the talent swap, has the New York theater renamed in his honor, and even shows up in aerobics gear to practice with the principals. The problem?
Jack and Cheyenne despise him and his blood money. (It’s not clear how Crispin made his millions. Oil? Weapons? A mix of both? Bottom line is, it’s not good.) Yet, the ballet companies keep taking Crispin’s money hand over fist while complaining that he is a toady to dictators and a friend of Rush Limbaugh (these are equally disgusting crimes, in the ballet company’s view). Cheyenne, who is not only a ballerina but an ecowarrior a la Greta Thunberg, verbally eviscerates Crispin in front of everyone during a fundraising gala, but her words seem hypocritical since we know he’s the one paying her salary.
The thing is, Crispin truly loves ballet. He doesn’t want it to die out. Some would say he wants to conserve it. Jack and Genevieve want ballet to survive, too, as long as it’s in a form that’s trendy enough to sell tickets (tutus are old-fashioned, they say). This is the part where Sherman-Palladino’s terminal case of Gen X brain shows up.
Most of the scenes you would expect to feature classical music are set to rock music, like pairing ballet and rock ‘n’ roll is some kind of avant-garde experience. (Never mind that that’s been done since the 1960s.) Like a true ‘80s kid, Sherman-Palladino thinks rebellion is “sticking it to the man” with punk rock. The cool characters wear black leather jackets! They strut around with devil-may-care attitudes! They smoke cigarettes!
What Sherman-Palladino doesn’t realize is that, today, true rebellion is marked by a return to tradition, not a rejection of it. The future patrons of ballet won’t be motivated by gimmicks that say, “Hey, we’re not your grandmother’s ballet!” because your grandmother’s ballet is exactly what they want. They want stories of noble sacrifices and good triumphing over evil. They want music so beautiful it transcends time and language. They want the same lavish costumes and graceful arabesques that Anna Karenina would have seen in imperial Russia.
If you take Sherman-Palladino’s view to its logical extreme, then the ballet of tomorrow will be unrecognizable from the ballet of today. That’s fine, but don’t claim to love an art form if you think it’s only palatable to the public through clever marketing and endless innovation. Beauty, endurance, heroism — these are the things that humans have revered for thousands of years. Saving ballet need not involve livestreaming a performance falling apart as its crazed choreographer runs onstage to completely redo it (yes, that’s something that happens in the show.) Just make something beautiful.
It may be cliche, but Sherman-Palladino and Palladino could benefit from a common piece of writing advice: kill your darlings. Or maybe another trite phrase is in order: write what you know. Maybe another streaming service will revive Étoile and bring us a second season. Or maybe the duo’s next show can center around a husband-wife TV writing team. That’s certainly what they know.