Etoile TV show: Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino brings back her blend of warmth and spiky

The mark of any Amy Sherman-Palladino series is quirky characters with a propensity to speak fast.

The TV writer has created a series with different premises, but the DNA remains familiar. With Etoile, her latest venture with husband Daniel Palladino, the setting is the world of elite ballet, but the people that populate it are recognisably Sherman-Palladino.

The Gilmore Girls and Marvelous Mrs Maisel creator has done a ballet story before with the 2012 series Bunhead.

That show had more in common with Gilmore Girls (small town, quirky people) than it does with Etoile (big cities, quirky people), but the new series comes partly out of the fact that Sherman-Palladino didn’t feel done with ballet after Bunheads was cancelled after one season.

If you know any former dancers, you’d know that it’s something burrowed into their being, they never leave it behind, and Sherman-Palladino danced during her childhood and her mother was one too.

Which explains a lot about Etoile and its reverence towards the skill and work it takes to be a dancer at the very top.

While the show is more about people than it is about dance, it is the foundation, and in the moments when Etoile stages actual performances, it’s stunning. It also helps that one of the dances is from real-life star choreographer Christopher Wheeldon (who cameos as himself) and features Sparks as the musical accompaniment.

You don’t have to be into ballet to be into Etoile, a zippy, pleasurable and accessible-for-all drama-comedy, but you do have to vibe with Sherman-Palladino’s sensibilities – everything and everyone is extra, they talk faster, they say more, they react 50 per cent more dramatically and everything is a big deal.

Set and filmed in New York City and Paris, the story starts with an idea that the cities’ two ballet corps should swap talent in a bid to attract more interest and audiences.

It’s a marketing gimmick but after the pandemic and the general decline in ticket sales, the two companies’ bosses, Jack (Luke Kirby) and Genevieve (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in a bind. Even if it means tethering themselves to the egomaniacal billionaire, Crispin Shamblee (Simon Callow), who will fund it.

In the exchange, Jack demands Cheyenne Toussaint (Lou de Laage), the star of the Paris ballet, and in return, Genevieve wants Tobias Bell (Gideon Glick), New York’s hotshot choreographer.

Cheyenne is a firecracker off stage as well as on. She is blunt, bordering on rude, obstinate and very, very opinionated about everything. She does what she wants and when she wants to, and is generally a difficult co-worker. But when she dances, she is transcendent.

Jack says to her, “You do love to dance, don’t you, Cheyenne?” and she replies, “No, but it is who I am so there is no choice”.

It’s that inextricability that makes Cheyenne so compelling, she believes she doesn’t exist without this passion that infuses every part of her.

For a character who is so belligerent, you can still empathise with someone who has purpose, especially when, at 32 years old, she is at a point where the off-ramp is not that far off.

By the end of the first season’s eight episodes, the audience will get to see every side of Cheyenne, including the parts she doesn’t want to believe about herself, and shouldn’t want to believe of herself.

As Jack and Genevieve, Kirby and Gainsbourg are wonderful as two executive directors constantly putting out fires – media disasters, artistic temperaments, board oversight and government ministers – but you get a strong sense of why they do it, which is that they both really love the ballet.

The pair also have great chemistry, whether they’re sharing scenes in person or if they’re tete-a-tete-ing over the phone on two sides of the Atlantic.

They also make great focal points for the controlled chaos around them, thanks to the rest of the ensemble of characters which also includes Mishi (Tais Vinolo), a young dancer trying to forge her own path away from her helicopter mum and unfriendly colleagues, Tobias, the mercurial choreographer who needs things a very specific way, and Gabin (Ivan du Pontavice), an ambitious dancer desperate to break out of the wings.

Sherman-Palladino has always been adept at building out characters in a large cast list, it’s the strength of her character-driven writing. Even guest stars who pop in for a scene or two every now then leave you with a solid impression of who they are, and here the production draws from Gilmore alums Kelly Bishop, Yanic Truesdale and Dakin Matthews.

Above all, it’s the rhythms of Etoile’s dialogue that creates the world you want to spend time in. It’s not as frenetic as Gilmore or Maisel but it has its own beat. When two characters are sparring, it’s as if we’re watching a pas a deux.

One scene towards the end of the series between Cheyenne and her mother, walking around a Parisian cemetery, is the dizzying high of Etoile. Even in French, or maybe especially because it’s in French, a language that is already spoken at rapid-fire pace, that exchange makes one giddy with delight.

It’s that combination of warmth and spikiness that Sherman-Palladino can do that no one else quite matches.

Etoile is streaming on Prime Video