The dancers streamed across the stage of a historic Paris theater, leaping and turning, the women lifted high into the air and whirled aloft, before aligning to bow on the final chords of the music. “Bravo! Bravo!” cried the enthusiastically applauding audience.
Then Amy Sherman-Palladino, sporting a white baseball cap, walked onstage with a Steadicam operator, consulted the choreographer Marguerite Derricks, and clapped her hands sharply. “Let’s go!” she called. Moments later, the cameraman was running frantically amid the dancers as Sherman-Palladino peered at a monitor, watching the way their movement was captured from inside the groupings.
“That was great, you guys were fabulous,” she called out at the end. She turned to the audience “What do you think?” Much applause. The cameraman took a little bow.
It was last May at the Théâtre du Châtelet, where Sherman-Palladino; her husband and creative partner, Daniel Palladino; and their team were filming “Étoile,” a new Amazon Prime Video series debuting on Thursday.
The show (the title means “star” in French) tells the story of two major ballet companies — the Ballet National (a thinly veiled Paris Opera Ballet), and the New York-based Metropolitan Ballet Theater (a mash-up of American Ballet Theater and New York City Ballet) — collaborating on an exchange of artists in order to boost sales and drum up publicity.
“It’s not a dance show; it’s a show about dancers,” Sherman-Palladino said firmly in a recent video conversation.
Sherman-Palladino, the creator of “Gilmore Girls” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” has long been a serious dance fan, incorporating choreographed passages into her series and, in 2012, creating “Bunheads” (with Lamar Damon), about a showgirl-turned-ballet teacher. Despite rave reviews, that show was not renewed after its first season. Sherman-Palladino, who danced seriously while growing up, said the abbreviated experience left her and her husband, a producer of that series, wanting to get back into the dance world.
“It festered in our minds, and we had to do something about it,” she said. She added: “We wanted to show that ballet isn’t something for someone else. It’s storytelling; it’s athletic; it’s powerful, emotional, transporting. It’s a great, dynamic art form.”
The directors of the ballet companies in “Étoile” are informed by the same passionate belief. Luke Kirby (Lenny Bruce in “Maisel”) is Jack McMillan, the head of the Metropolitan Ballet, while Charlotte Gainsbourg plays Geneviève Lavigne, the interim director of the National Ballet.
“There is something endlessly fascinating about people who choose to do this despite the impossibility of making anything happen in this world,” Kirby said in a video call.
We soon learn that Jack and Geneviève have some history. But romance isn’t a priority in “Étoile” — rather, the series revolves around cross-cultural French-American encounters, the companies’ fortunes and the dancers themselves. The étoile of the title is the take-no-prisoners Cheyenne Toussaint (Lou de Laâge), who is sent from Paris to dance with the American company. At the same time, Mishi Duplessis (Taïs Vinolo), a young French dancer based in New York, is dispatched back home.
Also part of the exchange is the American Tobias Bell (Gideon Glick), the ballet world’s hottest and most socially inept young choreographer, whose peculiarities don’t endear him to his new Parisian colleagues. Apart, that is, from Gabin, an ambitious young corps de ballet dancer played by Ivan du Pontavice, who slowly forges an alliance with Tobias.
And then there is Crispin Shamblee (Simon Callow), the Bond-worthy, English-accented villain of the piece, whose dubiously acquired wealth is financing the trans-Atlantic project.
“Étoile” is ambitious — it was filmed in both Paris and New York, with troupes of around 18 dancers set up in each city for the duration of the shoot. The dialogue is in both English and French, and there is a lot of dance: Derricks, who has worked with the Palladinos on several shows, choreographed around 15 pieces in addition to snippets of ballet classics like “Swan Lake” and “Romeo and Juliet.”
And then, it’s about ballet, which hasn’t resonated with audiences in recent shows like “Flesh and Bone” and “Tiny Pretty Things.” Like “Bunheads,” neither series survived beyond one season.
Addressing these potential negatives, the creators noted that viewers have become more accustomed to watching TV with subtitles in the streaming age. And while other ballet shows have been unsuccessful, “Étoile” has a different take, Sherman-Palladino said.
“People have tended to lean into the darker aspects of ballet — pushing people off buildings and throwing up,” she said dryly. “You see the beautiful dancers onstage, so effortless and soft and fluttery, and I understand the impetus to say offscreen they must be murderers. But it’s so much more fun, strange and weird than that.”
The Palladinos said they began with the two-company concept, then fleshed out the characters. Many were created with specific actors in mind, they said.
They approached Kirby about playing Jack just after “Maisel” ended production. “It was a happy moment,” Kirby said. “Living in the world they created had been a joy.”
To prepare for the role, he read books about ballet history, went to see performances and took a few ballet classes. He learned “how much it asks of the body, what it has to go through to look effortless,” he said.
Glick, who had played the magician Alfie in “Maisel,” began his work on “Étoile” in the writers’ room.
“Every time they talked about Tobias, they kept gesturing to me,” Glick said. “Finally they offered me the part.” He said the character was informed by his own teenage experience of working on the musical “Spring Awakening” with the choreographer Bill T. Jones, who had been “very exacting, very, precise, very blunt and eccentric.”
The character Shamblee, written specifically for Callow, was “a bit modeled after a David Koch type,” Sherman-Palladino said, referring to the billionaire businessman who before he died in 2019 used his wealth both to generously support the arts and to powerfully influence politics — often to the benefit of his companies, critics said.
Callow said Shamblee “obviously wants to control everything, but behind this ruthless monster is someone who absolutely loves the ballet, has studied and worshiped it.” (Asked if he had drawn inspiration from Koch, Callow said, “I couldn’t possibly comment.”)
Palladino added that a figure like Shamblee can wield that kind of power over a ballet company “in America but not in France, where the company is controlled by the government.”
“There are great things about that and not-great things about that,” he continued. “We wanted to highlight those differences.”
Shamblee is constantly popping up in New York and Paris, where Jack’s counterpart, Geneviève, is wrangling with dancers threatening to strike; with the imperious minister of culture; and with a recalcitrant bull. (It’s a long story.)
Gainsbourg, the daughter of the French singer Serge Gainsbourg and the English actress Jane Birkin, hadn’t previously done a comedic role in English. But she was keen to take it on after she read the scripts.
“I had a very precise sense of who she was, through the lines,” she said in a telephone interview. “A very solitary character who has her heels on, pretends to be a very strong boss, but on her own is vulnerable. It spoke to me, that double face.”
The most challenging part of the role, however, said Gainsbourg (and every other actor interviewed), was the signature speedy line delivery the Palladinos required.
“It was very difficult at first, but once I got into the rhythm of learning that much and delivering it quickly, I understood that’s Amy’s style,” she said. “It was such fun, and a kind of freedom.”
De Laâge, who didn’t speak any English before taking on the role of Cheyenne, said that at first she thought “how is it possible to speak so fast in English, with this very American dialogue, in this French accent?”
“But I worked hard,” she continued, “and I found the Amy tempo.”
De Laâge prepared intensively for the role, taking ballet, English and voice lessons — helped, she added, by the delay created by the Hollywood writer and actor strikes. She took some inspiration from the French ballet star Sylvie Guillem.
“But it’s a comedy,” she added. “So I had to create someone not totally realistic.”
“Étoile” uses dancer body doubles, including Constance Devernay for Cheyenne and Arcadian Broad for Gabin. But de Laâge and du Pontavice still had to learn the choreography to enable what Sherman-Palladino described the “magic and witchcraft” of digital effects.
“We always approach the dance sequences from a story viewpoint,” Palladino said. “You want the audience to feel they are in the middle of the dance.”
Sherman-Palladino said, “A great ballet can change your life, your thought process, make everything better for a couple of hours.”
“The arts are under siege, particularly in America,” she added. “If this show could do a small, tiny something to show that life with art is a better life, we would like that.”
