Etoile on Amazon: Ballet Trash or Ballet Process?

On phones and the way that all ballet art is either trash or process.

TW: Spoilers, but this is an Amy Sherman-Palladino show, not Breaking Bad. They shouldn’t matter! (And that is another essay.)

There are two types of ballet entertainments about ballet in this world, ballet trash — Grand Guignol gothic about the bodily extremes that dance takes you to, inspired by the biographies that have come out detailing every drug taken and food forgotten while in the pursuit of quixotic excellence in a complicated sport and art, embodied most brightly in Black Swan. Ballet process is the other one, and this is usually a girly fantasia of sorts. Center Stage may be one that comes to mind — they clearly had a gritty version in mind when they first wrote it, Natalie Portman was flirting with the lead role, and ended up with a charming teen movie starring dancers with charisma — but there’s plenty of examples, and a lot are teen-focused ballet shows. One of the better ones I saw recently was called L’Opera, and that was a semi-realistic look at the Paris Opera Ballet, focusing on the star dancer, the new girl, and the artistic director, starring the incredibly compelling Ariane Labed and Suzy Bemba. It was a little bit pulpy and a little bit of a stirring coming-of-age sports story.

As someone who has Gilmore Girls nearly memorized and who has New York City Ballet on their resume, I am comically in a place to talk about the new Amy Sherman-Palladino show, Etoile. Is it ballet trash? Ballet process? That’s for you to decide! It’s cursed, unfortunately, with being a classic ASP slow burn. Starts out with the characters deep in ASP-annoying quippy mode, only for the central French ballet dancer, Cheyenne, to become my goddess at about episode six.

At this point, the show consists of one season, eight episodes, and Amazon dumped them all at once late in April. It’s not likely to break into the crowded Emmy races, and it seems to suffer from a lack of buzz — I saw more ads for Mr. Beast’s sick-shit end-of-days game show than this one — that’s implying it’s probably one and done. And if that is the case, it’s a shame!

The short logline for the show, and how you can tell it’s pretty much a blank check, is that it’s about two ballet companies at the top of their game, but it’s also about the strange personalities and obsessions of people who devote their waking hours to an art form that’s expensive, becoming outdated in the cultural stream, and trending towards niche (honestly, relatable, so, let’s say … every art form today that isn’t a dumb TikTok, look at all the sad literary writers opining about the state of Literature, capital L on Substack).

There’s a scene in the season finale that sort of horrified me and charmed me at the same time. A ballet being performed at the Paris Opera House breaks down, due to various reasons, and the beleaguered head of the ballet, Charlotte Gainsbourg, sees an opportunity: she tells her assistant to put the livestream up on new outdoor screen on the front of the historical building, previously ad space for the clothing company APC.

As the genius choreographer berates, encourages, and envisions what he needs his dancers to dance, a growing crowd gathers outside. They are enamored of the process — the way that a ballet gets made — and meanwhile, Gainsbourg’s character is learning that because the audience in the theater is putting the scene up, live, on their various social feeds, this live disaster, destruction, leading to creation, is drawing an audience, maybe even going viral.

But if you’ve been to a ballet, this scene is a little bit horrifying to consider, as one of the big fights these days for ushers at ballet shows is making sure that people don’t take out their phones in order to steal the performances for their own use. (The blaring flashlight of a phone in the air is deadly to live performance, distracting the audience and breaking the spell.) The scene is also, on the other hand, a little bit magical. And because ASP is who she is, the moment is punctuated with an influencer in the crowd outside the opera house, speaking in obnoxious buzzwords, using the event to do a Get Ready With Me video. The scene ends with a lovely glance from above at the colorful umbrellas creating their own art above the crowd, Gainsbourg’s assistant filming it all on his phone, and Gainsbourg, finally, telling him to put it down and to pay attention.

I found this scene befuddling. Was it a showcase of the transformative power of art, how great art is great art and it can find an audience, if the audience knows it exists? Or was it a deeply cynical look at how to make art into an actual event these days? Or maybe it was both, all, deeply conflicted at its core, and it revolved around the two least compelling characters in the series to me, the “genius boy-wonder choreographer” and the hungry for more male dancer who was more arrogance than talent?

So while it should’ve felt like the grand coronation in a series that, to a point, was easy to watch and pretty good at points, it had me ruminating on the influencer in the crowd, a symbol of how ASP takes strange potshots at the internet-addled youth, seeing them as vacuous vipers as opposed to her passionate weirdo characters known for their intensity and lack of like-me pleasingness and their tightrope walk between annoying and quippy to brilliant and compelling.

What was the show trying to say? Is the only way for ballet to matter to the public again something along the lines of virality and drama? Will we like it when we have the chance to see it? Is everyone exceedingly stupid these days save characters in Amy Sherman-Palladino shows? I really couldn’t tell you the answers — yes to all, maybe? — and unfortunately the scene ended on a kiss with the two characters I didn’t care about in the show, despite enjoying the slight Justin Peck-teasing embodied in the genius choreographer character, so the chord just felt a little bit dissonant.

Etoile was messy, sure, expensive, probably, and I really hope it gets another season. When Amy Sherman-Palladino is on, she’s unmatched. At its best it’s a show for dreamers and dreamers have a hard time of it lately. I think she could get there with more episodes. It felt like it was just beginning, and so many ideas about ballet process were in the air. The process even lent itself to the dancing scenes: every extended ballet had a credit scene flash by, crediting the dancers, choreographers, and the musicians. It was a small touch, but a meaningful illustration of love, and respect, for an art form, that at its best can take you through the clouds, in communion with people who can fly — just for one moment.