Étoile season 1 is here, but is it worth your valuable watching time? Find out in our Étoile season 1 review!
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For those unfamiliar with Étoile, it’s the latest creation of Daniel and Amy Sherman-Palladino. The couple has created such hits as Gilmore Girls and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and they’re now back with a new series set in the world of professional ballet.
Yes, the pair did a previous series set around ballet called Bunheads, but this new series is its own.
This series follows Jack (Luke Kirby), who heads up the Metropolitan Ballet Company in New York City. He agrees to a talent swap with the National Ballet Company of France, headed up by his sometimes romantic interest, Geneviève (Charlotte Gainsbourg), in the hopes of spurring ticket sales for both companies.
While multiple people switch companies, the main ones are Cheyenne Toussaint (Lou de Laâge), France’s most celebrated dancer, who heads to NYC, and choreographer Tobias Bell (Gideon Glick) and dancer Mishi Duplessis (Taïs Vinolo), who head to Paris.
As one can imagine, the changes in settings and cultures hit people differently.
So many people
Étoile has a lot happening at all times, and there are a lot of people living these lives. In the brief description above, I named five characters, and all of those have supporting characters of their own. Cheyenne has a mother and a love interest, Mishi has her parents, Tobias has a love interest, Geneviève has an assistant, and Jack has family—both biological and found—that dominate his time.
Even when the various characters intersect, there are two cities involved, disappearances to account for air travel, and more. Sometimes, you feel like you need a real-time tracker to figure out where everyone is.
And this also leads to an issue with time. The two companies make the deal for one year, but when the season draws to a close, you have no real sense of how much of that year has passed. On one hand, you feel it could have been as short as two months, but you also feel like it could be about to end. You simply don’t know.
There is also an issue with how much of the show takes place in Paris. While I applaud the Palladinos for having French characters speak French, there is also an issue with the speed at which the lines are delivered. If you have any experience with the Palladinos, you know how their dialogue runs. Now, imagine half the episode being done in subtitles.
As a long-time fan of Anime, I have no issue with subtitles, but the speed with which these fly by can be exhausting.
It’s a new dawn for the Palladinos
Étoile seems to be the dawn of a new era for the creative duo. While the humor is still present, it is far more restrained than we have seen in their previous ventures. The humor is still present, but used far more judiciously than we have seen from them before. It is not bad by any means, simply surprising.
I would say of all of the Palladinos shows, I enjoyed this one the least, but that is like saying “Yes, we still ran the bases, but it wasn’t just as pretty as it could have been.” I still enjoyed the show, and I would recommend it to anyone I spoke with, but as a long-time fan of the Palladino shows, I found it more made me think about revisiting their previous works than focusing solely on this one.
Étoile season 1 premieres on Prime Video on April 24.
SCORE: 8 out of 10
Disclaimer: Prime Video provided us with all eight episodes of Étoile season 1 for this review. We watched all of the episodes in their entirety before beginning this review.
