From Gilmore Girls to Mrs Maisel: How one woman perfected comfort TV

Sydney Morning Herald

20-05-2025

No one makes TV like Amy Sherman-Palladino. Since the start of the century, she's created warmly welcoming, female-focused series about wonderfully eccentric communities.
They have a distinctive look and sound. Whip-smart dialogue is delivered at screwball-comedy speed. Conversations between characters, typically loaded with pop-culture references, bounce back and forth like verbal ping-pong. Episodes are rich with lush colour and distinguished by a shooting style that frequently favours extended, elaborately choreographed camerawork.
In her sunny fictional worlds, there are no mutilated bodies, missing children or rampaging creatures. She produces comfort TV of the best kind: not mushy, bland or glib, but happily surprising, like big bowls of festive bonbons. And fun. Chicken-soup-for-the-soul stuff.
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A writer, producer, director and showrunner who works with her writer-producer-director husband, Daniel Palladino, ASP has given us Gilmore Girls (2000-07); its 2016 sequel Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life; Bunheads (2012); and her masterwork The Marvelous Mrs Maisel (2017-23). In 2018, with Mrs Maisel, she became the first woman to win Emmys in the comedy writing and directing categories.
Now there's Etoile, a culture-clash comedy about a couple of elite ballet companies struggling with rising costs and declining audiences whose managers hatch a scheme to generate publicity and reignite interest in their endangered art form.
For one year, the Metropolitan Ballet Theatre in New York, run by Jack McMillan (Luke Kirby, Mrs Maisel's Lenny Bruce) and Le Ballet National in Paris, managed by interim director Geneviève Lavigne (Charlotte Gainsbourg), will swap stars. Famously fiery Parisian etoile (star) Cheyenne Toussaint (Lou de Laâge) will endeavour to put aside her contempt for American food, coffee and culture to headline productions in New York, while young ballerina Mishi Duplessis (Taïs Vinolo) will reluctantly return home to France, miserably clutching a plush toy of a bagel.
ASP's series are invariably celebrations of their communities, whether it's the cozy east-coast town of Stars Hollow in Gilmore Girls, the Californian coastal hamlet of Paradise on Bunheads or the Manhattan of Mrs Maisel, with its clubs, theatres, diners and delis.
Consistent through them is her fondness for smart, feisty and sometimes spiky female protagonists, as well as an affection for tetchy, formidable older women such as Gilmore Girls' Emily and Bunheads' Fanny (both played by Kelly Bishop). Now comes Bruna (Marie Berto), Cheyenne's mother, a woman of few gruff words who wears a workman's uniform and tinkers with goodness-knows-what in her trash-and-treasure-filled apartment.
Ballet also features regularly in ASP's productions: while Etoile focuses on a pair of prestige companies, Bunheads is largely set in a small home-based ballet school, and one of the cornerstones of Stars Hollow is Miss Patty's School of Ballet. Showbiz is in Sherman-Palladino's blood. Her father was a comedian, her mother a dancer and, as a child, she trained as a dancer, recently telling Vanity Fair: 'I stopped dancing the minute I realised somebody was going to actually pay me to do something, and I could have a sandwich'.
Etoile demonstrates that she reveres the qualities required to succeed in this sphere: grit, grace, discipline, dedication and endurance. At times, Etoile simply focuses on the extraordinary athleticism and sheer beauty of the bodies in rehearsal and performance. As well, ASP has explained, 'They're an odd, amazing bunch of people'. So, ideal for one of her shows.
Her commitment to them extends to the authenticity sought in portraying their world and the attention to detail in evoking it. More than 1000 real-life dancers auditioned to fill roles in the two companies. Constance Devernay, the body double for de Laage, was a principal dancer with the Scottish Ballet for seven years; Vinolo dances with the National Ballet of Canada.
Episodes are filled with shots of dancers going about their daily routines: stretching, chatting, napping, scrolling on phones, lacing shoes, bandaging feet. And when it comes to shooting the performances, the camera sits back respectfully, watching in wide shot, the directors understanding that there's no need to try to pump-up the action with fast edits or cuts to close-ups.
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That laudable effort aside, Etoile – which has been green-lit for a second season – is no Mrs Maisel. It certainly has its charms, predictably to do with snappy dialogue and vibrant characters, as well as the visual pleasures of two photogenic cities. But it can be a bit clunky, lacking the sleek flair of its predecessor, and it's prone to overstatement, particularly in terms of haughty French folk and their disdain for crass Americans. Where Mrs Maisel neatly avoids stereotypes and often surprises with its character developments, Etoile sometimes succumbs to clichés. Although it should be noted that Gainsbourg nails the tough manoeuvre of appearing both frazzled and chic.
To its credit, it's not all colour, movement and frisky banter as the series also tackles questions about the uncomfortable union of art and commerce. The talent-swap initiative can only be achieved with funding from flamboyant billionaire Crispin Shamblee (Simon Callow). Described by Jack as 'a right-wing, boot-licking toadie for dictators', he's made much of his fortune from an array of dirty deals.
Clearly having a fine time with the role, Callow is allowed to go over-the-top for comic effect. However, his confrontation with Cheyenne is chilling, as is his clear-eyed perception of the ugly realities of the world. Ballet might bring beauty, lift the spirits and allow its practitioners and those watching them to 'play in the clouds', as Cheyenne puts it. But without financial support – sometimes from people such as Shamblee – it might not survive.
At its heart, Etoile aims to celebrate ballet and the unifying, uplifting joy it can bring. Sherman-Palladino has said: 'My whole life I've known [that], without ballet, the world is a lesser place'. Similarly, the TV world be poorer without ASP.