Parents' Guide to Étoile

After one look at this intriguing, propulsive series set in the world of professional dance, viewers are likely to be glad they're just watching a show, instead of working in the milieu themselves. Dance dramas tend to cycle through a number of clichés on the way to the big show that usually ends proceedings, and Étoile duly goes through many of the same steps, with mean and capricious choreographers riding herd on trembling dancers, demanding audiences, pitiless financiers, and dance directors who throw themselves into new affairs with each dawning season. But the Palladinos' way with large, sprawling casts full of quirky characters gives Étoile lightness and ease, and though they make professional dance look both stressful and terrifying, viewers will soon cozy up to the characters they meet.

It doesn't hurt that viewers will recognize two actors who made an impression in the Palladinos' last collab, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: Luke Kirby (who played Lenny Bruce in TMMM) and Gideon Glick (who played hapless-but-talented magician Alfie) are both on hand, as director of a New York-based dance company and a choreographer and instructor at that same company. Here they play characters made of much sterner stuff, but they also give viewers new to the politics of dance a foothold in the world, as it were, before those viewers get swept away with the action of two dance companies in major cities both struggling to survive. Most of the drama is offstage instead of on in this quick-moving series full of surprises and reversals, and that's just the way viewers will like it.