Étoile Creator Amy Sherman-Palladino On Bringing The 'Strange, Elegant, Gross, Bloody' World Of Ballet To The Masses

Coming off of the period-pristine high-wire act that was the Emmy-winning The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Amy Sherman-Palladino was looking forward to a lower degree of difficulty with the contemporary-era Étoile, her new eight-episode Amazon ballet dramedy dropping Thursday.

"We thought Étoile would be a lot easier, but it's not," she confesses to TVLine. "It's hard in a different way. Maisel was all about skirts and wigs and, 'Oh, those cars won't start because they're from 1942,' but Étoile has its own challenges. We have so much dance and face replacement and other things that we did not have to deal with on Maisel."

Those other things include translating her and husband/Étoile co-creator Daniel Palladino's unique rapid-fire vernacular into another language (in this case French).

"Everyone's got an opinion on how to translate [our writing]," Sherman-Palladino explains. "We went through translator after translator after translator. [Étoile's French leading lady] Charlotte Gainsbourg — who knew Gilmore and Maisel so well — would say, 'This doesn't capture your humor at all... '

"There's a lot of formality in the French language that Americans don't have," the Gilmore Girls and Bunheads vet continues. "Something like, 'Eh, so what?' will be, like, four sentences in French. A lot of times it's trying to find the equivalent in rhythm. Luckily, we ended up finding really good [translators] who have been very helpful with that."

With Étoile, Sherman-Palladino's mission was simple: Offer audiences a more authentic portrait of the ballet world.

"We wanted to do a show that wasn't fluffy and light, or about a bunch of mean girls putting glass in your toe shoes," she explains. "Ballet is either [depicted as] soft and smooshy like a little music box that you open up and the little ballerina dances around, or it's Black Swan. There's not a middle ground of what the reality of this very strange workplace is. It's fun and it's beautiful and it's funny and it's weird and it's strange and it's elegant and it's gross and it's bloody and it smells terrible and yet you look gorgeous and everyone is in it because they just love what it is."