Please Like Me's Tom Ward on writing Étoile with Gilmore Girls creators
Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, executive producers of Gilmore Girls and The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, had read one of his scripts.
Not only that: they were interested in hiring him to write on their upcoming ballet dramedy series, Étoile.
A few days after the Please Like Me Star talked with the couple in late 2022, he got another call — this time from his agent.
Photo shows
A man in a blue room looking into a mirror.
Josh Thomas on how he stumbled into being an audience surrogate for millennials around Australia.
"He was like, 'Hey, remember how you promised that if you went for this job, that you'd move to New York with your family?'" Ward tells ABC Entertainment.
"I was like, 'Yeah, I remember saying that thing that I was obviously going to say just to get this meeting.'
"
He was like, 'Well, now you do have to move to New York … because you're going to be working on this show.'
"
While Ward says he "wouldn't recommend" trying to secure US visas for an entire family over the Christmas period, they pulled it off.
Within two months, they'd swapped summer in rural Aotearoa/New Zealand for Brooklyn in the depths of winter.
Why Tom Ward wanted to explore the weird world of dance
Ward, who has "absolutely watched some Gilmore Girls", says he "felt a definite kind of spiritual connection" to Sherman-Palladino and Palladino before he even met the Emmy-Award-winning couple.
He says they share a "similar gaze" to that of Josh Thomas, creator and star of Please Like Me.
"When they look at the world, [they see] the theatrics of life that can exist around everyday drama," Ward muses.
Much of Ward's career has revolved around this idea, from his writing on
He immediately saw Étoile's potential as an extension of that work.
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The show sees two flailing rival ballet companies in New York and Paris trade their top talent for a year, and launch tandem seasons and a transatlantic marketing campaign to publicise the move.
The desperate plot to boost dwindling ticket sales and improve reviews just so happens to be funded by a weapons manufacturer's blood money.
At first, NY ballet company exec Jack McMillan (played by Luke Kirby, pictured) is in denial about the fact the future of the dance is in question.
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Supplied: Prime Video
)
The series primarily follows Jack McMillan (The Marvelous Mrs Maisel star Luke Kirby), the nepo baby/executive director of the Metropolitan Ballet Theatre in New York, and Geneviève Lavigne (Charlotte Gainsbourg), the cutthroat head of Le Ballet National in Paris; the competing execs once enjoyed a romantic entanglement and still have the tension to show for it.
Then there's Cheyenne Antonius (Lou de Laâge), the equally despised, feared and revered titular "danseuse étoile", (lead dancer) who is so good at what she does that her volatility has been permitted in Paris. But will she get away with that behaviour in New York?
Tobias Bell (played by Gideon Glick, pictured) is one of the dancers and choreographers caught up in the swap who really wish they hadn't been.
(
Supplied: Prime Video
)
Among others, Cheyenne swaps places with Tobias Bell (Gideon Glick, another Mrs Maisel alum), the brilliant but exceedingly particular choreographer who struggles with all the change that comes with a move to France.
There is drama, and a lot of it, but the mesmerising ballet performances interspersed throughout offer a reprieve, as well as a reminder of what every character in Étoile is fighting for: a world in which such artistry survives, and might one day thrive again.
We're not in Stars Hollow anymore — Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino's latest show is the definition of grand.
(
Supplied: Prime Video
)
From Please Like Me to table reads in Paris
Ward is still reeling from the experience of bringing Étoile's first season to the screen from the writers' room.
Everything about it felt novel, from heading into work at a real film lot in Brooklyn ("it looks like the set of 30 Rock"), to Sherman-Palladino's office.
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"It's a sight to behold in itself — that's all I'll say. It's gorgeous," Ward teases.
When pushed a little more, he adds: "OK, all I'll say is: multiple chandeliers."
The scale of the production was so much larger than anything Ward had worked on in Australia, and so was his role.
"For my episode, I had the responsibility of making sure the script made it to screen, and that was another real showbiz moment," he says.
"The reading of my script happened in Paris because that's where we were shooting [at the time].
"It was quite surreal to be sitting in what was the set for this unbelievable Paris ballet studio, watching all these incredible actors read my episode."
And working with veteran TV creators Sherman-Palladino and Palladino, he says, was "an amazing and huge learning experience".
"I'd never worked with people with that much experience under their belt, [or who] understand the value of personality in a writers' room.
"
Their instincts for what works and what doesn't makes the whole process feel like a well-oiled machine.
"
Indeed, Étoile is the result of years of exploration by Sherman-Palladino and Palladino into not only dramedy, but the weirdness of the dance world. (
Photo shows
Emily, left, wears a white wedding dress and veil as she cuts a pink and red cake with Tom, right, both smiling.
This is the story of how Emily Barclay and Tom Ward's relationship started between takes.
First, there was the iconic dance teacher Miss Patty, who ran a chaotic studio in their enduring cult hit Gilmore Girls; then there was their far less successful 2012 dramedy,
Étoile feels like a natural evolution from those two series; it's as fast-paced and zingy as you'd expect of any Sherman-Palladino, Palladino offering, with the compelling side characters their shows produce so well. Gilmore Girls and The Marvelous Mrs Maisel fans will delight in many familiar faces.
It also tends towards The Marvelous Mrs Maisel in its massive scale, level of darkness, maturity and Jewish representation.
Étoile was
When asked what we can expect from him in the future, he coyly says: "You can say, 'Totally exciting things.'"
Étoile is streaming now on Prime Video.
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