What to watch: Dancing with death and desire

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This article was published 22/04/2025 (343 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This edition of viewing suggestions targets the highest human ambitions: love, survival — bodily and artistic — and a fantastic outfit that will turn heads on vacation, at the next Jane Austen book club meeting or a chic murder-mystery reveal. Forget your fears and press play on these.

Étoile

(Series premières all eight episodes on Thursday on Prime Video)

This is for those who like fast, witty banter and fancy footwork. The team of Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino (Gilmore Girls, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) have a new series with some familiar faces about famed ballet companies in New York and Paris.

Both are in such deep financial trouble that they reluctantly agree to a Hail Mary so outlandish it just might work: swap talent and swap cities! Kooky bunheads! Filming in both cities makes for some gorgeous scenes.

The talent is also head-turning, including Mrs. Maisel alums Luke Kirby and Gideon Glick, Gilmore Girls’ Yanic Truesdale (Montrealer!), Charlotte Gainsbourg (The Pale Blue Eye, Antichrist), David Alvarez (West Side Story, American Rust) and Lou de Laâge (The Innocents) as the diva Cheyenne.

 

Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue

(Series premières with a weekly rollout on Friday on Crave)

“Ten bodies. Nine passports. One mystery.” Of the nine bodies recovered from the plane crash that puts this story in motion, only one of the eight passengers, one flight attendant and one pilot died in the crash.

The other presumed crash survivors appear to have been murdered, each in a very singular way.

Whirling flashback sequences reveal a little about each of the characters as the jungle survival story unfolds. Eric McCormack stars in a very smart set of glasses.

 

Wear Whatever the F You Want

(Series premières with all eight episodes on Tuesday, April 29, on Prime Video)

You might, as Clinton Kelly says in the trailer, recognize the hosts of this show from their old show What Not to Wear. That cat-scratchy makeover show ran from 2003 to 2013.

This new makeover show reunites co-hosts Kelly and Stacy London, both of whom have been busy for the last dozen years on red carpets, daytime talk shows and food and fashion competition shows.

The sniping recommences as they “help” their guests realize their fantasy fashion dreams in, of course, New York City.

 

The Four Seasons

(Series premières with one episode on Thursday, May 1, on Netflix)

At a certain point in this remake of the lovely 1981 film (streaming on Plex), Will Forte’s character proposes a toast: “To friends, family and finding your soulmates.” Emphasis on finding.

When one of three couples who vacation together splits up, things get very existential. Over a year of four fabulous seasonal vacations, everybody questions what they want, what they’ve got and what they’re going to do about the space in between.

The cast here is even more spectacular than that of the original film’s Alan Alda and Carol Burnett, with the modern couples played by Forte and Tina Fey (also co-creator), Steve Carell and Kerri Kenney-Silver, and Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani.

 

Masterpiece: Miss Austen

(Four-part series premières Sunday, May 4, on PBS)

Sufficiently fervent fans of Jane Austen already know the true story that this new series tweaks: the novelist’s sister Cassandra burned nearly all of Jane’s letters.

Literary vandalism! Shock! Horror! Or… a “witty and heartbreaking story of sisterly love”?

What makes a legacy, what should be kept private and who gets to decide are among the questions asked in this Austenian miniseries.

Keely Hawes (The Durrells in Corfu, Bodyguard) plays the firebug to Patsy Ferran (Living) as young Jane, with Rose Leslie (Game of Thrones) standing in as family friend Isabella.

 

Broadcast dates subject to change. Questions, comments gratefully received at denise.duguay@freepress.mb.ca