Étoile, an eight-episode spoof of the world of ballet dancers by creator Amy Sherman Palladino (airing on Prime Video), centers around an elaborately choreographed PR stunt in which rival ballet companies in New York City and Paris swap their leading dancers in the hopes of getting more young people to go to the ballet.
The show's premise raises echoes of the historic exchanges of dancers between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a focus of Associate Professor Anne Searcy's research and the topic of her book Ballet in the Cold War: An American-Soviet Exchange. Searcy is quoted extensively in this Time article by Olivia B. Waxman exploring this era of cultural diplomacy in the arts and the ways the Cold War-era exchanges differed from those depicted in the fictional world of Étoile.