Inside the World of Ballet’s Tormented Swans

In the new series Flesh and Bone (premiering Nov. 8 on Starz), a talented young ballerina moves to New York while being pursued by a violent man from her past, finds herself used as bait to ensure her dance company’s funding and–as graphically as one can–loses a toenail. And that’s in the first two episodes. This is a show that’s gleefully unafraid to indulge in soapy twists. It’s like an eight-part version of the classic dance film The Red Shoes, infused with the DNA of Scandal.

Moira Walley-Beckett, who created Flesh and Bone, was approached by Starz to create a drama about ballet while she was still working on Breaking Bad. (Last year she won an Emmy for writing one of that show’s final episodes.) “I came up with the show in my seedy motel room in Albuquerque,” Walley-Beckett says. “Starz asked how I was going to fit in all the story. I said, ‘We will.'”

Flesh and Bone follows Claire (Sarah Hay) as she settles into her new life at the fictional American Ballet Company, fending off overexertion and her fellow dancers’ jealousy when she quickly becomes the company’s star. To create Claire’s world, Walley-Beckett drew from her own experience studying ballet from age 4. She insisted on casting professional dancers rather than actors one could cut around (as in 2010’s Black Swan, in which Hay, a soloist at the Semperoper Ballet in Dresden, Germany, also appeared). “It’s not just pretty,” Walley-Beckett says of the ballet world. “We’re watching them sweat and breathe and leap and soar. It’s not editing magic, or magical realism. It’s down and dirty.”

Flesh and Bone charges, unprettily, into a TV landscape full of stories about the lives of morally compromised men. In that context, the currents of passion and jealousy that float freely among the ballerinas are rare and welcome. Walley-Beckett says she kept Breaking Bad’s intensity but reversed the circumstances. “Claire’s journey is the opposite of an antihero’s. She’s got so many emotional deficits, and her quest over the series is to be an ordinary person within these vicious circumstances.”

That may be a worthy goal, but a dancer as gifted as Claire can never be truly ordinary. And her journey through what Walley-Beckett calls a “shark tank, where everybody’s naked, dating, loves each other, hates each other,” promises to move her further from sanity. Starz will be releasing all of Flesh and Bone’s episodes to its on-demand platforms in a Netflix-style drop the day of the show’s premiere, but Walley-Beckett doesn’t anticipate extreme binge watching. “I’d be shocked if people can get past four in a sitting without needing medication, a call to their therapist or a stiff drink.”

–DANIEL D’ADDARIO