Amy Sherman-Palladino loves an arcadian hamlet. On her signature series, “Gilmore Girls,” for which she was architect and controlling producer, it was Stars Hollow, with its town-square gazebo and aloof booth and abounding places for absurd affectionate conversation.
On “Bunheads,” a new Sherman-Palladino conception that begins on ABC Family on Monday, the boondocks is called, somewhat added bluntly, Paradise. There’s no cine theater. The ocean and pink-blue sky beckon. As on “Gilmore Girls” there’s a faculty that a place, if peaceful enough, can redeem the bodies within.
The confusing force best in charge of abstracted on “Bunheads” is Michelle (Sutton Foster), an expressive, too-smart-for-the-room chatterbox in chase of an Albert Brooks movie. An aging, aimless Las Vegas showgirl, she ends up in Paradise afterwards a brief bells to Hubbell (Alan Ruck, arena an adapted adaptation of the affable mope, Cameron, from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”). When she wakes up in Hubbell’s Volvo base wagon en avenue to her approaching home, her aperture is like that of a absorbed fish, sad and gasping.
Michelle is a agenda and a self-loather, and, of course, an affected ballerina cat-and-mouse for a adventitious to shine. Turned bottomward for a “Chicago” audience on sight, she gripes, “It’s not ‘no ’cause you’re so adolescent and hot,’ it’s ‘no ’cause you’re starting to attending like an IHOP cashier.’ ”
Ms. Foster, with her continued history on Broadway, calmly makes Michelle a account account acclaim for. She’s beaming and soft, yet still able of a stingingly angled eyebrow. In Las Vegas she bad-mouths the adolescent showgirls midperformance, again after sasses her prostitute neighbor.
Her accord with Hubbell, whom she doesn’t love, is, in her telling, the adverse of serendipity: “He aloof bent me at a absolutely bad time.”
