‘Flesh and Bone,’ tangled, padded mess

Many critics say that in recent years TV has become more creative, more adventurous and generally better than movies. Screenwriters who might once have traded on their success in TV by pitching a movie are instead trying to sell their next series.

That isn’t always good news for TV, as shown by Starz’s new limited series “Flesh and Bone.” Created by Moira Walley-Beckett, an Emmy-winning writer from “Breaking Bad,” it might have made a concise, if puzzling, art film.

But at eight 60-minute-long episodes, it’s hopelessly and frustratingly padded. Walley-Beckett’s point is still hard to discern, but whatever it is, it’s not worth the time.

In the premiere episode, airing this Sunday, Nov. 8, at 8 p.m., Claire Robbins (Sarah Hay) sneaks out of what looks like her childhood bedroom as we hear what sounds like the voice of an angry man outside her door.

Claire, who is from Pittsburgh, travels to New York City to do an open audition at the fictional American Ballet Company. She had spent only one year at a Pittsburgh ballet company before dropping out for a dark reason that will remain a mystery for hours but will be both unpleasant and disappointing once revealed.

At the audition, the company’s capricious artistic director, Paul Grayson (Ben Daniels), goes quickly from nearly throwing Claire out for forgetting to mute her ringtone to deciding she could be his new prima ballerina.

Paul decides to start the season by starring Claire in a new ballet commissioned from a hip choreographer. This earns Claire the enmity of the company’s current prima ballerina, Kiira (Irina Dvorovenko), who is approaching retirement age.

Claire rooms downtown with another dancer, Mia (Emily Tyra), who also resents the competition. Their apartment building comes complete with a manic homeless man, Romeo (Damon Herriman), whose poetic rants may have something to do with the point of the show, but since that point is indiscernible, the rants get tiresome quickly.

Another dancer, Daphne (Raychel Diane Weiner), despite having a rich father, works at a strip club that’s run by a ballet-loving Russian tough named Sergei Zelenkov (Patrick Page). Although Claire projects an air of virginal innocence, she is intrigued by Daphne’s moonlighting job.

Other characters come and go without really driving the story or engaging our interest. They start to feel like filler.

The camera lingers far too much on Claire’s sad or impassive face.

Sarah Hay, who, like most of the actors playing company members, is a professional dancer, almost never succeeds in making her long close-ups tell us what’s going on inside Claire’s head.

Since Hay proves she has a wider range in a scene in which she’s comically intoxicated, we have to blame the directors for this.

Paul, the second most salient character, is sometimes loving and idealistic and sometimes sadistic and tyrannical. At first, he’s hard to figure out, but these mood swings soon become predictable — and as unbearable as they would be in real life.

The show favors that bluish, bleached-out look that in current TV drama suggests alienation and seriousness. Many scenes open with a close-up on an inanimate object — a toe shoe, a cigarette, a bottle cap — that often fails to justify the prominence it’s been given.

The dancers’ nude bodies are also front-and-center, to varying degrees of gratuitousness.

Lovers of dance, rather than lovers of dancers’ bodies, will appreciate the rehearsal and performance scenes. For once, the unusually long scenes don’t feel like filler.

The plot is driven by two elements. The first is the progress toward Claire’s premiere in the new ballet. The plot elements — the mercurial leader, the aging rival, the demanding patrons — are familiar.

At one point Paul shouts at a colleague, “Don’t you dare tell me what I can and cannot do!” Memories of hundreds of other fictional creative geniuses come flooding in.

The second major plot element is Claire’s secret and the danger it may entail.

Although we feel some suspense and concern for her safety, we never get to know her well enough to truly sympathize with her or to understand how her secret reflects her or shaped her.

When the secret is revealed, it’s such a heavy back story that it overwhelms the current story. And it makes Claire’s behavior even harder to fathom.

The two elements fail to play off each other in a meaningful way. If “Flesh and Bone” is supposed to be telling us something about how the creative process is fueled by private pain, the message is lost.

If it were a movie, we could have failed to get much from it more quickly.