Though if that all sounds slightly serious, then this show's a little less so, promising, in its amped-up intro, "exclusive access to all areas" (cue close-up of male dancer's bare butt) and glimpses into the aforementioned lives and loves and all that (cue talk about ballet being "like a drug").
But the dancey stuff was so beautifully shot, I kept watching anyway, despite the babble that never paused for a moment to let the pictures do much talking.
If the dancer stars of Secret Lives weren't letting us into their secret thoughts ("he has the most fantastic set of buttocks"), then that ever-present voice-over was filling in all the gaps with a lumpy, humourless script saying an awful lot about nothing much at all in the dullest possible way.
We have to accept, I guess, that the only way a show about anything as old-fashioned and dangerously arty as the Royal New Zealand Ballet is ever going to get on primetime TV is to sex itself up.
It has to get into the dressing rooms, back to the grotty, shared flat, exaggerate the tensions, stretch small things into big drama.
Which Secret Lives has duly done with its gossipy curiosity and its intrusion into the dancers' private lives, though pretty much all those dancers do is dance or think about dancing.
But couldn't the series' makers have done it a little better?
Because in the rare moments when they aren't talking about themselves, when they're caught by the camera in the pain and concentration of rehearsal, the young dancers are extraordinary creatures - possibly gazelles.
But gazelles who can casually lift one leg right up behind their heads while standing resolutely on the outstretched toes of the other.
In fact, with more of an eye for beauty and a lot less jabbering, this show might have been something wonderful, a seamless combination of the inner thoughts of the young and restless and outer beauty of that thing they do so well - you know, the dance bit.
