The Big Read: Breaking Bad producer's vicious ballet drama

Sarah Hay as Claire in Lightbox TV show Flesh and Bone.

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Chris Schulz goes behind the scenes on a show about the nasty side of ballet.

A ballet dancer sits slumped in her practice room, picking at a blackened toenail on her swollen foot. It's a gruesome sight - and it's about to get worse.

Slowly, she peels off the nail, and blood oozes out. Instead of stemming the flow, she sweeps it up with her finger, wipes it across her lips, then leans sideways and kisses the mirror beside her.

Amazingly, that sick scene from Flesh & Bone doesn't come close to describing how depraved Lightbox's new show gets over its eight episodes, which premiere on the streaming service on Monday.

Sarah Hay as Claire, a ballet dancer with a troubled past, from the Lightbox TV series Flesh and Bone.

"The first two episodes are the lightest and it wanders off into the darkness after that," warns showrunner and executive producer Moira Walley-Beckett, a seasoned Breaking Bad contributor who won an Emmy for writing that show's best episode, Ozymandias.

Like the 2010 film Black Swan, Flesh & Bone promises to take an unflinching, no-holds-barred look at the characters working within the world of ballet.

There's Paul Grayson, the unhinged artistic director for the fictional American Ballet Company played with delicious venom by Ben Daniels.

Grayson has grisly sex in his office while taking business calls, waves hopeful dancers away from auditions with a disgusted look and a flick of the wrist, and kicks them out of the company for minor indiscretions like an annoying cellphone tone.

Then there's the show's lead, Claire Robbins (Sarah Hay), who has run away from home to chase her ballerina dream. She hides her sickening foot injury from the company, spies on her flatmate and a male companion, and nearly prostitutes herself out during a drugged haze.

Flesh & Bone is vicious, gripping viewing and absolutely true to life, swears the star.

"Everything they portray during filming has happened to me," says Hay, a trained dancer with a minor role on Black Swan to her name before landing the role of Claire.

Struggling with her career in America, Hay was dancing with the Dresden Semperoper Ballett in Germany when asked to audition for Flesh & Bone by Walley-Beckett, who was determined to use real dancers - not actors and body doubles - for her show ...

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