2008, My Year in Review: Slings and Arrows
Despite the fact that I think LOST is the best currently broadcasted show on television, I nonetheless discovered another show this year that won my heart.
You may say it’s the actor in me, you may say it’s the Shakespeare fan in me, but above all I believe when a piece of art (TV/film/music/etc) is passionately made and genuinely satisfying, it’s far more than the sum of its parts.
I am referring to the Canadian import, featuring one former Kid in the Hall:
Slings and Arrows.
If you’ve ever wished you ‘got’ Shakespeare a little more, this is the show for you. I have a friend who is in the theater who confessed to me that she ‘doesn’t like Shakespeare’. My response to her was she’d never seen it done well. She is now a proponent of Slings and Arrows after we recommended it to her.
I had it recommended to me a year before I actually decided to give it a chance. And, in fact, if you decide to watch it yourself I had to get past the first few episodes before I really warmed up to it.
Slings and Arrows is a show about a Shakespeare Festival in Canada. In what quickly became one of my favorite characters on television (next to Desmond, Locke, Scully and Mulder) Paul Gross plays Geoffrey Tennant, the slightly unstable artistic director of the New Burbage Theater. He’s haunted, literally, by the theater’s former artisitc director and his former best friend Oliver Wells who dies in the first episode (and yet appears in almost every subsequent episode thereafter).
In a bit of masterful plotting, the show’s creators – which includes the aforementioned Kid in the Hall Mark McKinney – set out in their three 6-episode seasons to examine the Ages of Man as presented in Shakespeare. Season 1 is Hamlet, with a then-unknown Rachel McAdams playing Ophelia. Season 2 is MacBeth and 3 is King Lear.
If it sounds too academic for you, don’t let that scare you off. The show, beyond it’s Shakespearian inside jokes and homages is also rife with hilarity besides. From the extremely quirky FrogHammer ad agency that tries to encourage McKinney’s character to market the theater offensively to the jabs and punches the show takes at musical theater in its third season to the intially-you-hate-him-then-you-love-him guest director to the theater Darren Nichols, the show has plenty to offer the non-Shakespeare fan. But be warned, you may find yourself falling in love with the bard’s work whether you planned on it or not.
Each season culminates with a performance of the play being rehearsed through the season. The Hamlet is inspired, the actor playing MacBeth in season 2 gets some hilarious and inspiring comeuppance from Geoffrey during the performance and season 3’s Lear played to pitch-perfect precision by late Canadian actor William Hutt is a performance that had Tracey and I in tears by season’s end.
This show quickly became one of my favorites of all time and we purchased the whole series on DVD after we had rented it all on Netflix. You may be reading this thinking it would be a show solely appreciated by actors but, if my nonacting wife’s affection for it is any indication, anyone can enjoy Slings and Arrows.
Darren Nichols!