Everyone who has seen at least two seasons of The Wire considers it the greatest television ever made. And it is. But a close runner-up, to my mind, is Slings and Arrows, a program about a group of Shakespearean actors that ran on Canadian television from 2003 to 2006. Different as it is from The Wire—it is billed, for one thing, as a comedy, though I would debate that categorization—Slings and Arrows shares some of the David Simon show’s crucial elements: beautifully written scripts, wonderful acting, a deeply informed sense of how particular institutions work on the inside, and, above all, enormous respect for the audience’s intelligence.
If you plan to rent this show on Netflix, as I just did, be forewarned that it is addictive. You will receive your DVD containing three episodes—half of each season—and you will plan on sedately watching one each night. But as soon as you have finished the first, you will be unable to resist moving on to the second, and then, no matter how late it is, the third; so if you want to get a reasonable night’s sleep, it’s safest just to allocate a full three hours on the night the disk arrives.
The plot centers on something called the New Burbage Festival (think Stratford, Ontario), which exists to present Shakespeare plays, but also promotes ghastly new Canadian playwrights, develops “hard-edged” musicals, and supplements its dwindling resources with forays into dreadful commercial ventures. At the beginning of the first season, the festival’s artistic director, Oliver Welles, is hit by a truck and dies; he reappears thereafter only as a ghost. I can become impatient with this ghost routine (I hated it in Six Feet Under, for instance—but then, I hated that whole series), but I can also be entranced by it, as I was in Topper, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and Truly, Madly, Deeply. In Slings and Arrows, Oliver-as-ghost is essential if occasionally annoying: in fact, his annoying quality is part of what makes him essential.
The only person who can see and hear Oliver, in the first two seasons of the show, is Geoffrey, the certifiably crazy, very attractive, somewhat fumbling, deeply sensitive actor-turned-director who is drafted into Oliver’s job. Geoffrey and Oliver have an old history (Oliver directed Geoffrey in his most famous performance, as Hamlet, during which he went crazy and had to leave acting forever), so when Oliver appears in front of Geoffrey and starts ordering him around, their interaction has the quality of an old couple’s disagreements. To complicate this history, the production that Oliver left unfinished at his death, and that Geoffrey has to take over directing, is Hamlet.
But I have not begun to indicate the complicated strands of plot and character that make up each six-episode season. We get to know all the onstage actors—Ellen, the temperamental female lead, who is also Geoffrey’s former and future lover; Frank and Cyril, the two old English homosexuals who play all the spear-carrying parts; Jerry, the slightly pathetic guy who is always the understudy for the main role; plus the American movie star imported to play Hamlet, the self-important blow-hard who takes on Macbeth, the aging Canadian Shakespearean who becomes Lear, and the series of pretty ingenues who portray Ophelia, Juliet, and Cordelia. (The last of these roles is played by Sarah Polley, the brilliant young actress who directed the film Away From Her and whose real-life father, Michael Polley, plays one of the two gay old Englishmen.) Behind them are the administrators who run the New Burbage Festival— most notably Richard, the number-crunching executive director, and Anna, his put-upon assistant—along with some hilarious sidekicks, my favorite of whom is Darren, the violently pretentious, patently idiotic, theater-hating director who is Geoffrey’s nemesis. And behind them are all the schemers, moneymakers, board-members, ministers of culture, advertising executives, and other disreputable types who inhabit the nether regions of any corporate enterprise, but especially a non-profit corporate enterprise that runs to many millions of dollars every year. Art and money mingle cleverly in this series, and one of the more amusing plot strands involves the “re-branding” of New Burbage during Season Two, engineered by a glossy con-man who calls himself Sanjay. (He is not Indian, but has Zen pretensions.) It is this sort of wit that has caused the series to be labeled a comedy, I suppose, and there will indeed be many moments when you laugh out loud. But the humor is dark and frightening and accurate, and the sadness that underlies the humor is palpable and often foregrounded.
It’s hard to separate the acting and the writing in this show, because the people who wrote it seem so deeply inside the actor’s life that the lines are designed for perfect, convincing delivery. There is a reason for this: the people who wrote it are actors, and they all appear in the show. The three writers who are credited with every episode are Susan Coyne (who plays the long-suffering Anna), Mark McKinney (who plays the alternately foolish, evil, and endearing Richard), and Bob Martin (who appears briefly in Season One as Terry, an accountant taking a Change Your Corporate Life With Shakespeare workshop which Geoffrey undermines by turning it into a real acting class). I don’t know what kind of Shakespearean credentials these three have, but somebody in the crowd has thought long and carefully about how these plays work and what makes them wonderful. The series, as a whole, is an argument in favor of Shakespeare as a writer for the living stage, and against the kind of corporate dumbing-down that Shakespeare festivals often indulge in. This is not just a general argument: when Geoffrey, speaking to his actors, hazards a guess at how Ophelia’s mind works or contemplates what makes Lear’s fate moving, we learn something profound about the play itself. And even the people who can’t perform their parts properly (the egotistical Macbeth, the hateful initial Ophelia, the TV-star-turned Goneril, the mumbling Kent) show us something about how those roles function in their respective plays.
About ten percent of each season’s dialogue (at a guess) consists of lines from the specific Shakespeare tragedy that’s being performed by the company during that period. Just as the play’s language fuses with and enriches the script, its themes extend off the stage into the lives of the actors, managers, and behind-the-scenes players. The first couple of seasons feature Hamlet and Macbeth (with a side venture into Romeo and Juliet), and those two ghost-ridden plays naturally offer plenty of scope for Oliver’s supernatural appearances; in the third season the play is King Lear, which has no ghost, but in which the dying actor who plays the dying Lear begins to see and hear Oliver, just as Geoffrey always has. This kind of gentle but profound shift (nothing much is made of it in the script—it just starts happening, and we notice) is exactly what Slings and Arrows is best at. Subtlety is its finest mode, which is a rare thing indeed for something that is also so markedly satirical.
The show as a whole does that remarkable thing Shakespeare himself manages: to offer at once both comedy and tragedy, self-mockery and sincerity, manifestly artificial language and immediate psychological reality. Despite the fact that it is TV rather than staged performance, the emotions it provokes resemble those I have previously felt only in the live theater. As I watched the final episode of the third season last night, with tears in my eyes throughout the whole last twenty minutes—for Lear, for the actor playing Lear, for all the other players in the series, and for myself at the fact that it was coming to an end—I wondered how I was ever going to replace it.
—May 4, 2008