User reviews

You can tell that this TV show came out of a country other the the US because it's so well acted, very funny and just plain brilliant. It's unashamedly aimed at adults with IQ's over 10. I've been a huge fan of Stephen Ouimettes for years so I expected nothing but the best from him, but what a pleasant surprise to find this show chock a block with actors who actually can act. I watched the first two seasons straight through the night purring like a cat with a saucer of cream. It's great fun seeing how the theatre works behind the scenes - at last a show with a unique theme, original ideas and clever writing. I hope this one lasts and lasts.

I don't have much to say about this series other than it is one of the best television series of all time! Anyone who has the slightest appreciation for Shakespeare or the theatre in general will get instantly hooked on this series, each season having one of Shakespeare's major tragedies at it's focus. Paul Gross proves himself to be one of the most underrated actors working to day as the brilliant Geoffrey Tennant, and his real life wife Martha Burns is wonderful as star actress Ellen Fanshaw. Stephen Ouimette Steals every scene he's in as the ghost of former Artistic Director Oliver Wells, and in season one there's excellent work from Luke Kirby and a pre-Notebook Rachel McAdams. If you haven't seen this series yet, go buy the DVD immediately!

This is primarily a comedic parody of the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario. It's set in the early 2000s in a fictional town of New Burbage, Ontario and over three seasons follows the efforts to mount Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear.

There are four or five primary characters. First is Geoffrey Tennant (Paul Gross), the Artistic Director of the New Burbage Festival for most of the three years. Second is Oliver Welles (Stephen Ouimette), Tennant's predecessor as Artistic Director, who is killed in an accident early in the first season, but returns as a ghost that only Tennant can see. Third is Ellen Fanshaw (Martha Burns), one of New Burbage's lead actors and on-and-off lover of Geoffrey Tennant. Fourth is Richard Smith-Jones (Mark McKinney), the shallow Executive Director of the Festival. Fifth is Anna Conroy (Susan Coyne), the Associate Executive Director and only level head in the organization. There are also some other continuing roles.

Each season also brings in special guests with significant roles in that season. These include Luke Kirby, Rachel McAdams, Geraint Wyn Davies, Colm Feore, Sarah Polley, and William Hutt.

Most of the characters are unstable personalities, leading to many absurd crises and final resolutions. There are ongoing conflicts between the classical theater troupe and the musical troupe whose members barely know who Shakespeare is. Many references and images harken to a Stratford-like place.

The interaction between Geoffrey Tennant and the ghost of Oliver Welles is well done and in itself has echoes of William Shakespeare.

The most remarkable performance is in year 3 by William Hutt, who was 85 or 86 years old when he played the role of Charles Kingman, an elderly classical actor who is dying of cancer but wants to play King Lear one more time. Hutt died of leukemia in 2007, one year after year 3 was issued.

Although it's mostly a comedy, there are dark aspects, especially in year 3. Overall it is great fun; I wish it could have had more seasons.

Intelligent, witty, insightful writing that each and every actor clearly loves having the chance to deliver. Fully-rounded, complex characters, examined with insight and empathy. A deep love and rich understanding of life in the theater, with all its excitement and pitfalls. Perfectly paced, with a pleasing balance between comedy and drama. It's so rare to see a work that treats its subject, characters, actors, and audience with so much respect. Very few shows have made me care so much about how everything would turn out, or left me so satisfied at the final fade-out. This is one I look forward to seeing again and again.

Still growing in cult popularity, all three seasons of the Canadian dark comedy are well worth owning.

Set backstage at a mythical Shakespeare Festival, in a mythical Canadian town, New Burbage, this send up and homage to the famous Stratford Festival is a quiet riot.

The show's lead actors, like Martha Burns, Paul Gross, Susan Coyne and Stephen Ouimette (who made his Broadway debut in 2010). All have been real-life Stratford players. Gross played Hamlet, and Coyne played Juliet in Stratford productions.

This gem delivers the guts and the glory for all involved. Great, television. Give me more of these stories that go... "right through the ages with Shakespeare..." and raise the high water mark for the entire medium of television.

As a cure for fevered greed, Hollywood needs to take a seat on the living room couch and shut off the phones to study this one, because, obviously, audiences exist for shows that engage us with real story, three dimensional characters, and rarest of all - resonant dialog. That is dialog that reflects and echoes internal character arc as well as external action. Instead of slapping an audience across our dull-eyed faces with crude jokes, or non-stop violence and gimmickry.

Give me more.

By the middle of the second series I knew that-hard as it is to choose-my favorite character was the put-upon office, long suffering, manager/secretary, Anna Conroy, played with pitch-perfect sympathy by Susan Coyne; who ends up with most of the responsibility for daily operations at the New Burbage Theater Festival" and is the moral lynch-pin of the entire company. She walked into my hear quietly, slowly, barely noticeable at first, then, Bam!

Brava! More! More!

I freely admit I am a drama geek. I love live theatre and backstage tours. My husband religiously go to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. This series captures all those quirks, ups and downs and backstage goofs. A friend recommended the series to us because her actor son recommended it to her. He said it was really true to life. The acting is fabulous. I am not familiar with many of the actors but would like to see more of other things that they are in particularly the main character Geoffrey. The comedy is subtle but laugh out loud funny. There are also so many touching moments. I wish there were more seasons. Anyone know if there is any discussion of returning to it? I agree that to really get the most out of it you do need to know your Shakespeare starting with the title. So watch and enjoy.

I know the comments are full of gushing praise, but this show really is that delightful.

The more you know and like Shakespeare, the more there is to see and tease out in the play-within-a-play structure -- but if you're not an expert, just watch it for the fun, behind-the-scenes soap opera of a theater festival in the midst of chaos.

Paul Gross is utterly compelling as the off-his-rocker but committed-to-his-craft artistic director, but he is surrounded by a wonderful ensemble, all of whom make the dialogue snap and these characters come to life.

Truly a quirky, fun treat of a show.

I first read about this series on a Broadway message board. One of the writers is the very talented Bob Martin, who appeared in and co-wrote the Broadway show "The Drowsy Chaperone." I bought the first two seasons as a gift for my sister, who has attended the Stratford Theatre Festival in Canada yearly for two decades. She loves the series, and so do I.

The series stars handsome Paul Gross from the TV show "Due South" - my sister actually saw him do Hamlet at Stratford, in fact. Gross plays Jeffrey Tennant, a once insane actor who is now back as interim artistic director of the Shakespearian theatre where he once worked. He succeeds an ex-friend, Oliver Welles (Stephen Ouimette, another Stratford actor) after an intoxicated Welles is hit by a pig truck. Welles may have left this earthly coil, but he keeps appearing to Jeffrey.

There's backstage intrigue, the aging leading lady who takes young lovers, the usual art versus business discussions and decisions, and all sorts of chicanery performed by an excellent cast. "Slings & Arrows" is a series equal to any high-class production done by HBO. I look forward to the season 3 DVD in July 2007.

Slings and Arrows is one of a handful of series or films I deem worthy of 10 stars. Although the series has been concluded (and rather well, in my opinion), we can perhaps hope that we will see more from all who were involved in the production.

I'm pleased Slings and Arrows found a home in the U.S. on the Sundance Channel. Our PBS channels have a long history of importing British productions, but we have seen very little of the original programming from Canada. Our U.S. networks and cable channels CAN make space for quality productions from our NAFTA friends and others around the globe -- if more of them will live up to their promise and stop reverting to reality shows, reruns of U.S. series, or clones of Law & Order.

I believe the highest praise that one can give to a work of imagination (book, movie, series, painting, etc.) is that "it rearranges your mental furniture." That is, you view things differently after experiencing the work.

And -- as a downwardly mobile lower highbrow from the upper middle class -- I find that this happens, for me, with roughly approximate frequency between cannonical works (classic novels, great symphonies, etc.) and pieces from popular culture (good movies, fun series, the occasional computer game or web site).

Slings & Arrows is definitely in this class. It is a best-of-breed collection of work. The writing, the acting, the production... All are essentially faultless. (I don't find the castng faultless.. I have some quibbles there.) Some works rearrange on's mental furniture by subversion, by making you rethink things (like, David Lynch movies would be a good example). Slings and Arrows isn't like that... there's nothing subversive about it. Instead, it rearranges by enlarging... I gives an enlarged sense of the actor's craft, of the enduring value of Shakespeare, and ways people can be people.

It's not epic, it's not mind-blowing, it's just really really good. Really.

Annn-nnnd... Why Paul Gross is not an A-list, top-billing, Oscar-winning actor.... I dunno. Some smart scriptwriter really should write a movie that features him and Tom Hanks as brothers in a complex relationship.

I quite enjoyed watching 'Slings and Arrows' on TMN this past season, and must say - it was a delight to finally see something strikingly original and drop down funny on the telly. It was well received, by the audiences who knew of its existence, but lacked any sort of advertisement and flare that HBO shows get. It's been too long since something like this has been tried, and it sure as hell stacks up to the HBO shows any day. Paul Gross has finally shown he as as good an actor as he is a looker. The characters are thoughtfully developed and the plot line is kept alive by the fast-moving pace of this Stratford-like festival. A perfect score all the way.

If you're a theatre junkie or have ever been involved in theatre then this show is for you. It's a blast to watch the "behind the scenes" drama of a theatre troupe and it's extremely well written and well executed. It seems as though the producers were completely unable to come up with anything but amazing cast members and the writers seem incapable of creating anything less than great "dramedy" (not a big fan of the word but it fits). The acting is sublime (really just wanted a chance to use the word sublime...just mean that the character interpretations are fantastic and the commitment of the actors to these neurotic characters makes the whole thing believable...this is awfully long or a parenthetic statement isn't it?) I would highly recommend that anyone check it out if they can because I could be wrong about it appealing mainly to a niche audience. I just found it recently while channel surfing and I can't get enough. I might even buy the DVD's even though they're a little pricey for the number of episodes.

This Canadian TV series is fantastic. I saw the full first season without leaving my couch. It is impossible to stop watching, that's how good this is. The dialog is intelligent and full of surprising humor, a masterful use of language and theatrical sparks. Actors play the scenes with total involvement, they construct and maintain the atmosphere, the dialog and their glances tie them together in a perfectly directed story. Of course, Paul Gross is bewitching. His screen persona, his voice, his whole act, are so good - a delight. All of them are so good, though. And last, but not the least: the plot is great. You can't help but thinking that this show reproduces in a theater, what is happening on the political stage in the US. People with no taste or culture, but who control the money, try to buy and sell artists. Absolutely the greatest TV series in many years.

I'll be quite honest here. I'm a big Rachel McAdams fan and I only started watching the show because I saw she was in season one and the first episode in season two. In that the break between seasons, she became a mega-star following Mean Girls and The Notebook so she left the show. I figured I would "leave this show behind" as well, but it was just too good.

The dialog between Geoffrey and Oliver is some of the most entertaining banter on television. Of course there's the "will they or won't they" relationship with Geoffrey and Ellen throughout that never gets stale either.

I have to say, this show has one of the best final episodes that doesn't let you down like many other series you may follow from beginning to end.

If you like live theater or are a fan of any of the actors in this show, do yourself a favor and watch this series. It's only 18 episodes after all. A fairly easy binge. You won't regret it.

...or at least a strong contender for that title.

It is witty and poignant, and has a lot of intelligent things to say about theatre. It was created and written by the two actors who play the business manager of the theatre (an almost complete idiot) and his executive assistant (an extraordinarily competent woman)--Susan Coyne and Mark McKinney, working along with Bob Martin. What a coup for them!

The setting is an Ontario repertory theatre (in a town called New Burbage) that specializes in Shakespeare--based lovingly but not too closely on Stratford, of course. The premise is that the artistic director, Oliver Welles, who has sold out utterly and hates himself for it, gets drunk on an opening night and is run over by a truck full of Canadian Hams, and must be replaced at the last minute. The only available substitute is Geoffrey Tennant, a once-promising actor who had a nervous breakdown on stage many years before; he accepts the job, but then realizes that he will be haunted persistently and irritatingly by Oliver's ghost, whom only he can see. Paul Gross (who plays Jeffrey) has never been better, and he is matched at every turn by the rest of the regular cast--especially Stephen Ouimette as Oliver, and Martha Burns (Paul Gross's wife) as Ellen Fanshaw, Jeffrey's ex, an actor who thinks that being late for every rehearsal adds a certain lustre to her position in the company.

They did three 6-episode seasons, each centered around a central Shakespeare play for the season: First Hamlet, for which the management in their wisdom hires an American action film star (played by Luke Kirby), who is terrified at the idea of doing live theatre, and by Shakespeare even more so. Then Macbeth, the bad-luck play, for which they hire a big-name star (played by Geraint Wyn Davies) who knows much better than the director how things should be done and must be somehow thwarted. And finally King Lear, for which Jeffrey hires an dying theatre star who wants to do the role one last time, if he can (played by the magnificent William Hutt, an institution at Stratford for 50 years, in one of his last roles before his own death).

Many of the supporting parts are played by well-known Canadian stage and film actors. Three standouts: the poor young woman hired to be Cordelia, who must then suffer through the tirades and tantrums of the really-dying Lear, is beautifully played by Sarah Polley (daughter of Michael Polley, also in the cast). The great Colm Feore played Sanjay, a completely demented marketing consultant (or is he?), hired by theatre management in the second season--a wonderful comic performance! Finally, among many others, Don McKellar played Darren Nichols, a wild-eyed Eurotrash director who wants to stage Romeo and Juliet with the characters encased in wire hoops (as living chess pieces) and never looking at one another (because what could go wrong with that?).

I cannot recommend this show highly enough. If the rating scale went up to 11, this would be an 11!

When it comes to hearts on the sleeve, Canadians rule. I have yet to see a Canadian production that panders to its audience, and this one is no exception. Everything rings true, from lofty intellectual pretense down to pie-in-the-face farce.

The first season was tighter in its plot than the next, and some of the characters are a bit too zany at times, but ideas like a play behind a play within a play keep this viewer entertained as few other television productions have ever done.

If anything, there are moments that soar. The many possible sides of stage interpretation for King Lear, for example, are conveyed almost on the level of a lecture series, whilst the politics of raising money from mindless self-serving bureaucrats comes across as rich satire.

I am still a little put off at this mid-point in the series when it comes to understanding exactly what Geoffrey's central complaint is. I hope it becomes clearer as things develop. Until then, I will not read any of the other viewer comments as I want to keep the thought open.

Can't wait.

In looking at the copyright dates on the DVD set for "Slings and Arrows" I noticed that the entire series was produced over several years with only six episodes produced each production year. I'd be curious to know if the producers were taking a leaf from the production schedule of one of the all-time great series, John Cleese's "Fawlty Towers", or if this is common practice in Canadian television. In any event, this kind of schedule allows for excellent writing, re-writing and relatively unhurried production unlike US TV which demands delivering a new episode every week even if it isn't as good as it could be. Can anyone enlighten me? In any event, I will be watching this series over and over as I do "Fawlty Towers". Many thanks for this terrific series.

This series is not only great fun to watch, but is also extremely poignant and insightful. The antics offered by the characters keep things moving quickly and maintain the entertainment, but every now and again, they slip a subversive bit of social commentary into the mix as well.

When Irwin's corporate shark quips at one point that she's always had an idea to do a musical about John Lennon's life, saying that it would have everything the modern production needs to succeed (sex, drama and familiar music) it's hard for the "Mama Mia!" marquee to not flash in the mind's eye. When Burns' young stud pronounces that he loves "serious theatre" while holding an inflatable doll in the shape of the man from Munch's "The Scream", the fundamental paradox in presenting the arts in our times hits you in the face: in order to produce, you need to sell, but it's hard to sell without selling out.

The contrast between approaches to Shakespeare used by Gross' reluctant, haunted (literally!) Artistic Director and McKellar's over the top Art-Nouveaux Director (a send up of Robert LePage, I'm sure) is fantastic, and illustrates that Shakespeare can be both artistic AND accessible. The snippets shown of the final mounted production of Hamlet are brilliant, and Gross' speeches about the meaning of the various passages in the play should be cribbed by all high school students studying it.

One hopes that Showcase, Bravo or HBO will pick this up, and even better, that a DVD release is forthcoming. Or better yet - a second series?

To people who have only seen live theater in the audience, some may think this is a gross over exaggeration of the characters and situations portrayed therein - you would be wrong. I have been a theater junkie for 40 years. I have known each and every character in this show that some moments for one or two characters brought up memories long forgotten.

What impresses me most about the writing is each character is flawed...but no one is trying to "fix" anyone ...not even the main character who is literally insane. On several occasions, I found myself screaming at my TV for the characters to not be so stupid.

Then I had to remind myself; it's just a TV show.