Show: Slings and Arrows (2003-2006)
Slings and Arrows is a Canadian show, and to be honest, I have never watched another Canadian television series in my life, nor have I ever asked a Canadian about his or her television viewing. So I can't really give any insight into this show's place in Canadian TV history or even if this show is more well-known there than here in the States (the wealth of awards it gathered seems to indicate it was a hit on some level, if only critically). What I do know is that Slings and Arrows is wonderful.
A large part of that wonderfulness comes from just how out-of-place the show feels in the television landscape. A lot of that has to do with the premise. Slings and Arrows is about the struggles of the various employees of a modern Shakespearean theater festival as they try to finish the theater season after the untimely death of their artistic director, Oliver. An old colleague of Oliver's, Geoffrey Tennant (played impeccably by Paul Gross), takes up the role of artistic director after Oliver's passing, and each of the show's three seasons focuses on Geoffrey's challenges in staging a different Shakespearean tragedy in Oliver's absence—Hamlet in Season One, Macbeth in Season Two, and King Lear in the final season.
So yeah, there's a lot of Shakespeare. Television has had its share of showbiz series, but I can't think of a single one that is so focused on the production of a work as wholly non-contemporary (let alone challenging for modern audiences) as Shakespeare's output. I mean, the word "Shakespearean" has been used to describe a handful of shows from time to time, but to have Shakespeare's plays themselves as the central thematic device feels completely fresh and unprecedented to me. And I do mean central thematic device. Extended periods of each episode are devoted to Geoffrey conversing with Ghost Oliver (did I mention that Geoffrey might be mentally unstable and is visited by the ghost/hallucination of his old director?) about how each play's themes translate onto the stage. As a former English major (even one who does not particularly care for a lot of Shakespeare), I found all the literary analysis fun, and even if Lit Crit isn't your cup of tea, the analysis is always grounded in the various crises of the show's characters, so it's both intellectually and dramatically rewarding.
If that sounds dry and academic, that's just my awful prose. For all its Shakespearean settings, Slings and Arrows is first and foremost about living, breathing people and the laughs and heartbreaks that come from spending time around them. It's is a very lively, funny show with a penchant for black humor and light satire. The show gets a lot of comedic mileage, for example, out of the pratfalls of the festival's manager in his attempts to scrounge up money for the company, and there are a lot of nice jabs at the whole "commerce vs. art" tension. And then there's Geoffrey's hilariously smug rival, Darren Nichols, a director whose high-concept ideas (the picture above is his vision for Romeo and Juliet) poke all sorts of holes in self-serious theater.
But it's also an achingly sad show. The main characters are all funny and likeable, but they are also lonely, miserable people, broken by narcissism, hurtful relationships, and unhealthy obsessions. I've already mentioned Geoffrey's mental instability and Oliver's death, and these two main tragedies set the tone for much of the other character work as well, with mortality and isolation oppressing all the characters throughout the series. Aside from Oliver's death (which happens in the pilot), this isn't really a show life-or-death stakes [1], but the the conflicts in each season nudge every character toward the realization that their lives and those of the people around them will not last forever. And in these moments of realization, the show becomes desperate and beautiful in its humanity.
A lot of TV dramas use patches of humor to relieve the sense of tragedy, but what's remarkable about Slings and Arrows's combination of tragedy and comedy is that the two aren't at odds with one another. In Slings and Arrows, there is no "comic relief" like there is in Mad Men, for instance, or Lost. The comedy is not an aside to distract from the tragedy but it is instead intrinsically woven into it. Slings and Arrows depicts its drama and humor as different expressions of the same broken humanness that drives its plot. In doing so, it links comedy and tragedy in a way that's rare on TV (outside of Freaks and Geeks, that is, and maybe the U.K. version of The Office). It's actually quite appropriate, then, that Slings and Arrows is so concerned with the works of William Shakespeare. Like the most interesting of Shakespeare's plays, it finds that comedy and tragedy lie on the same emotional spectrum. And in making that discovery, it becomes occasionally profound.
So yeah. If you can find it, I strongly recommend Slings and Arrows. It's not without its flaws (for instance, it has a penchant for stringing along irrelevant romantic subplots in its second and third seasons as a way of filling the void created by Rachel McAdams leaving the show—yeah, she's in this show, too!). But at only eighteen episodes, the series goes by fast enough not to let those flaws boil into genuine irritants. The whole show used to be available to stream on Netflix, but unfortunately it expired earlier this year. You can still get the seasons by disc delivery, though. However, Amazon Prime still has it up for streaming, so if you're interested in just sampling it, that might be the place to go.
Until next time.
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And now the intro.
Back in June, Entertainment Weekly threw down the gauntlet that all entertainment-covering publications throw down at one point or another: they declared their "all-time greats." Specifically, they made lists of their choices for the 100 all-time greatest movies, TV shows, books, and albums.
Now, I love lists. As much as it can be reductive to quantify works of art as "good, better, best," I can't deny the debt I owe to such rankings, and without them I would have missed out on some truly great stuff. Lists are nice because they're such a fantastic tool for introducing folks to works that they wouldn't normally approach and to spark discussion of said works (even if those discussions sometimes boil down to, "Nuh uh, man, It's A Wonderful Life is totally better than The Seventh Seal![2]").
But here's something else lists do: they create canons, and that's something to be a little more careful about. At their worst, artistic canons can be exclusive and focus critical attention on certain "elite" works while marginalizing all sorts of less-canonized groups and movements[3]. You get a little of this with the Entertainment Weekly lists. Sure, I think EW is right on the money by calling Revolver a great album and Citizen Kane a great movie, but almost everyone thinks they're great; look at previously published lists for any of the categories, and you'll see the same entries crop up over and over again until list-making begins to look like an exercise in rearranging preexisting pieces. There's something blandly patriarchal about putting these guys at the top again[4], especially when there are so many other interesting works to discuss that didn't even make these lists. And yeah, I realize that exclusion is a basic function of a list. That's part of what makes them interesting. And no, I'm not saying that frequent high-ranking on lists makes a work somehow inferior. But sometimes it would be nice to see more discussion of supposedly second-string works.
Which brings me (finally) to the main point of this ramble: Shows You Should Watch. Looking at EW's list for the greatest TV shows (the top ten of which you can view here), I was struck by how quickly the television canon has calcified. Out of all the media EW considered for their lists, TV is by far the youngest, barely pushing 60 years in age. Yet already the selections they made feel old-hat. The Wire, The Simpsons, The Sopranos, The Twilight Zone, Cheers, I Love Lucy—these are all shows that have featured in so many best-of lists by other critics that calling any of them the best show ever is about as easy and obvious as naming Citizen Kane or Star Wars the all-time greatest movie. Ladies and gentlemen, that's a canon if I ever saw one.
And I got to thinking that yeah, these shows are great, but there are so many other TV shows that don't get as much attention from critics and/or American audiences, especially not when most of the spots on best-of lists like EW's are taken up by all the Seinfelds and Twilight Zones [5]. So that's exactly what I'm planning on doing with Shows You Should Watch. In each post, I'll write about a different TV show that doesn't often seem to be considered among TV's all-time greats, but that I like just the same. I'm not promising that I'll be digging around the TV archives for the most obscure shows ever; this isn't an attempt to out-hip the TV canon. I'm not some TV guru that knows exclusively of "all the good shows," either. These are just random series that I've come across, not entries from some comprehensive knowledge of all things TV.
You may have heard of these shows before or even watched some of them. And that's great! What I want to do is stir up discussion about some less-talked-about series[6], so if you've watched any of these shows before, join in the discourse. The more the merrier! And if you haven't heard about one of these, well, that's great, too! Glad to introduce you.
I've already said that discovery of new works and discussion of those works are the chief delights of pop-culture lists for me. Well, it's my hope that this feature will serve the same function as a list in that regard and that those two qualities will be the chief delights here, too. Happy reading!
1] In his first-episode review of the show over at The A.V. Club, Todd VanDerWerff has an excellent analysis of how this lack of life-and-death stakes makes Slings and Arrows an "outlier" in the context of modern TV.
2] To anyone out there who shares this opinion, I'm right there with you!
3] For a great (and obvious) example of this, just look at how long it took English literature curricula in public schools to diversify out of the "19th-century white male" canon. Or, for a less politically charged example, look at how the rise of album-oriented rock criticism has all-but banished any artists performing prior the the mid-1950s from modern best-of lists.
4] Then again, kudos to Entertainment Weekly for putting some newer, less proven works in the list, too; I may be pretty ambivalent about Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, but it was nice to see a three-year-old hip-hop album crack the top ten albums, if only to shake up the status quo of obviously-great Clashes, Dylans, and Princes.
5] And just to be open here: I would have named many of these same shows myself if I were making the list. So I'm definitely not saying that most of these shows are not great. They are (at least, the ones I've seen, which make up six of the top ten, and a good deal of the rest). The point I want to make is not that these shows don't deserve the attention they get; it's that there are plenty of other shows off the beaten path in need of attention, too.
6] The Internet has made TV criticism and discussion so abundant that I'm positive that most of these shows have been discussed somewhere out there; heck, the reason I know about some of these shows is that I read about them on the Internet. So I'm not trying to out-hip TV criticism either. Chances are, I won't contribute a single new idea to the discussion of any of these shows, so forgive me if this all just seems redundant. But honestly, the probability that I will repeat someone's ideas on one of these shows is much smaller than if I were going to write on The Wire or something.
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