Why is it that when you're not looking for it, you come across something truly memorable?
Showcase (Canadian cable channel) on a Monday night is not where I normally look for comedy, but I found it recently. Slings & Arrows is a great series set behind the scenes at a Stratford Festival-like theatre company.
Paul Gross plays the slightly unhinged star of the festival. He disappeared years ago, and has been brought back to save the theatre after the untimely death of the washed up artistic director (played, alive and as a ghost, by Stephen Ouimette).
There's just something slightly out of control about the action in this ensemble series, as the festival lurches through a production of Hamlet. And the chaos is served up better than most of the tightly scripted crap (especially the tightly scripted reality crap) you see on TV these days.
The first season is being rerun on Showcase Monday nights (guess I missed it the first time around). The second season runs this summer, says Rita Zekas in the Toronto Star, and will feature the action behind a production of MacBeth, with scripts written by Susan Coyne, Mark McKinney and Bob Martin.
Good comedy is hard to write, hard to act, and hard to market. I don't know about the marketing of Slings & Arrows, but the writing and acting is superb.
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