Slings & Arrows: The Complete Collection (Wikipedia) (Acorn Media)
Is this the best TV series to ever come out of Canada? If it's not, I'd love to see the competition because Slings & Arrows is easily one of the funniest, smartest, best written and performed series to hit any airwaves anywhere. Combining a hilarious comic pitch with warmly felt personal drama, this universally acclaimed series mines gold from the personal and professional crises of a dysfunctional Canadian theater troupe -- said to be based on the real Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario.

This clever love letter, simultaneously celebrating and satirizing the theater, sends up the compromises needed to keep art alive in a short-attention-span era. Think The Larry Sanders show with tights and swords.

Originally Broadcast in the U.S. on the Sundance Channel, each of these three seasons unfolds behind-the-scenes as the New Burbage Theatre Festival tries to hold it together -- mentally, financially, artistically, sexually -- long enough to mount a successful theatrical season, or at least not kill anyone while doing it. (That said, the ghost of the New Burbage's former director, killed early in the first episode, is a recurring character throughout all three seasons.)

Slings & Arrows stars lick-the-screen handsome (just ask my wife) Paul Gross, Mark McKinney (Kids in the Hall), Martha Burns and Don McKellar. The series was created and written by Susan Coyne, Mark McKinney and comedian Bob Martin (the Tony-award winning co-creator of Broadway's The Drowsy Chaperone), and drew from their own experiences in professional theater. Season-long guest stars include Rachel McAdams (Wedding Crashers, The Notebook, Mean Girls) in Season 1, Colm Feore (Chicago, 24) in Season 2, and indie sensation Sarah Polley (who has since directed Julie Christie in Away From Her) and renowned Stratford Festival actor William Hutt in one of his last performances in Season 3.

Must you be a theater-goer or Shakespeare aficionado to enjoy Slings & Arrows? Not at all. In an interview on the new bonus disc in this seven-disc set, Paul Gross observes that Slings & Arrows is a traditional workplace comedy that could be set in, say, a concrete plant. But because the characters are so "extreme," the comedy is that much greater. Slings & Arrows is affectionate, sophisticated, bitingly satirical, hilarious and sexy -- no English degree required. It is, at the same time, absolutely essential viewing for theater lovers, who may be blissfully horrified to see what goes on when the audience isn't looking.

What was it Hamlet said? "The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral. . . ." Terrific stuff all the way through.

Acorn Media's Slings & Arrows: The Complete Collection boxed set (available from Acorn here) bundles the six previously released discs, presenting all 18 episodes in anamorphic widescreen, and adds the bonus disc with a featurette, "A Look Behind the Scenes," cast interviews and raw, unnarrated on-set rehearsal footage. Other extras scattered throughout the discs include bloopers, deleted and extended scenes, photo galleries, production notes, song lyrics, the trailer and cast filmographies.

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