What A Piece of Work Is Man!

Call My Agent is a French TV series (in France called Dix Pour Cent or 10%, the percentage of an actor’s pay taken by their agent) on Netflix.

It is frothy, full of humor and drama and demanding actors. There is some glamor but the show is also frank about how unglamorous things can be behind the scenes.

If you liked Call My Agent I think you’d love Slings & Arrows.

Outrageous Fortune

Slings & Arrows is a Canadian show from the early aughts that you can find on the Acorn channel (or AMC or Sundance) via Amazon Prime. It’s about a Shakespeare festival but also so many other things.

The show’s first episode begins at the most broken-down theatre you can imagine, the Theatre Sans Argents (Theater without Money). The cast is rehearsing The Tempest. But first the director, Geoffrey Tennant, needs to fix the broken toilet.

Brandishing the plunger, Geoffrey leads the cast and us into the storm struck up by Prospero’s magic, intending to cause a shipwreck and bring the plot of The Tempest to life.

Geoffrey Tennant is one of the most inspiring and infuriating characters in modern television. His moral center is always very sound. His behavior can border on criminal.

Oliver Wells is the artistic director of the festival. He’s been estranged from Geoffrey for seven years. Oliver gets drunk on opening night of an overly commercialized production of Midsummer Night’s Dream.

He sees Geoffrey on the news, chained to his theatre (the landlord is trying to evict the theatre after their rent check bounces). Oliver tries to call Geoffrey and reconcile but instead they argue. He passes out near the pay phone and is hit by a truck emblazoned with the slogan “Canada’s Best Hams.”

Vex Not His Ghost

Geoffrey becomes haunted by Oliver. The haunting is literal. Oliver torments Geoffrey but not in the way we might expect. Oliver and Geoffrey have some personal issues they need to resolve. Oliver also helps Geoffrey direct the production of Hamlet.

After Oliver dies, the festival needs a new artistic director. Despite Geoffrey’s questionable behavior he gets the job, in part because seven years prior he performed one of the most brilliant Hamlets ever seen.

Slings & Arrows is an ensemble comedy, much like Call My Agent. And like Call My Agent, there is a lot of delicious intrigue over the egos of the players involved.

Geoffrey’s former love is Ellen Fanshaw, an actress who has been with the festival for years. She played all the ingenues and now she’s mature enough to play all the queens. She and Geoffrey (played by real life married couple Martha Burns and Paul Gross) are also estranged. She is very angry with Geoffrey when the show begins, but their relationship is one of the great delights of the show over the course of three seasons.

The festival’s production of Hamlet stars a young movie star – based, some surmise on that time Keanu Reeves played Hamlet at the Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg in 1995 (right after Speed came out).

I Loved Ophelia

Rachel McAdams, in one of her earliest parts, plays a winsome young actress struggling with auditions for cereal commercials and playing the third fairy in Midsummer Night’s Dream. When the awful actress playing Ophelia breaks her leg (thanks to an errant chameleon) she gets to step in. And we get to see a real star being born.

The themes of Hamlet interplay with all the themes of what the characters are going through in the first season. As in Hamlet, death spurs the action of the first season of Slings & Arrows. Hamlet’s soliloquy, of course, provides the title of the show.

The Play’s the Thing

The show was written and created by Mark McKinnon (former member of comic troupe The Kids in the Hall) and playwright Susan Coyne (along with comedian Bob Hall). They also play the foolish managing director of the festival, Richard and his long-suffering assistant Anna.

With many shows, a character like Richard would be unlikable but then have a redemption arc. Richard struggles a lot in the first season. He is seduced by an evil corporate rep and board member of the festival who is intent on turning the festival into “Shakespearetown,” whose main focus would be gift shops. Richard joins her when she professes a hatred of Shakespeare and a love of musicals. (The show’s disdain for musicals is a running joke.)

Richard’s arc across the three seasons is human and funny and relatable, but he does not find redemption. The way Slings & Arrows is willing to be honest about its characters’ flaws reminds me of Call My Agent.

The second season centers around Macbeth, and the third, King Lear. The themes of each play are explored in the comedies and dramas of the characters of the show.

But, I’ll let you find that out. I hope you love Slings & Arrows as much as I have.