Happy September 2nd, 2010 everyone.

Paul Gross as Geoffrey Tennant in Slings & Arrows

Over the past few days I’ve been rewatching Slings & Arrows, which I have written about previously over here. Other than a renewed sense of its total and complete awesomeness, one thing that strikes me about the show is that it chooses as its material not merely a Shakespearean play, but also the long process of staging that play. The show succeeds because the best dramatic analog for television is not the play itself, which would be much better served by the short concentrated burst of a feature film, but the longer, less structured or predetermined scope of the whole process of rehearsals and production. Of course whatever play they’re putting on informs the thematic content of the show, so in season one we get uncertainty and self-doubt, madness and self-realization at the same time we get Hamlet. At the same time, regardless of the play, Slings & Arrows has the space to examine the messier, artistic, business-oriented, political, ideological side of theater productions. Man I love that show.