Critics’ Cult Classics: Emily Nussbaum on “Slings & Arrows”

18:28Emily Nussbaum:I'm Vincent Cunningham. I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Alex Schwartz, and we host Critics at Large from The New Yorker. Each week we pick a starting point. The new novel you can't stop thinking about, the movie everybody's seeing this weekend. and we kind of go galaxy brain with it. Right, we take the ideas at the center of these things and trace them across history, across mediums, all to get to the bottom of why this particular text is important right now in politics and culture and also in your everyday life.

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19:30Emily Nussbaum:We've been talking about Slings and Arrows. Let's talk about the show's reception. We're here because we're doing this cult classics series. And of course, this would not be a cult classic if it had been a huge smash hit right out of the gate. As I understand it, relatively few people saw the show when it first came out. TV critics in Canada mostly ignored it. I think it did have good success at the kind of Canadian Emmys equivalent. But certainly American reviews were positive, but it never became a real hit. Why do you think that is?

20:03Alex Schwartz:I mean, you know, it's funny because I always try to answer this question, but there is no answer to a question like that. Because the nature of, like, why does something become a hit? Sometimes it's because it's brilliant and sometimes it's because it's terrible and appeals to a vast amount of people. And sometimes it's great, but it just slips through the cracks because of how it was distributed. And, you know, the last 20 years have marked this radical, 20 years, I guess, quarter century, this radical change in how TV was distributed. and certainly a small television show from Canada about Shakespeare is probably a hard sell in that way.

20:37Alex Schwartz:So maybe that accounts for it being less of a prominent hit. But some things are just circumstantial. Like if a show came out on HBO when HBO was exploding, people watched it. And also, as it happens this year, a small Canadian show about gay hockey players became a massive hit. Might have heard of that one. I don't totally understand why this show, which people who have seen it love so much, has never been accessible to a larger audience. It used to stream on Acorn and Sundance, and now it seems only available on YouTube. So why is it a cult hit? It's because it's only on YouTube. That's the answer.

21:16Alex Schwartz:I will say when I talk to people in L.A. and Hollywood who have watched it, it had a big influence on a lot of showrunners. David Simon had said that this was the one show that ever made him jealous. Yes, it has that kind of meaningful element. But with TV, I mean, this is the one last thing I'll say about it, is that the history of TV is the confusion between whether something's good and whether it's popular and commercial. Obviously, that's true in many art forms, but I think it's particularly true in television. Slings and Arrows is just an example of a show that is the best show regardless of how many people watch it.

21:51Alex Schwartz:And so all we can do, we few, we proud fans of slings and arrows is do podcasts to try to bring people into our web of deceit. Our web of deceit, our web of passion.

22:04Emily Nussbaum:Yeah, we have to get the word out. And I did want to ask you about what you were saying about showrunners. I mean, I've seen, yeah, I've seen a variety of people claim that they love slings and arrows. I have a little pet theory, which I wonder what you'll think of. When I was thinking about what shows feel like this, immediately 30 Rock came to mind, which is also, yeah, you're making a face no, but I'll just say this. 30 Rock, which came out in 2006, which is not about theater, but it's also a front of house, back of house kind of show. And you know that jazzy little riff?

22:37Alex Schwartz:Where are Tracy and Jenna? We're supposed to be rehearsing. Hey, Elle, sorry we haven't had time to get into our costumes yet.

22:44Emily Nussbaum:That 30 Rock is so well known for and the jazzy little riff on slings and arrows. When they're kind of doing scene setting and going into a comic jag, I was like, did Tina Fey watch Slings and Arrows, hear that jazzy little riff, and think, that's the perfect tone for my show, too? Emily's like, absolutely not.

23:04Alex Schwartz:I would hope that Tina Fey was—no, that would be great. I would love if Tina Fey was influenced by—the reason I sort of made a face—first of all, 30 Rock, absolutely one of my favorite shows. I have also seen every episode multiple times. Love 30 Rock. I think the reason I sort of like pull back from it is just because 30 Rock is that classic Tina Fey humor where it's just ripples with quills of jokes and it's a half hour comedy. One of the unique thing to me about Slings and Arrows, especially at the time it came out, was that it uncompromisingly combines comedy and drama, romance and sort of surrealism, fantasy stuff like The Ghost in a way that is unusually confident and successful.

23:46Alex Schwartz:And so the show that the only show that I could think of that was a comp was actually Orange is the New Black, which is a very different kind of show. It's certainly not a backstage kind of show, but it had such a weird mixture of heartbreak and comedy and sexiness and all the stuff that it was the first show that I think the Emmys didn't know whether to put it in the drama or comedy category. So I see those shows as part of the move on television to no longer having these strict lines between sitcom and drama and being able to mix tones in much more ambitious ways. And I think that Slings and Arrows is actually one of the originating creations that fearlessly crossed those wires in that way.

24:34Alex Schwartz:That's the thing that I think as television that makes it pioneering. But the thing that makes it standalone is that it's a show about theater. Like, are there other shows that are about theater? I don't think so.

24:45Emily Nussbaum:I was just racking my brains to think if there were. And I was hoping you could answer that question for me because the shows that are coming to mind for me as things that I love for similar reasons to Slings and Arrows. Like, Call My Agent was immediately at the forefront of my mind. the French show Call My Agent, which is also about the making, in this case, of movies. It's about a group of French agents who are agents to actors and to directors in the French movie business who are in it for the love of the game, who have to deal with all the business indignities of trying to keep money coming in, but also while wanting to make art of the highest quality.

25:23Emily Nussbaum:I think what you're saying tonally, Emily, about what works for Slings and Arrows is so true of Call My Agent as well. There's so much that's laugh out loud funny in that show. and there's also so much pathos too because you're dealing with people who really care.

25:36Alex Schwartz:And it's a very adult show. I like that show a lot. There's the studio which has a different tone which is also about the making of Hollywood shows. I mean, there are definitely shows, but about live theater, you know, the legit theater. Yeah. I may be missing something, but I do think that Slings and Arrows, gosh, I'm really thinking about it. Unless I'm mistaken, I don't think there's ever been another show that was about being a stage actor, a stage director. And one of the wonderful things about the lastingness of a television show in this way is I love theater and theater is very ephemeral.

26:15Alex Schwartz:But this show, which was not seen, I think, by a huge amount of people when it went on and they had trouble getting it on the air, has the capacity to have a kind of lasting relevance if people rewatch it. there's this beautiful contrast between the permanence, the nature of television and modern television in this way, and what it's portraying is people putting on shows that will never be seen again. And where Jeffrey's brilliant performance of Hamlet is something that's experienced only by four audiences and then disappears off the face of the earth. And that's what it means to live a life in the theater.

26:56Emily Nussbaum:More on Slings and Arrows after the break. This is Critics at Large from The New Yorker.

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28:15Emily Nussbaum:And this month, we're making plum cheesecake karpatka. It is a spectacle of a giant Polish dessert, and it is so fun. Head on over to BA.com and come and bake along with us. Send us your questions, pictures, and any thoughts to bakeclub at bonappetit.com or find us on Substack. Join us here on the first Tuesday of every month as we debrief about our latest bake. Find BA Bake Club wherever you get your podcasts. Happy baking.

29:11Emily Nussbaum:They explore fashion through the lens of culture with guests like Doja Cat and Margot Robbie. Listen and watch The Run-Through with Vogue wherever you get your podcasts and Vogue's YouTube channel.

29:30Emily Nussbaum:You were mentioning before the difference between the ephemerality of theater, which just inherently, even if you can go and watch a recording of a performance, It's not the same as being in the audience for it. It's not designed for that kind of thing. And there are some very high-level recordings being made now of theater, the National Theater. Yeah, finally.

29:50Alex Schwartz:It's great that we can see that. There's good pro shots of shows, but it is true that it is not the same. I mean, I think some of them are fantastic. Like, I love the musical Next to Normal. The pro shot of that is incredible. But one thing I wanted to mention is it's funny because it always seemed to me like there really is a strong relationship between television and theater, which people don't usually think of as in the same thing. But, you know, the history of television is television used to be live, and it came largely out of theater and radio. Like, those were the sources of it. Television did not come out of movies and books.

30:22Alex Schwartz:It came out of people doing live performances and kind of throwing spaghetti against the wall and figuring out what worked. And there were a lot of early forms of TV that were basically like live stage plays. Obviously, that's not true anymore. And the whole nature of television has changed. during the time since Slings and Arrows came out, streaming became the dominant thing. And unfortunately, whatever is going on economically has had the worst possible effect, which is somehow making Slings and Arrows inaccessible. But, you know, it used to be that TV was something that was also ephemeral. Well, you'd watch it, it would disappear.

30:55Alex Schwartz:And now people expect to be able to pull it up anytime they want and rewind it. Which has, you know, upsides and downsides. Whereas stage theater is what it is. You go there, you sit in the audience, and then you have a communal experience with the people performing it, which is what's so beautiful and so terrifying about it. And that's what this show, by being a TV show about theater, kind of gets at in this interesting little friction between those two things. TV actually appears on the show.

31:26Emily Nussbaum:I was going to say, yes, absolutely. I mean, the thing that I'm thinking about, in addition to the relationship between the seeming permanence of television now and the ephemerality of theater, is, of course, theater seeing itself as an underdog, as an economic and artistic underdog, especially at a place like the fictional New Burbage Festival, where they're dealing with these questions of how to make the theater popular while not losing its soul. And of course, there's a core group of people who believe that they can't compromise on their artistic values at all. They don't want the gift shop.

31:59Emily Nussbaum:It's all a bunch of nonsense. They just want to get to the heart of the text. And TV is seen as the populist enemy by that group of people. In the third season, I think this is what you're referring to, Ellen has the opportunity to go on a kind of soulless, meaningless, sci-fi-esque TV show and to finally make some money. She's at a real turning point in her life. She's getting older. She has been at New Burbage forever. And she recently, and this is a very funny thing that happens in season two, has been audited and turns out to owe nearly$30 ,000 to the Canadian government. So she needs some cash.

32:33Emily Nussbaum:And it's seen very much as an artistic defeat. And one thing that really struck me about Slings and Arrows is that I think we're always in a bit of a discourse about decline where the theater is concerned. But that discourse is quite old. It's going back beyond the early 2000s. It's over and over and over again. And yet theater does survive. It does, but this stress and tension about how it's going to survive is now so much a part of the experience.

33:05Alex Schwartz:Yes, and more recently it's been a big part of the discourse. Yes. I mean, Oscar Eustace, who had been running the public theater, this major theater where all of these shows, including Hamilton, originated, announced that he will be stepping down. Yeah. When he gave interviews about his decision, they're incredibly depressing. He basically says, this school of theater is over. this is unsustainable. And the show ends up being like it's a snow globe that when you shake it, like that's the anxiety that's inside it. And not only the question of like, how do you maintain a theater company, especially a theater company about Shakespeare, but what does it mean to actually live your life like this?

33:47Alex Schwartz:Like when Ellen goes broke, she's finding herself in middle age, like massively in debt with seemingly nothing to show for it. And there's a whole conversation in the show that goes, like, what does it serve you to live your life in this art form that very few people see and kind of end up feeling like it's all dissolved? I think that's part of the heartbreaking feeling about the final season, which centers around an elderly actor who everybody acknowledges is a brilliant guy, but old age comes for everyone and the fragility of him and the fragility of Lear, who he's playing, and the sense of slippage between feeling like you can sustain some kind of stable sense of self and that falling apart is part of that, but it's also about, you know, illness, decay, and old age.

34:33Alex Schwartz:That part of it is basically like, that's the way people feel about theater. Sometimes that's the way that people feel about life in the theater.

34:40Emily Nussbaum:You know, one thing that does occur to me is, as you mentioned, when Slings and Arrows came out, it was the kind of golden, this golden age of TV. The big shows were getting made. There was really a sense that TV was where serious art and art for entertainment was gravitating. And there's a lot more anxiety these days about making television. I feel like... Things are falling apart. It's a terrifying period. Yeah, I feel like TV has started to more resemble the new Burbage Festival than anything else, where really interesting creative ideas, shows that people love, boop, one season, and you're done, didn't get renewed.

35:14Emily Nussbaum:There's a lot of that. There's a sense that that system has also really fragmented. Do you see that as being the case? Absolutely.

35:22Alex Schwartz:I mean, I think it's an enormous problem, and it's very heartbreaking for me because I really do feel like – I'm not saying there's nothing that's good or ambitious on TV. There are things. But the entire system from all of the major companies that run these productions merging together to the shrinking of the economy to the aftermath of the strike, I mean, all of these things have led to an enormous difficulty taking risks. Because for a while, there was kind of a heavenly situation going on where small cable networks could make a show that very few people saw but was actually very interesting and it would make the name of the cable network.

36:01Alex Schwartz:Like that was the system. Streaming, I mean, I don't even know how to describe how it's changed things. But the outcome has been, you know, employment is fragile for people who work on crews as well as for writers. The fragility that's kind of native to the stage is now infecting TV, a medium that was notoriously and historically treated as the sellout place where you could make money and create garbage. And for a while was a place where people were doing really interesting episodic art that was both populist and in some cases challenging and even, you know, in a few fringe cases kind of avant-garde.

36:39Alex Schwartz:That doesn't seem possible anymore, even for really brilliant creators. The whole relationship between theater and TV was often about playwrights who wrote brilliant plays and could not make a living on the stage taking jobs writing for TV because you can make a living in TV as a writer. But all of those things have been kind of flipped around. So I don't think the relationship between the two mediums is quite as clear.

37:03Emily Nussbaum:Yeah, that's such an interesting point. I mean, Succession, one of the best written shows in recent memory, had a number of playwrights on its writing staff and thinking of Lucy Preble and Will Arbery among others.

37:12Alex Schwartz:And it makes sense because playwrights, you know, not universally, but it's an art that has a lot to do with dialogue. That's true of television in a way that isn't true of movies. So there's always been that bond. But I need to mention one thing. So part of the reason I was so excited to do this podcast is that unfortunately for scheduling reasons, I was unable to go up to Stratford, Ontario in July when I had been planning to go up because the writers of Stringing and Arrows, that triad, wrote a prequel called The Amateurs, which I have not seen. But it's about the founding of the Stratford, Ontario Festival.

37:48Alex Schwartz:I guess two of the episodes were performed live. And I was very sorry to miss this. I mean, I have no idea how it is. I haven't seen it. But there's something also really fascinating to me about the fact that there are two episodes and there are television episodes that were performed live as a staged reading at Stratford. So to me, I hope that that succeeds and that that sort of marks a second life for it. One last question for you, Emily.

38:13Emily Nussbaum:I love what you were saying before about having returned to the show numerous times for rewatch. I do think it has a great novel-like character in that it's the right size for a rewatch. If you're going to rewatch The Sopranos or Mad Men, you're in it for a really long haul. This is like picking up a favorite novel every year, every two years, and being able to dive back into it. And since the time you first saw the show, you've become theater critic at The New Yorker. You're seeing a ton of theater. Has that changed at all how you see Slings and Arrows? Has that brought something new to it for you?

38:46Alex Schwartz:I mean, I think the main thing is I always felt this incredible tenderness toward the characters because of this feeling of greatness slipping away and the desire to create a moment on stage that can't be repeated but will affect everybody who's been there for that. And the moments that I've seen even in the short time that I've been writing about theater, I mean obviously I was seeing a lot of theater before that but not writing about it, those kinds of indelible moments where you see somebody on stage and it's this thrilling, jaw-dropping, heart-stopping bond between the viewer and the person performing that is the thing that you're looking for.

39:25Alex Schwartz:And, you know, I'm at the fringe right now, and that's the experience that I'm looking for is that moment when it's just undeniable. And the parts of Slings and Arrows, it's about a lot of different things. It's about art and commerce. It's about mental illness. It's about love. It's about a life in the arts, all of that. But some of the best parts of the show actually are moments that you see people performing Shakespeare and knowing that they've nailed it. They found an interpretation, and they found a route through. That's something that's just present in the show, and it's this sort of pulsating thing where while you're watching Slings and Arrows, a recorded television show made from 2003 to 2006, you still get that hit of seeing what it means for a live performer for just a moment to nail it.

40:11Alex Schwartz:Yes, absolutely.

40:17Emily Nussbaum:Well, Emily, you've nailed it once again. Thank you so much for coming on Critics at Large. And to everyone else, please join us in the cult of slings and arrows. We need our cult to grow. Thank you so much. Thanks for inviting me. Thank you.

40:38Emily Nussbaum:This has been Critics at Large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor and Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Our show is mixed by Mike Kutchman and we had engineering help today from Pran Bandy with music by Alexis Quadrato. This wraps up our summer interview series. All three of us will be back in your feeds next week with a brand new Critics episode. In the meantime, you can listen to all of our episodes anytime, anywhere at newyorker.com slash critics.

41:39Emily Nussbaum:Transcription by CastingWords deep on the influence of dark money and tech billionaires. So join us in the run-up to the midterms in 2026. Subscribe to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

41:54Emily Nussbaum:I'm Jesse Sefciak. And I'm Shilpa Oskoukovic. And we're senior Test Kitchen editors at Bon Appetit and the hosts of the Bon Appetit Bake Club podcast. Bake Club is Bon Appetit's community of confident and curious bakers. We love to bake. Some might even call the two of us obsessive. and we love to talk about all the hows and whys and what didn't work that come with it. Every month, we publish a recipe on bonappetit.com that introduces a baking concept that we think you should know. Then you'll go bake, send us any questions you have. And we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe.

42:27Emily Nussbaum:And this month, we're making plum cheesecake karpatka. It is a spectacle of a giant Polish dessert and it is so fun. Head on over to ba.com and come and bake along with us. Send us your questions, pictures, and any thoughts to bakeclub at bonappetit.com or find us on Substack. Join us here on the first Tuesday of every month as we debrief about our latest bake. Find BA Bake Club wherever you get your podcasts. Happy baking.

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