A Television Critic’s Unlikely All-Time Favorite
Emily Nussbaum, staff writer at The New Yorker, has spent her career watching more television than almost anyone alive – and when asked to name the best show she has ever seen, she does not reach for The Sopranos or The Wire. She reaches for a small Canadian series that most people have never heard of, set inside a fictional Shakespeare festival, and argues the case with the kind of conviction that makes you open a new browser tab before she has finished talking.
That show is Slings and Arrows.
Nussbaum discussed the series as part of The New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast, in a segment called “Critics’ Cult Classics” – a format built around writers championing overlooked or underappreciated work. The choice says something about what critics notice when the pressure of the cultural moment falls away and they are simply asked what they love.
What Slings and Arrows Actually Is
Slings and Arrows is a Canadian television series set at a Shakespeare festival – the kind of regional theater institution that occupies a specific, slightly precarious place in the cultural ecosystem, respected but perennially underfunded, populated by people who chose art over money and are not always graceful about it. The show takes that world seriously while also finding it consistently absurd, which is a difficult balance to hold across multiple seasons.
The title comes from Hamlet – specifically from the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy, which asks whether it is nobler to suffer “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” or to take arms against a sea of troubles. That the series chose this particular line is not incidental. The show is about people who have chosen, against rational self-interest, to keep making theater – to keep suffering those slings and arrows rather than find something easier to do with their lives. Shakespeare is not backdrop here. It is structural.
For Nussbaum, this is her favorite show of all time – not a qualifier she uses lightly given her professional history with the medium. The specificity of that claim, coming from someone who reviews television for a living, is worth pausing on. Cult status usually implies a small but fervent audience, and Slings and Arrows fits that description almost perfectly: widely admired by the people who have found it, largely invisible to everyone else.
Why Critics Fall for Overlooked Work
There is a particular relationship that critics develop with obscure favorites – work they have championed so many times, to so many unconvinced friends, that the championing itself becomes part of the experience. Nussbaum bringing Slings and Arrows to a podcast called “Critics’ Cult Classics” is not accidental. The show has almost certainly come up in her conversations about television for years, because that is what happens when a critic falls for something the culture has not caught up with.
The “Critics’ Cult Classics” segment at The New Yorker is designed precisely for this purpose – to give writers at the magazine room to advocate for work outside the current news cycle, outside the awards conversation, outside whatever everyone is watching this week. It functions as a kind of institutional permission to care publicly about things that are not trending. For readers and listeners, it tends to produce the most useful recommendations, because the enthusiasm is not manufactured around a release date.
What makes Slings and Arrows particularly well-suited to this treatment is that it has never had a moment when the broader audience was primed to receive it. It did not arrive on a major streaming platform with a marketing campaign behind it. It did not win the kind of awards that create cultural permission to pay attention. It has existed, quietly, as something that people discover through other people – through critics like Nussbaum who keep bringing it up because they genuinely cannot stop thinking about it.
The Case for Watching Something No One Told You To Watch
There is a real argument that the shows and books and films critics return to most obsessively are not the ones that arrived fully pre-validated but the ones they found on their own, or that were handed to them by someone who cared – work that asked something of them before the cultural apparatus told them how to feel about it. Slings and Arrows fits that pattern. It is the kind of recommendation that comes with a slight edge of urgency, because the person making it remembers what it was like to discover something that had been sitting there, available, the whole time.
Nussbaum’s framing of the show as her all-time favorite is also an implicit argument about what television can do at its best – not just entertain, not just reflect, but build something dense enough that you can return to it and find more. A show set at a Shakespeare festival, working through the same texts that actors and directors have been arguing about for four centuries, has a certain structural advantage there: the source material does not run out.
The Critics at Large podcast from The New Yorker is available wherever podcasts are distributed. Whether the Nussbaum episode finally tips Slings and Arrows into the kind of visibility its long-standing admirers feel it deserves is an open question – though anyone who has ever recommended a cult favorite to a skeptical friend knows that the answer usually depends on whether that friend actually sits down and watches the first episode, or just says they will.
