If this Canadian TV gem got lost in the schedules for you, we recommend you remedy that ASAP...

Three – it’s the magic number. Gervais and Merchant couldn’t manage it with The Office and Extras (not including the specials), nor could John Cleese famously muster the energy for a third series of Fawlty Towers. But for those who do, the rewards can be great. Mitch Hurwitz’s comic masterpiece Arrested Development put in three terrific seasons before being axed, but to go out at the top by your own choice after three seasons...well that honour belongs to Canada’s surprise TV export, Slings and Arrows.

Set in the fictional town of New Burbage (basically a trans-Atlantic Stratford-Upon-Avon) and dealing with the frenetic farce of the theatre’s Shakespeare season, each of the three seasons dealt with a particular play (Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear) while simultaneously mirroring each plot within its own modern day story.

Cleverly utilising that traditional Shakespeare device – the ghost, the three series combined black humour most evident in killing off the first episode’s main character straight away. Mowed down during the final frames, the theatre’s creative director Oliver Welles appears throughout the following episodes as a spooky guide, seen only by troubled actor Geoffrey Tennant (the magnificent Paul Gross) who assumes his mantel.

Where Slings really excels is in the performances. Gross is terrific as the actor haunted by greatness (one excellent performance of Hamlet) and doomed to a career of stage fright. Real life wife Martha Burns is excellent as his long-suffering partner Ellen whose career revolves around playing female villains on stage and suffering with them off it. Stephen Ouimette camps it up as the ghostly Welles, but it’s Don McKellar and Mark McKinney who really steal the show.

McKeller plays the arrogant Darren Nichols, a director enthused by little except his own inflated ego and an unusual love of German theatre. As the theatre’s Chief Director, McKinney’s Richard Smith-Jones is a fantastic mix of high school geek trapped in a man’s body and a mid-life crisis desperate to get out. His character arc over the three seasons is the most impressive as he becomes seduced by womanly power in Series 1, by a ridiculously enthusiastic con man in Series 2, and by drugs and a realisation of his boyhood dream in musical theatre in Series 3.

In keeping its finger firmly on the pulse throughout, Slings managed to make comment on current cultural trends and a dumbed-down audience appetite by downgrading the theatre’s stalwart Shakespeare production in favour of the crowd-pleasing highs of drugs and prostitutes in the awful production of East Hastings by the end. There’s no last-minute change of heart for the traditionalists - it’s pretty ruthless backstage you know.

Not only launching the careers of some (Rachel McAdams stars in the first series), it also revived others (Gross, typecast from his Due South days creates his best role to date here). The fact that probably so many theatres across the land are run in such hazardous and outrageous fashions makes Slings and Arrows repeatedly watchable. Managing to mix humour, drama and tragedy with as much skill as Shakespeare himself, you’re unlikely to see writing this good for a long time.

Consider yourself outrageously fortunate then to be able to do so right now.

You can buy the complete three seasons on DVD at Amazon in the US, or the UK (you’ll need a multi-region player though!)

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