Slings & Arrows was created and written by former Kids in the Hall member Mark McKinney, playwright and actress Susan Coyne, and comedian Bob Martin.

The show's central characters are actor/director Geoffrey Tennant (Paul Gross), New Burbage artistic director Oliver Welles (Stephen Ouimette), and actress Ellen Fanshaw (Martha Burns), who seven years previously collaborated on a legendary production of Hamlet.

Midway through one of the performances, Geoffrey suffered a nervous breakdown, jumped into Ophelia's grave and then ran screaming from the theater.

When the series begins, Geoffrey is in Toronto, running a small company, "Théâtre Sans Argent" (French for "Theatre Without Money"), on the verge of being evicted.

After clashing with an old rival, Darren Nichols (Don McKellar), Geoffrey is reluctantly forced to take over directing the festival's latest production of Hamlet.

A famous and highly egotistical actor, Henry Breedlove (Geraint Wyn Davies), arrives to star in Macbeth.

Sanjay (Colm Feore), the head of Frog Hammer, launches a series of shock advertisements and manipulates Richard into accepting them.

Anna begins a romance with playwright Lionel Train (Jonathan Crombie), who is doing a reading of his original play at the festival.

The cast of Macbeth returns home after a successful run of the production on Broadway, where an old friend of Ellen's, Barbara, tells her to think about moving beyond New Burbage.

As Richard tries to cope with being a success, Anna must deal with a group of stranded musicians and Darren is back in town, this time to direct a new musical, East Hastings.

Geoffrey, meanwhile, has cast an aging theatre legend, Charles Kingman (William Hutt) as Lear, despite everyone's fears that the role will kill him.

In the late 1990s, Tecca Crosby pitched the idea of a half-hour comedy about a theatre festival to producer Niv Fichman.

[5] In 2009, a remake of Slings & Arrows, titled Som & Furia (“Sound & Fury”), aired on Brazil's Rede Globo network.

[1] As of November 2019, the creators were shopping a prequel to Slings & Arrows called The Amateurs about the origins of The New Burbage Festival in the 1950s.