Slings & Arrows, the charming and engaging Canadian series that first aired a few years ago, is the kind of show that contradicts the cliché that television is a vast wasteland. Each of its 18 episodes, originally spaced over three seasons but now available on DVD, is full of witty dialogue, intelligent nuances, and inspiring moments. And I don’t use the word “inspiring” frivolously. This is comedy and drama that would make Shakespeare proud. When the short series ended, it left me craving more.

The show is about a financially and artistically struggling Shakespearean theatrical troupe in a suburb of Toronto. The Bard-mad Geoffrey Tennant (Paul Gross) has been hired as the new artistic director. As he begins his first task, directing a production of Hamlet, he finds himself haunted by the ghost of his predecessor, Oliver Welles (Stephen Ouimette). Several years before, Geoffrey had given a handful of legendary performances as Hamlet under Oliver’s direction, but one night he threw himself into Ophelia’s grave and had a massive nervous breakdown which landed him in a mental institution for seven years. Now he has presumably recovered his sanity and is back to revitalize the theater with his unique but fragile skills.

Is Geoffrey still crazy, or is Oliver a real ghost? That’s only the beginning of the fun. The actress playing Gertrude, Hamlet’s unfaithful mother, is Geoffrey’s former lover, Ellen Fanshaw (Martha Burns). I know it sounds like a soap opera, and I guess some of it is, but the show is so much more than that. The heart and soul of Slings & Arrows is its love of Shakespeare and the playful and irreverent way it deals with the greatest drama on earth. Added to that is a lot of vibrant and hilarious situational and verbal comedy not only from the principals but from the many peripheral characters.

Earlier I used the word “inspiring.” There is no other term that can adequately express the way Geoffrey enables people to rise not only above the expectations of others, but beyond their own expectations of themselves. The hapless girl playing Ophelia is in over her head, clueless about how to handle the part. He kneels in front of her and quietly explains in soft, expressive tones that her father is dead, killed by the man she planned to marry. Her brother is out of the country. She is very young and completely alone in a man’s world, isolated, scared, desperate. What does she have? Where can she go? How can she live? I have never heard a better elucidation of the character of Ophelia. The delicacy of the scene made me cry.

I thought things couldn’t get better than that, but then Geoffrey pumps up a cowering understudy to play Macbeth in season two and helps an elderly heroin addict bear the mantle of King Lear in season three. It’s impossible to put into 500 words how well this little Canadian show works on so many different levels. You really have to see it to believe it.