Tragedy, comedy, farce - and an ending that's much like Shakespeare : Final episode of Slings & Arrows

Last episode of final season of "Slings & Arrows" is a perfect summation of the three seasons of the series. It's sweet and touching, but not saccharine - and ends as I expected with some sad and wry notes as well, a true Shakespearean ending. To no one's surprise, they do manage to pull off a great performance of King Lear, with the dying Charles Kingman rising to the occasion. But this final performance is done outside the festival, in a church. Simply by running through this performance (and in Anna's case b attending it), the actors and crew put their contracts with the festival in jeopardy. And the surprise (spoiler!) is that Richard ultimately turns out to be a selfish prick. He fires the whole crew, brings in Derrin as the new artistic director, decides to make the festival much more commercial, appeasing his thuggish board chairman and retaining his job. Through the three seasons he veered from being an uptight businessman led around by a dominating woman to a sensitive guy who just wanted to be loved - and then in this final season we see that he's shallow and self-centered. So there's tragedy and comedy and face in this final episode: the season actually echoes Lear in some way, in that the characters have everything stripped from them. But unlike the tragic Lear, they do rise and survive: we see that Sophie/Sara Polley will go on and have a great career, Ellen and Jeffrey at last get married and they seem OK about moving on to new careers in Montreal, and the ghost of Oliver leaves (though he does seem to attach himself to Charles, as predicted). Very realistically captures the feeling of the end of a long run.