Last year, Bob Martin, one of the three creators of the cult backstage theater TV series “Slings & Arrows” told me they were thinking of creating a fourth season — a post that got attention internationally (it was a Canadian series after all), and filled the show’s many fans with hope.

Theater lovers ridiculed “Smash,” an American TV series about Broadway, and NBC canceled it last month after two limping seasons.  Theater lovers adore Slings & Arrows, which takes us backstage to a theater festival not unlike the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada, but its creative team decided to discontinue it after three seasons, ending in 2006.

It’s been almost an entire year after Bob Martin said to me “it felt finished. But recently we have been meeting and thinking, shall we say, laterally. Slings may live again.” Yesterday, he and the rest of the team put an end to that dream, in an interview with AVClub. They will not be creating a season four of “Slings & Arrows.” HOWEVER, they left us with some excitement nonetheless, in this passage:

Bob Martin: But it was really hard to imagine doing any more. First of all, the story was over. There’s just a lot of talk about a fourth season.

Mark McKinney: Yeah, that’s true.

Bob Martin: It was over. It felt over. The big one for me was I could not imagine pulling Ellen and Geoffrey apart again and putting them back together again. We had done it so many times. It just would feel contrived.

Mark McKinney: That’s why we’re doing all the characters as tots for our follow-up….See, they knew each other when they were four and five. It might be animated. It might be live-action. We haven’t decided that yet.

Bob Martin: We have spoken publicly about doing something with Slings & Arrows.

Susan Coyne: And when we say “we,” Bob—

Bob Martin: No, no, no, you know… it’s not going to be a season four.

Michael McKinney: Slings & Arrows-ish is what I’d describe.

Slings & Arrows-ish! Even ISH is cause for celebration! (Slings-ISH over smASH any day)