Oct 1, 2019 · 17 min read
Critics, scholars, and other creative types ponder the 20th anniversary of the great Buffy spinoff.
It was twenty years ago that the brooding vampire with a soul, scared off by Buffy’s mom, hightailed it out of Sunnydale and set up shop as a gumshoe in the world’s ultimate noir city: Los Angeles, literally the City of Angels. Angel — a Buffy the Vampire Slayer spinoff — ran for five seasons, left us on the precipice of an epic battle between good (team Angel) and evil (armies of hell), and ended on our hero’s now-famous last words, “Let’s go to work.” Fade to black.
Angel is widely recognized as the darker of the two shows, even by its creators, Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt. Buffy was all teen/young-adult angst; Angel navigated the challenges of adulthood, though as any fan of the episode “Normal Again” can tell you, Buffy could get pretty damn dark.
I’d never want to have to choose between the two, but that doesn’t mean I can’t ask other people to do it.
Additional context, for those who aren’t Angel literate or just have bad memories:
Angel (David Boreanaz) was Buffy’s love interest on the first three seasons of the original show. A legendarily vicious creature of the night, he one day tortured and killed a young gypsy woman whose clan retaliated by cursing him with a soul, imbuing him with guilt for every single act of evil he has ever committed— and trust us, there are a lot. Spike (James Marsters), Buffy’s subsequent love interest, also starts out as a twisted, sadistic vamp, but ultimate chooses to have his soul restored, out of devotion to Buffy. In the Whedeonverse, huge debate rage over who should have gotten the girl: Angel or Spike. This is what is known as “shipping.”
Connor (Vincent Kartheiser, aka Pete Campbell in Mad Men), who joined the show in season three, is Angel’s human son by Darla — a fellow vampire who stakes herself to death upon giving birth to the boy. Talk about postpartum depression. Many Angel fans despise the character, especially because of his brief but thoroughly ill-conceived relationship with another Buffy alum, which brings us to our fourth and final point of context:
Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter): Oh, fair Cordelia! A delightfully solipsistic mean girl in Buffy who once defended Marie Antoinette for giving peasants cake, Cordelia grows up in Angel. She too develops a conscience (more through maturation than anything supernatural, though those headaches help), falls in love with Angel but sleeps with Connor (admittedly possessed at the time by Jasmine, the Blessed Devourer), and eventually becomes a goddess who literally floats . . . oh, never mind. I personally would rank it as among the worst examples of character development in the history of television, but apparently not everyone agrees (see below).
So, let’s get to work.
Note: answers are occasionally edited for length.