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Angel
1999 · TV series · 5 seasons
Created by Joss Whedon, David Greenwalt
The vampire Angel, cursed with a soul, moves to Los Angeles and aids people with supernatural-related problems while questing for his own redemption. A spin-off from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
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19 comments on Hacker News
In the audio-track commentary for Angel, which is a TV series that has some very long story arcs, one of the writers mentions that they would insert superfluous details into the script (i.e names of people and places) so that they could tie future story developments back to earlier episodes and seasons, making it seem to the viewer like the entirety of the show had been worked out from the start, and that the writers had been dropping hints along the way.
> Case in point, Angel, which was cancelled on a February when Joss Whedon, the showrunner, demanded to know whether or not they got a fifth season. Sort of a "tell me now or fuck it." Well ...
Whether they'd get a 6th season. It did get 5, with a total of 110 episodes.
That was sort of true of "syndication," or roughly your hundredth episode. If the show ran long enough, it got into syndication, and then the residuals mattered. It used to be that a hundred episodes was kind of a benchmark for that sort of thing.
Case in point, Angel, which was cancelled on a February when Joss Whedon, the showrunner, demanded to know whether or not they got a fifth season. Sort of a "tell me now or fuck it." Well ...
Granted, it wasn't a great choice for the network (that exec moved on, probably "failed upward") and it wasn't a good ultimatum for Whedon to make, but it does serve as an example of the kind of games that get played out, because quite a lot of networks would stop shows just before that, due to the Hollywood accounting being a pain once you had to keep paying your actors for decades. The math varies, so some shows go on, but that fourth season, man ... look out.
Speaking of tropes, It's probably because I'm old and jaded but I find it gets harder and harder to enjoy many movies and TV shows because having watched so many I see the tropes.
I think the most obvious pattern in many modern TV shows/movies is the musical interlude. You insert some famous pop song as 3 minutes of filler and try to transfer the affection for the song to the show.
A recent example is in The Umbrella Academy one of the characters dances to "I Think We're Alone Now" by Tiffany. It is entirely superfluous. It's not a new technique. I recently watched Love Actually for the first time and it had at least 3 of these types of scenes. When they happen though I just tune out as my brain screams "you're being manipulated". They're filler. They're like "design by committee" or "marketing checklist".
Related is the downbeat 3 minute musical interlude montage. Something disappointing to the character happens and then there's a downbeat montage of them brooding etc. IIRC Angel had 1 or 2 per episode but they're all over in modern shows.
>Somewhat related, but I have hard time watching older shows/movies where the plot only works because people do not a have cell phones.
One of the funniest moments in the Buffy spin-off Angel was when the title character was trapped somewhere, and after managing to escape he's asked by his friends why he just didn't use his cellphone to call for help - at which point he's at a genuine loss for words, because he did have one with him at the time.
" Nothing in the world is the way it oughta be. It’s harsh…and cruel…but that’s why there’s us…champions. It doesn’t matter where we come from, what we’ve done, or suffered. Or even if we make a difference. We live as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be. You’re not a part of that yet. I hope you will be. "
-- Angel, Season 4, Episode 1, “Deep Down“
It was Shadowrun lite, which is awesome. Now that they have a movie that rates well with normies, they can go deeper and expand (and probably even make a series out of it).
A lot of settings that are actually interesting only really work as long-form episodes--Babylon 5 or Angel for example would've been a garbage movie.
Bright was essentially a large pilot. I'd be really interested in seeing what the production side of the house is learning.
This is dead on target.
It's also why I found the TV series _Angel_ (the _Buffy_ spin-off) so unsatisfying. There is a truly fascinating story to be told about a vampire whose soul has been restored to him, and who is always at war with his own evil nature. But _Angel_ is not it. Instead, the eponymous character is essentially entirely good except when some supernatural agency transforms him back into Angelus, his evil form. All the conflict is externalised.
That's a particularly surprising and disappointing mis-step given _Angel_'s provenance. Joss Whedon is exactly the kind of person who I'd have expected to be interested in exploring the _inherent_ contradictions within the Angel character, and showing how they are analogous to the questions that we all face.
At the time of airing of both shows, I watched only a few episodes of Buffy vs all of Angel. Angel worked for me, Buffy not so much.
However, I am planning to binge on Buffy in the near future and then re-up on Angel right after. I do not guarantee I'll change or stay the same, but I am open to either.
I don't recall details, but the Dollhouse set was reused for the law office in Season 5 of Angel.
Season 5 has some corporate metaphors, after the production team was no longer spread across Buffy, Angel & Dollhouse. Angel S5 is almost a standalone series.
The Buffy vs. Angel vs. Firefly discussion is a good one. Babylon 5, Veronica Mars, and the recent Battlestar Galactica also fit in. Ditto Dollhouse, Heroes, Alias and Lost.
I'd say:
-- It's just a detail, but recall that the first season of Buffy was actually just a half-season in length.
-- The first three seasons of Buffy had a very clear meta-metaphor. :) It posited monsters as being a good representation for what happens in actual high school life.
-- That aspect of the show hit its stride in the Buffy/Angel romance: Girl sleeps with guy and he turns into a monster.
-- Firefly was good, but nothing in it was as brilliant as, say, the best of Buffy.
-- A lot of shows started with a lot of monster-of-the-week/crisis-of-the-week and emphasized the ongoing story more later into the run. But most of the shows cited did at least some standalone stories all the way to the end. (Babylon 5 is one exception).
-- Firefly never got past that part of the show's evolution. This may be one reason it never matched Buffy's brilliance.
-- Not knowing whether or not a show will be renewed is a huge problem. If you're a fan of Buffy or Angel or Babylon 5, you're familiar with the consequences.
-- The writers' strike messed up multiple shows, or at least their audiences. I never went back to watching Battlestar Galactica post-strike.
-- Joss Whedon tried to oversee three shows at once. That didn't go well. Each of Buffy, Angel and Firefly deserved more of his attention.
-- Dollhouse didn't have real characters, the people running the place excepted. It was never going to work.
-- Some shows have a brilliant idea for an overarching story, in which the big story and the individual characters' experiences and arcs mesh beautifully. Then that story comes to a natural end, and the show is never quite as good again. Veronica Mars Season 1 is a great example. Ditto the first 1 1/2 or 2 seasons of Alias. Ditto Babylon 5 after things were wrapped up in Season 4.
-- I'd put Battlestar Galactica into the same group. The best part was the first season, as everybody builds a society on the fly )as it were) that can survive against terrible odds. The plots with the election and the defeat and the aftermath weren't as good. And the pseudo-mystical stuff toward the end was just weird.
I've watched Buffy, Angel, and Firefly several times all the way through (Firefly the most often, by far). Certainly, some of the magic of Buffy is gone when watching it as a middle aged man (I was an adult when watching it the first time, but just barely), but it's still enjoyable.
It was definitely a show that got better in the later seasons, but it was always funny and fun pop horror/fantasy, and the cast was excellent (except Michelle Trachtenberg's Dawn, who was just annoying). I think maybe Whedon's greatest talent back then was picking a good cast with great chemistry, which may be why Dollhouse failed so miserably, for me. So much of that cast was just wooden and utterly forgettable (I almost said "unlikable", but I can't remember anyone from the show other than Amy Acker and Eliza Dushku, so I can't even say I disliked the cast). Now that he's working with huge names, and the cast is already mostly set in stone, I'm not inclined to go see his films. I watched the first Avengers and remember it being funny, but not really anything else about it. The second was a snore.
Anyway, Angel was maybe more adult-friendly; at least it was intended to be, since no one could pretend David Boreanaz was young enough to be messing around with high school girls anymore. Though Buffy was always funnier.
But, Firefly is the best of them all. Surprisingly so, since all other Whedon shows are widely regarded as being best after they've had a season or so to find their rhythm. It seems reasonable to assume Firefly would have actually gotten better; the film hints at that potential. Though Serenity was rushed, it was still excellent, and would have made a top-notch series of episodes for the show if it'd been presented in that form.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. I obsessed over Buffy (which I consider a guilty pleasure as I wasn't the target demographic of teenage-at-the-time girls), and enjoyed Angel to a lesser degree. Firefly absolutely blew me away, and was a starting point for several of its actors who have become successful in the years since. I've followed those actors into the shows they went on to do, with the exception of Nathan Fillion in Castle, which I found too cheesy for my taste.
But Dollhouse...the cast was great, the story was intriguing even if a little derivative, but somehow the show fell flat for me. I found myself struggling to watch it and gave up about 10 episodes in. I still have the first season DVD on my Amazon wish list but it's been on there since December 2010 and I still haven't brought myself to buy it, despite its price dropping below $10 several times in the past.
Maybe one day I'll pick it up and try again, but there's so much good TV out today and so little spare time to watch, I may never get around to it.
Would be interesting to know from Google's analytics how many views are unique vs. repeat.
The super-engaged toddlers are remniscent of those in the "Smile Time" episode of Whedon's Angel.
Only to a limited degree. Yes, there were soaps and other serials that had long-running narrative arcs, but not with the kind of sophistication contemporary writers are using.
Let's call it the 'Post-Buffy' school of thought, where character nuance, motivation, back-story, plot and sub-plot are all delivered with a kind of attention to detail formerly only used by novelists. There may be a few examples from the 60's -- The Prisoner comes to mind -- but even that can't really touch the narrative layers we've seen in the last decade: The Wire, Lost, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones (TV as novel if there ever was one), Six Feet Under, Dexter, Band of Brothers, and so forth. These aren't just books, they're novels.
This I think is partially the result of the ability of viewers to sit down and spend concentrated time with a series when they come out on DVD. The first time my wife and I did this was maybe 10 years ago with Buffy and Angel, and it was the most fun I'd ever had with television. This was a new experience. We'd lose 4 or 5 hours late on a Friday just chaining one after another, like the Battlestar Galactica skit on Portlandia.
What I think Netflix is doing, and probably what it has massive amounts of data to back up (I watched Buffy through Netflix, come to think of it), is that this new type of viewer engagement -- long sessions of series "gorging" -- has completely transformed the way we experience television. I think this is why they released the House of Cards episodes all at once. This is also probably why they're not releasing viewing numbers -- the new experience context of contemporary viewers has very little to do with the old Nielsen ratings arc, and would be a poor measure of the show's success, from Netflix' own point of view.
Anything Joss Whedon calls Firefly, I'll call Firefly.
The cast made the show, to be sure, but they did so on top of Whedon's words, and Whedon did the casting. He's proven over and over again that he can put together a compelling, poignant show (or comic book) no matter the premise.
I've scoffed at every single show he's ever put out: - Re: Buffy; Who's gonna watch a remake of that movie? It's gonna suck. - Re: Angel; Spinoff? Really? Vampire in sunny LA? Dumb. - Re: Firefly; A space western? What? Stupid. - Re: Dollhouse; Wow, that's abstract, even for Joss Whedon. How are we supposed to care about characters that have no character?
Every time I've ended up happily eating my words, and while I still consider Firefly to be the best science fiction TV show of all time (personal opinion), I have no qualms about somebody trying to resurrect it, so long as that somebody is Joss Whedon.
Obviously, you've done a good job on keeping your landing page clear, and done a very good and simple description of the service.
However, even here on HN, you'd find that most people are consumers and not contributors. Therefore, getting a sign-up on the homepage and not providing access to the content is likely going to hurt your growth.
I love arrested development, which I saw on your page. So I clicked on it, expecting to get rankings, reviews, or recommendations of other things i might like.
Unfortunately, I didn't get that. So I don't get to try out your technology. I can only see what you liked.
also, why have the type way off on the right hand side (tv show, film)? I had no idea what Angel was, and with the light grey AND the positioning, it took a bit to figure it out. I like the idea that they type isn't blaring out, but I think better placement would improve it.
I assume others have recommended that you provide filters by media type?
I haven't had Cable/Satellite since 2002. I started watching all my TV on DVDs that I bought from Amazon, but then switched to iTunes around 2006.
Now it's mostly a combination of iTunes/DVD - I'm pretty certain it's less expensive than subscribing to TV.
The good part of this (and it should be emphasized) - is that you now watch for a _purpose_ - Latest episode of Lost, BSG, Dexter, Weeds, South Park, Doll House, BtVS, Angel, The Wire, DeadWood, Heroes, The Office, Dr. Horrible, Mad Men, Parks and Recreation, Castle, Californication, Dr. Who, Kings, Sarah Connor Chronicles, True Blood, Torchwood.
Any time that might have been lost to just passively watching television, news, is now, of course, lost to passively reading ycombinator, nyt, wsj, groklaw... :-)