Angel

The creator of the Buffyverse revisits Angel and a million other things…

One year after its international debut, the Angel Collector’s Set is finally scheduled for an American release on October 30th. The set collects all 110 Angel episodes (with all the corresponding bonus features) into a single handsome box, topped with a signed letter from creator and executive producer (and occasional writer and director) Joss Whedon. To celebrate, we caught up with Mr. Whedon to ask about his memories of the series, the status of his many films, and his eventual return to TV.

So has the impending release of the Collector’s Set lead you to any new and profound insights about the Angel box set?

Oh yes. But unfortunately, they’re really dirty.

My editor will be thrilled!

[Laughs] My perspective on the series is changeable. I mean, I always love it, but I can never figure out which is the part that I love. That changes.

It’s certainly a show that has had a lot of distinctly different eras. Do you have a favorite, and least favorite?

You know, I love them all in a way, but I did enjoy the insanity and the darkness of Season 4 quite a bit. Season 4 was good times all around. And by then we had everyone in place, although by Season 5 we got James Marsters (Spike) and that was pretty amazing. Season 5 was fun in a challenging and limited way. We said “we’re going to completely shift the paradigm and throw the entire show on its ear.” And the network said “That’s great! You have less money.” Hiding that was the work of better men than I.

They certainly did a good job of it!

The producers and the production design people were extraordinary. I think the show never looked better, and we were actually doing it on a dime. It was like the first year of Buffy all over again—what can we make with this papier mâché? How much papier mâché can we have?

Were there any storylines in the series that didn’t turn out the way you had hoped?

We had to make some adjustments when Charisma was with child. That caused us to have her sleep with Connor rather earlier that one might believe. But since we were doing something evil with her anyway, we managed to get around it…But I’m always a big fan of adjustments. Throw us a curveball. Someone’s always going to leave, or someone’s going to show up who you have to have back, or they’re gonna bounce you around, or they’re gonna tell you to “make it more standalone,” which they did in Season 5. Season 4 was one giant episode, and Season 5 was little bits. There’s always going to be something that you don’t see coming, and usually your best work is going to come out of that.

Speaking of curveballs, I understand the original second episode of the show was killed because the network thought it took the show in too dark of a direction. What direction was that?

That’s true. Kate the cop, in the original script was a drug-addicted whore. She was in deep cover and her cover had gotten so deep that she was completely losing it. It was very dark, very grown up, very not-what-they-wanted [Laughs]. That was another curveball, but not a terrible one. It was just “guys, lighten up.” You know, it was me and David Greenwalt and you add some Tim Minear, and you’re going to get some darkness in there. They were like “Ok guys, that’s cute, but we are still the WB…Can you just ease up a little bit?” And that’s fair.

Did that really change the direction of the series? It ultimately had plenty of dark moments!

True, and we did take Kate to a somewhat dark place, we just took our time doing it. It was sort of like pitching Buffy with “The Body.” [Laughs] Once you have your sea legs, it’s different. It’s not like we were deliberately trying to be controversial. If the stakes aren’t high, then neither is the audience. So we push. Also, with Angel, you have a show about redemption that is coming from a very dark place…But you also have a very stalwart hero. You have a man who looks like he should be a hero, being the hero. Which means we’re going to flip that over and undercut it every chance we get. That brings out a lot of the comedy, and also brings out Angelus. We want to redefine that genre. We thought the show was going to be, as we liked to call it, “Touched by an Equalizer,” [If you don’t get the reference, ask your parents. Or Wikipedia.-ed] but we realized we can’t write that show. We can only write shows where terrible things happen to the people we love, and we come back every week to find out how they deal with it. joss-02.jpg

Did you have any plans for future Buffy/Angel crossovers that had to be

scrapped when Angel changed networks?

Well, we were going to ease out of it anyway. It was interesting when they were airing one after another and we could do tricks like the aborted phone call crossing over in the pilot, and of course the Spike & Darla “Fool for Love” episodes with the same flashback from two different perspectives. Stuff like that was a joy, and obviously those crossover episodes were among the best we did. But there was also a certain amount of relief when they were separated, and we could let the two of them go their own way. For example, we didn’t have to keep the same timeline on Angel necessarily, while Buffy always had to come back exactly three months later for the beginning of a new school year. We lost some opportunities, but it was also freeing. Of course, we still did have a couple of crossovers; David [Boreanaz] got to come back for the last Buffy, and no one ever made a fuss over that.

What can you tell us about the Angel: After the Fall comic series?

It came about because of Brian Lynch, the writer of the Spike mini-series, which I loved… I sat him down and gave him an overview of what we were planning to do with Angel’s sixth season, the sort of milieu. The story is different because we can go a lot further in comics, but we took the actual basic concept we were going to work with for the next season as our starting off point for the comic book. It’s not called Season 6 the way the Buffy comics were called Season 8, because I’m actually overseeing every single aspect of [the Buffy comic], while this is actually in Brian’s hands. But it came from a bunch of stuff that we went through together, which is really fun, because we had a fine bunch of stuff planned.

Do you have any reservations about stepping on the final statement of the series?

You know, I do and I don’t. The final statement of the series means a great deal to me…I had written the final statement in my head knowing that it would work just as well as a season ender as it would a series ender. I always did every season of every series that way. The only time I ever did a cliffhanger was when [Buffy] first moved to UPN and we had a two-year pick-up, so we knew we were coming back. But generally speaking, every season I expected to be cancelled, so every season finale was more or less the final statement I had to make on everything ever. And then it turned out to be that it really was the final statement. I had planned a Season 6, but obviously I knew [Angel was cancelled by the time we filmed it] or I would never have offed the characters that I did. But I had planned it, so I don’t mind something coming after it. The people who don’t want to accept the comic book don’t have to, and the people who want more, they shall have it.

So that would have been the ending to the season either way?

Yes, exactly. It takes on a resonance that it absolutely wouldn’t have had, had there been another season. It makes a lot of people angry because some people saw it as a cliffhanger, but I never did. I felt that really was the last thing that I needed to say. It doesn’t mean that it’s the last thing I necessarily will say.

As someone who has had to write two heavily scrutinized series finales, what did you think of the Sopranos finale?

Never saw it! I fell behind on my Sopranos, so I’ve been staying spoiler-free. I’ve missed most American television—I’ve missed most of everything. I have no idea what music or TV is going on, with very few exceptions. It’s embarrassing in front of other writers, because I sort of have to look at my feet and go “I’m sure it’s pretty good.” I don’t get out much. Actually, I don’t stay in much either. Where the TV is.

Is that purely a function of how busy you are?

It’s the work, plus kids. I always said “you either make TV or you watch it.” The thing is, I get addicted to things. So I don’t have video games. If I had a video game console in my house, I would never work again. So I have to dose myself. I mean, obviously I watch Battlestar, but that’s like air.