Angel

Fans’ Love for His Brand of Weird Blows Even Joss Whedon’s Wide Mind

Angel Weekdays 5pm

As hard as it might be to believe, there’s a limit to Joss Whedon’s imagination. He’s the first to admit it, in fact. The creator/executive producer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff, Angel, knew all along that his characters could save the world, but he had no idea whether they could win viewers’ hearts. He knew that he could make good television, too, but didn’t dare to dream that he’d make a couple of modern-day classics.

And that’s what Buffy, which ended triumphantly last May after seven seasons, and Angel, now entering its fifth season, are: They’re classics—a couple of small-screen masterpieces that seamlessly leap from horror to humor, from action to angst. They’re scarier than most horror movies, funnier than most sitcoms and more action-packed than a John Woo flick. But the quality that makes Buffy and Angel truly special is a depth of feeling and intelligence that’s exceptionally rare on TV. These shows might be populated by vampires, demons and misfit monster hunters, but the characters are nevertheless real and relatable in every way.

"It’s been very close to what I envisioned, except it grew up a lot more," Whedon says. "When I started Buffy, I didn’t know its full potential. I just had the basic notion of ’It’s tough to make it in high school’ and that it would be funny and involving and scary and really hip. But I didn’t know how good my actors would be, I didn’t know how long we’d go and I didn’t know how far we could go with the medium. The basic idea was always there. But it grew beyond my best imagination."

Whedon’s weird, wonderful worlds of Buffy and Angel sprang from this one idea: In most horror movies, the beautiful blond girl is an inevitable victim. "I started feeling bad for her," Whedon says. "I thought, ’It’s time she had a chance to take back the night.’" In lesser hands, this premise—the sassy high school girl discovering she’s "the chosen one"—could have been awful. In fact, the 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie (which starred Kristy Swanson in the role later inhabited on TV by Sarah Michelle Gellar) WAS awful. Whedon wrote the screenplay but had no say in the final product and was very disappointed. Years later, however, he got a second chance. The Buffy series, with Whedon as a rookie producer, premiered on the new WB network in March ’97, quickly winning critical acclaim and a small but devoted audience.

Then, in 1999, at the height of Buffymania, Whedon took one of the show’s most popular supporting players—David Boreanaz, who played Angel, a vampire seeking redemption for his past acts of evil—and developed a new show. "It was clear, when I first devised the Buffy pilot, that Angel was the one character bigger than life in the same way that Buffy was, a kind of superhero," Whedon says. "I knew, as the dark, mysterious love interest for Buffy, that he had the potential to be a breakout character."

Angel is a reformed vampire whose reign of terror began in Ireland in 1753 and ended on a night in Romania in 1898 when a Gypsy curse restored his soul. Tormented by his past atrocities, he’s now trying to reclaim his humanity—a journey that most recently has taken him to Los Angeles. Whedon set the new show in the City of Angels because, "L.A. is not only a very funny place, but it’s also incredibly scary. It is a minefield for horror."

Many of the resulting story lines have been, in Whedon’s estimation, "the same kind of all-over-the-place, transcending-genre kind of thing" that brought Buffy so many kudos. In four years, Angel has done everything from save the world from the horror of permanent darkness to explore the highs and heartaches of fatherhood. Yet at its core, Angel remains a meditation on redemption and the qualities that make a hero.

"The thing about a hero," Whedon says, "is even when it doesn’t look like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, he’s going to keep digging, he’s going to keep trying to do right and make up for what’s gone before, just because that’s who he is." One day, Angel may even get the atonement that he seeks. "But it won’t be easy," Whedon assures. "It won’t come cheap." Until that day, viewers can only hope for many more years of great stories. Whedon & Co. haven’t let them down yet.