Does my jaw look square in this? (Angel)

Member Name: EnglishPatient

Product:	Angel
Date:	26/05/01 (214 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Brilliantly conceived, a complete vision that adds another dimension to the Buffy phenomenon while being a superb show in its own right, Boreanaz gets to flesh out the Angel character

Disadvantages: Screened at inappropriate time and treated insensitively by Channel 4, Can be quite nastily violent and/or gory at times, Non-Buffy fans are unlikely to enjoy it as much

So, who or what is Angel?

Angel (or Angelus, to give him his full name) became one of the most popular and important characters in Buffy The Vampire Slayer over the course of the show's first three Seasons - so much so that at times he seemed to dominate proceedings.

All well and good, but for the most part he wasn't given an awful lot to do other than be the moody, tortured guy with a deadly duality that....um...everyone knew about. Angel is a vampire, some 240-odd years old. A vampire with a soul. He might look the ultimate slice of hunkdom, with his brooding demeanour and swishing black coat, but that's a demon there ladies. And like all vampires, soul or no soul, he lives on blood. Even if pinched from the local hospital, it's still sachets of the red stuff filling up his refrigerator.

His long and horribly evil past was gradually revealed using flashbacks and a plot arc during the second series of Buffy, as Angel's sins came back to haunt him more vividly than he could have ever imagined. Having quite lietrally gone to Hell and back on this rollercoaster ride, he spent Season Three flitting in and out of the spotlight while remaining an integral member of the cast.
Inevitably, Angel was given his own series to tie-in with the start of Buffy's fourth season...the plot development of both programmes dovetailing with one another at regular intervals. But why the need for a spin-off, besides cashing in on the appeal of David Boreanaz and/or stretching out the whole Buffy phenomenon even further?

Well, Angel had outgrown the *other* programme...there is only so much mileage in (and audience tolerance for) the whole torturous love-story-that-could-never-be with Sarah Michelle Gellar's spirited young Slayer. Buffy creator Joss Whedon was at least savvy enough to realise this before the formula had grown stale, and the resulting split has produced two high-quality shows in their own right.

>Angel (the series) doesn't concern itself with spooky goings-on at a High School, following the lives of teenagers and their struggles growing up while the chaos of the Hellmouth is all around them. It's a show that deals with the more adult side of life in downtown Los Angeles. For L.A. is a city teeming with corruption, suffering, violence and general demonic activity (bet they don't mention that last fact in the brochures). What better place for Angel to do his bit for society, to redeem himself and seek to further make up for all the horrible acts of cruelty and killing which kept him pretty much occupied for most of the 18th and 19th Centuries.

Under the guise of a Private Investigator, he sets up a *business* with a couple of (initially reticent) helpers, offering aid to those most in need - people under threat from ugly creatures with pointy sticking-out bits, slime and dodgy skin....and from lawyers. The all-powerful firm of Wolfram & Haart (attorneys to the evil and undead) looms large over the series...not always in the thick of the action, but come the final few episodes of Season One some heavy shit finally hits the fan.

Granted, it has Boreanaz as its star of course - enough to earn a devoted female following - and it's still essentially about demons, but the show comes across as significantly more than a mere Buffy offshoot. A certain familiarity with the conecpt, style and history of Buffy The Vampire Slayer obviously helps to best appreciate Angel, but it's difficult to claim whether it works as well for the uninitiated as to this long-time fan it's so very entwined in the fabric of its sister series.

Despite its extremely ill-conceived early evening slot on terrestrial UK television (where episodes are cut beyond recognition and common sense, with entire shows skipped), Angel is also not really suitable for a pre-teen audience; be it in content or in execution. The video editions of its first s
eries (22 episodes in all, as with Buffy) are all either 15 or 18 certificate, and not without reason.

By the close of opening episode "City Of" (a clumsy title, like many of its first season companions), the show has set out its stall quite impressively. No slacker-lite soundtrack or credits sequences, no trace of a typical *teen* programme at all. The main suprise, and a most welcome one, is the self-depricating humour. The introspective, doom-laden old bugger from Buffy has lightened up. A bit. There are...wait for it...jokes! Good god.

Most programmes with so many episodes per series tend to have their *filler* moments sandwiched between the key plot developments - the X-Files made an art-form out of it - and Angel is no different. Having said that, very little of the content veers too far from driving the overall narrative along - elements crop up all the time, events or personnel who become part of the story in some shape or form.

Such has been the creative success of Angel, that it has been able to take two of the least appealing characters from Buffy - the fame-seeking Valley Girl, Cordelia Chase, and Buffy's replacement Watcher from England, the estranged Wesley Wyndham-Price - and develop their personae so they have a depth and subtletly to match this more grown-up enterprise.

Never afraid to poke fun at itself or its characters, the show's scripts seem to be eeking out a broader milieu for our hero. Season Two - already well underway on Sky One - promises to be every bit as compelling, with a major character from Angels' past back on the scene. In retrospect, leaving Buffy (the series and the girl) has proved a very good move indeed for the square-jawed one.

Unfortunately, Channel 4 - as briefly mentioned earlier - have made a complete farce of showing the programme. Their clueless, and probably cynical, desire to screen it in a time-slot patently unsuitable for the themes and content con
tained in Angel. Severe cuts were obviously necessary to grant a pre-watershed airing, often making a nonsensical mockery of the plots, dialogue and action scenes. So, Angel was rushed through in double-bills around halfway through its run to more swiftly complete the Season, after much adverse publicity and viewer complaints, then repeated uncut in the small hours...shunted around the schedules, ending up sometime between midnight and as late as 3am.

The only upside of this was an increase in the desirability of (and one would assume, demand for) 20th Century Fox's Video Boxsets - £30 each for half a series, but unabridged and thus free of the scissor-happy Channel 4 bigwigs.

Summary: