'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' and 'Angel': May be dead, but still pretty

Buffy the Vampire Slayer has been on my ‘To Watch’ list for as long as I can remember. I knew it was a full seven seasons long and that I was probably going to enjoy it - what I had seen of it was a strange tonal clash between actually frightening horror premises and clever writing that seemed to be genuinely funny. I was mainly putting it off because it felt like such a commitment. But when I realised that Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its younger, grumpier sister Angel were both added to Disney+ I decided it was time to bite the bullet and watch both shows. Watching through Buffy was breezy and Angel was light enough, so I started on my journey through the Buffyverse! 

First things first, Buffy follows the efforts of a high school girl who has been chosen as the Slayer - the one girl who will protect humanity from the vampires and demons and whatever else ends up attacking the people of Sunnydale. You would think that most of the people in Sunnydale would move away given the frequent murders, missing person cases, property damage and the weird habit that corpses have of pulling themselves out of their graves at night. Sunnydale is on a Hellmouth you see; it attracts fiends of all kinds and is the location of seven seasons worth of rituals, artefacts and fallen gods’ attempts to pull the town, the country or the world into Hell itself. You can’t argue the show’s colossal scope, or the influence it has had on TV as a format. When Willow, the bookish redhead, comes out as gay it is treated with celebratory fanfare and then becomes a non-issue. This stands out as one of the show's strong points, it seems very topical and not too dated (put a pin in that thought), particularly because this show is older than me! 

So rather than try to broach individual episodes and particular highs and lows, I thought a little retrospective would be more fitting for such a mammoth show. Buffy has no shame about the themes that it tries to broach - the metaphor couldn’t be any clearer. It is a show about teenagers struggling with teenage problems. In the first seasons, the villains come in the shape of evil cannibal teachers, pushy guys, and undead jocks. When Buffy Summers combats evil, she is growing up. Her love interest is, of course, Angel himself - a vampire who was given a soul as a curse. I think even that relationship plays into the metaphor of growing up, Angel was a mysterious figure in Buffy’s life, a romantic relationship begins and she realises that he has the potential to be dangerous until eventually, the two realise that despite the obvious feelings they share, they are incompatible. If it isn’t obvious yet, I like Buffy a lot. The characters are well written, the quippy dialogue was so fast and funny and the universe has so much potential. Willow, Giles (a kind of father figure to Buffy) and Buffy herself have such good throughlines that allow them to build for the whole show. A few characters do start to have nothing to do (I’m looking at Xander and Tara) but it never feels overcrowded.

Now for the bad stuff. Remember that thought that we put a pin in? The show feels pretty timeless for the most part, with emotional stakes and powerful moments but when it does shift into being dated, it suffers massively. Another Slayer joins the show in the second season called Kendra and as soon as she spoke I cringed a little and continued to feel uncomfortable until she is killed and replaced by the much better-written Faith the Vampire Slayer. Kendra is supposedly Jamaican … you can see why this may be dated, and why it is hard to watch. The accent is terrible and lets down the otherwise stellar performances of the rest of the cast. Spike’s redemption story also made me raise an eyebrow. Buffy never really forgives him for his attempted sexual assault but it feels like the show does, and wants us to be on his side.

For the most part, though, Buffy is incredible. The pacing is snappy and tight, filler episodes still bring a lot to the table. I will definitely be rewatching it - although maybe after a little break. Sorry Buffy, I think we should see other people.

And then there’s Angel. When Buffy Summers graduates High School it finally ends her relationship with Angel. He leaves, goes to Los Angeles, and starts work as a Private Investigator. Angel drags a few other characters from Buffy along with it; basically, anybody who they couldn’t send to Sunnydale college with the Scooby Gang. If anybody was going to have a spinoff TV show, it should have been Faith. It feels like even the writers knew this - Faith appears numerous times on Angel and steals the show every time that she does. She has internal conflict, she is troubled but powerful. Struggles with what she has done while wanting to do the right thing, which sometimes means having to ‘slay’. So much more interesting than pouty Angel!

If we take Angel episode by episode it seems pretty promising. The first few episodes are obviously there to establish Angel’s group and their mission: ‘Help the Helpless’. Not a bad start. The monsters that they fight are interesting, occasionally properly spooky like Buffy’s. But very quickly, Angel becomes almost a parody of himself. As the lead, he can’t be a brooding tortured soul all the time and so he is either a snappy badass or the comedy relief character that is put on the sidelines. The rest of the cast manages to carry the weight though, especially Wes and some of the new additions to the Buffyverse.
The season-long arcs are what devalue the whole Angel experience. As a quick example - Angel has a miracle child that is kidnapped by his old nemesis, taken into a Hell dimension where he ages super quickly. Then Angel’s son sleeps with Angel’s love interest, and she gives birth to an evil goddess. These convoluted plots stack on top of each other and lead to the final season (and the introduction of Buffy’s Spike into the main Angel cast) where it feels like the show is going through the motions. Previous plotlines are dropped, and we wind up with a conclusion that feels like it is as good as we could hope - a statement that the cast will keep on fighting the good fight, no matter who falls and who they lose along the way. It feels like an anticlimax for this to be the end of the Buffyverse’s TV presence after how incredible Buffy was, but if there was a statement for the moody sister show to end on, it was certainly the right one. I don’t think I’ll be revisiting Angel - the high highs just aren’t worth the subterranean lows. But who knows - maybe eventually I’ll end up reading Buffy Season 8 and the other comic book continuations of both stories that are still released regularly. There is a series of comics devoted exclusively to Faith the Vampire Slayer…

Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Mutant Enemy Productions, 1997.