Angel EP Reveals Season 1 Crisis That Triggered a Production Shutdown: ‘The WB Completely Freaked Out’
Liam/Angel
David Boreanaz, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (debuted March 1997)
The second episode of Angel sucked so badly that it forced The WB to drive a stake through the then-fledgling Buffy spinoff’s production schedule, according to the the series’ co-creator.
In a just-published Entertainment Weekly cover story commemorating Angel’s 20th anniversary, exec producer David Greenwalt — who birthed the offshoot with Buffy brainchild Joss Whedon — reveals that production was shut down early into Season 1 due to creative differences with the WB. At issue? The script for Angel‘s second episode.
“[WB execs] completely freaked out, and they were right because in our effort to go dark, we went a little too dark,” Greenwalt confides to EW of an alleged scene in which David Boreanaz‘s title character watches a girl die and then proceeds to lick her blood up off the ground. “If you’re gonna go that dark, you have to earn it. So, we shut down for a few weeks, revamped some things and we were off and running.”
Angel nonetheless remained dark in tone, especially compared to Buffy. “We thought, ‘Let’s do a noir thing that’s about addiction and redemption, and we’ll put them in L.A.,’” Greenwalt recalls of the show’s inception. “The stories will be darker and, more important [and Angel] will be darker.”
The series went on to air for five seasons, before the plug was abruptly pulled in what would go down as one of history’s 17 dumbest cancellation decisions. Ratings for the Buffy spinoff had actually trended up in Season 5, so Whedon aimed to head off at the pass what had become a typical, anxiety-creating, mid-May renewal decision by leaning on The WB CEO Jordan Levin in February of 2004. But pressed for an early decision, Levin opted against a Season 6.
“I guarantee that, if we waited as we normally did, by the time May had come around they would have picked up Angel,” EP David Fury said in a September 2004 interview, echoing what WB chairman Garth Ancier said months prior: “The mistake that was made… was that we didn’t wait until May, we just made the decision early based upon their request.”
Yeah, season 2 was way darker than it should have been.
But it brought about a fun series :)
still one of my favorite shows from beginning to end.
Definitely. Angel had a much more consistent quality than Buffy ever did. There were some duds – I’m looking at you, Season 4 – but it was generally pretty solid. Buffy’s quality shifted so much:
-Season 1 – not great
-Season 2 – Great
-Season 3 – arguably the best of the series
-Season 4 – awful/boring as heck
-Season 5 – Great
-Season 6 – awful
-Season 7 – okay.
–
Whereas, with the exception of Season 4, I think Angel was always pretty strong.
Season Four… the college year. Hey it got better. Ish. You’re flat out wrong about season six. It was not awful. Sure that season was bleak but to that was to be expected. Buffy was dead. Then not so much.
Season six gets a lot of flack but it’s actually my favorite…I’ll agree the middle eps after the musical we’re a bit iffy…I think it was just hard to watch, it was relentlessly bleak but it made perfect sense for what the characters were going through, and I for one loved that Buffy wasn’t just automatically happy again after being ripped from heaven
Me too! LOVED this show so much. So much better then Buffy.
Could have done without the whole Connor/Jasmine thing. And speaking of Dark…. Wesley. But loved the show as a whole, especially Fred/Illyria and was happy, happy, happy when Spike joined and we got more of the ‘Tall, Dark and Forehead / Captain Peroxide’ dynamic.
Funny thing is today, TV is a lot darker then that. I mean watch some of the stuff in The Originals with the Vampire protagonists. They went way darker then that proposed scene with Angel licking off some dead girls blood from the street. You could get away with so much darker and more violent stuff today even on the CW.
I would have loved it if Angel had really gone all in no restraints and go as dark as they could. It would certainly be possible today.
Angel was such a great show, sometimes even better then Buffy and once you had Spike and Angel together it was the best vampire show that has ever existed. I take Angel and Spike over Klaus and Elijah any day (though I love those two as well). They are the original vampire brothers (pun intended)
I completely agree! I loved him & Spike together. It was only getting better, & could have gone a lot more seasons. I was devastated when it was canceled & cried real tears watching the finale. I have watched it twice more from beginning to end & would still be watching it if it was still in syndication anywhere. Still one of my all-time favorite shows. But, I love David Boreanaz & have eagerly followed & watched every show he’s been in. Bones & Seal Team are also two of my favorite shows!
“Greenwalt confides to EW of an alleged scene in which David Boreanaz’s title character watches a girl die and then proceeds to lick her blood up off the ground.” Not to mention that it would’ve been kind of out of character for Angel to do so [unless I’m remembering things wrong].
Angel was in a really bad place when Season 1 started. He would not have killed a human but drinking their blood when it’s right there on the street and he can’t help the girl anymore anyway ? Absolutely.
This typified the ultimate mistake made by the showrunners of both Buffy and Angel. They wanted to make the shows darker, whereas the fans loved the light hearted humor. We liked watching the Scoobies be funny, but too often in later years the show seemed to prefer the darker elements of the show. They wanted to do drama (melodrama), but the fans wanted a dramedy that was (heavily) weighted towards comedy.
I contest that Angel was darker than Buffy. Buffy dealt with some extremely serious and impactful issues and just because she kept a sense of humour about it, doesn’t mean it wasn’t impactful on the audience. I always felt considerably more seen in Buffy than I ever did in Angel. Darkness is always subjective, but the themes of Buffy were more affective on my life than Angel
The tone and setting for Angel was darker. Buffy was the superhero in the light, he was the dark vigilante. Like Superman and Batman. Buffy may have affected you more, but that has nothing to do with darkness. Angel was the much darker show for sure simply because of it’s much darker concept of addiction and redemption. Buffy went through some tough sh*t but she wasn’t a tortured soul who had been a sadistic killer for centuries. That’s a whole other level.
It seems you didn’t watch Buffy after season 1. Angel never went as dark as Buffy season 6.
The dispute is over tone more than subject matter, I think. While Buffy did go to dark places, there was always humor. That wasn’t always the case on Angel.
Apparently no one remembers season 4. The whole point was that it was just to soon for Angel to go so dark way early on in the show. Angel season 4 was a lot darker than Buffy season 6.
And as a side note; I hate what they did to Cordelia, and every time I watch the show I have to force my self to watch the last two seasons.
I agree- I loved Cordy then she went into a “coma” :'( it was hard to watch after that- but Spike helped with that a little ;)
The thing with Buffy seasons 6 and 7 is that subtext became text. As long as the evil stuff was under the surface, like the Hellmouth, there could be lightness on top. But as soon as depression, sado-masochism, infidelity and rape became text, then it’s hard to joke about that.
Someone telling me – a hardcore Whedonverse fan for over 20 years, who has literally seen every single episode of both shows and Firefly at least 20 times – is truly and utterly hilarious. One of those crazy things that can only ever happen on the internet lol.
Buffy Season 6 was dark (way TOO dark for a lot of people) but the show, it’s character and it’s tone, setting and basic concept was nowhere near as dark as Angel. That was the whole damn point of Angel anyway ! That it wasn’t Buffy 2.0.
Don’t ever lecture a longtime Buffyverse fan like this again. You only make a complete idiot out of yourself. I could write entire books about this universe.
Totally agree, Negan. Your analysis is very similar to my own – the Superman/Batman analogy is spot on, in my opinion. Buffy was the teen show – which isn’t a bad thing; I’m not saying it as a pejorative. Its characters were literally teenagers and young adults, dealing with high school, college, and adjusting to adulthood – while Angel was much more “adult” — I mean, just on the surface, if you take away the supernatural elements, you have a private detective struggling to set up payroll for his business, dealing with a megacorporation of lawyers that wants to put him out of business, and a police detective who wants to arrest him for the past crimes for which he’s trying to atone. Very adult issues compared to Buffy. Both are two of the best shows I’ve ever seen. They just had different tones.
Buffy was dealing with the non-adult issues bereavement, rape, raising a sibling, addiction, depression, gun violence and so forth.
Buffy didn’t deal with that. Those were cheap plot twists and devices for the sake of drama. Which is why I increasingly grew disengaged from BTVS by mid-season 6, when the writing just stopped being character driven. All of those “adult” issues were not part of character growth–Buffy working at Doublemeat Palace one season and the next, working at a high school? Without a college degree or experience?? Buffy being Dawn’s guardian, but the plot just had Dawn running around like a 12 year old and every episode being some “Very Important Episode” about parenting or drugs or boys LOL. Let’s not get started on that mf’ing attempted rape scene, which was merely used to give a certain character a redemption arc to justify why he had not been killed off yet.
Liked Buffy, loved Angel, miss them both.
Loved this show, but what they did to Cordelia? ACK……….hated it.
Yes. It was terrible. They gave a better goodbye in season 5 than after what they did to her in season 4.
Agree..
There was some really shady stuff that went down with Whedon and Co. and Charisma Carpenter. So it was no surprise it was handled so terribly within the story.
Source?
It’s been addressed in interviews by both Whedon and Carpenter. It’s not a secret; she got pregnant and didn’t tell him until well into when the season was filming. It cause all sorts of issues with the plot since I believe he had a different direction in mind, and he kind of took it out on her story-wise although I don’t know if he’s ever said exactly how much his original vision of season 4 differed from what we got. One would hope a great deal. She addressed it at a Comic-Con panel a few years ago. They are still on at least cordial terms, if not overly friendly and seem to have put it behind them. The way it was handled sucked, but let’s be honest, it was a Joss Whedon snow and he loves to kill off beloved characters. It probably would’ve happened one way or another.
In a way they kind of kept that moment. During Angel’s, or should I say Angelus’s, journey down memory lane in Orpheus with Faith, he remembered being a diner in the 70s and watching as the cashier died after another guy shot him in a robbery. He didn’t lick the guy’s blood off the floor though. Just fed off of the cashier after he died.
Now television is completely miserable. Unwatchable to a lot of people, so it would fit right in to today’s garbage.
Well, aren’t we a gloomy Gus today.
“TV is garbage” he says on a television-related website.
Feel free to be anywhere else, buddy.
With so many shows coming back, will it not be great if either Angel or Buffy come back?
Well Buffy is being revamped. No pun intended. Joss has some involvement, but not to an immensely portion. It’s s a supposive reboot. Same universe, different cast.
Is that still happening? There was a ton of pushback from fans because it sounded like they were doing something similar to the new Charmed, where they kept the show the same pretty much in name only. I haven’t heard about it in a while.
This story sounds similar to the story they’ve told on the dvd commentary but for the first episode, “City of”. I recall them saying it would originally have angel find Tina’s body and instead of just seeing it he would’ve held her body and licked her blood from his fingers but then decided against it for the same reasons stated here. The aired scene was a bit toned back and instead had him smelling the blood from his fingers instead and showing some internal struggle there.
I loved the show and it’s theme song (the violin) I LOVE without a doubt and can listen to it over and over <3
Yeah, not a new story. They basically had to reshoot the pilot because the network freaked out at how “dark” the original story was. For Angel and for Kate. The show was going to (and did) air on Tuesdays with BTVS, so the WB didn’t want to have two discordant tones.
I always disliked Joss’s interference with Angel because for the most part, the episodes he wrote were completely off tone. Not that they weren’t interesting, but they always felt like Joss taking someone else’s toys and putting them into his own sandbox instead of playing with them where he found them. As a result, I was extremely upset when his meddling, once again, ruined my favorite television show by getting it CANCELLED!
How could Joss Interfere in a show he created, wrote and directed? If anything, his direct involvement like in season 5 where he wrote most of the stories to then be made into scripts, made the show much better. And lets remember, season 4 got changed at the last second to accommodate Charisma’s pregnancy. He and the other writers did what they could to write her real life pregnancy into the story. He didn’t hurt Angel, he made it great
This was actually episode 1, episode 2 in the terms they did shoot a pilot which was just a 5 or 6 minute promo with a few montage clips and some new insertions. But if you listen to the DVD Commentary for the first episode its where Tina dies and Angel finds her in the apartment he puts his finger in her blood and then we fade out. Whedon said as originally filmed we see Angel tasting the blood but they cut that bit out.
I still Feel extreme anger and disappointment over the loss of Angel all because of the ego maniacal decision of a suit who did not want to feel pressured. I sincerely hope that Jordan’s careers us in the toilet. Thank you Angel and company for all the memories. Season five was simply spectacular with the addition of Spike and the gut wrenching death of one of my favorite characters. Long live Angel
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