Yes, it's another Whedon show here, but all fanboying aside, Angel is a prime example of a show that became surer of itself in it's later years and ended at possibly the highest point in it's run; a rare thing indeed, making it very worthy of it's spot in this list. Angel spawned in 1999 as a spin-off of the cult classic Buffy The Vampire Slayer, a show at it's height of popularity and quality, making it as good a time as any to develop the vamp on his own stage. The show began more or less as you'd expect it to, feeling like most spin-offs do, trying to recreate what made their parent show so popular. Like Buffy did it it's first (and weakest) season, it succumbs to a few too many "monster-of-the-week" stories for my liking. Bringing in some Buffy deferrals like Cordelia and Wesley proved to be a good choice, and they really became much more three-dimensional characters here than they ever were on that show. New characters like Irishman Doyle and tough guy Charles Gunn were less interesting than most, but with the introduction of Amy Acker's Fred, Vincent Kartheiser as Angel's son Connor & Andy Hallett as the flamboyant, green Lorne, the show found itself a group of characters who are in their own right as interesting or even more interesting than Buffy's gang of Scoobies. Once the "monster-of-the-week" stuff started to fade out of the show for the most part, it could really start developing and building on the mythology that made it interesting in the first place. In the character of Angel we are presented with a definitive anti-hero who is one of the most inspired creations in the vampire genre; a vamp with a soul. And the show really starts delve into what this means as it grows older, with moral dilemmas aplenty and even a string of episodes where he defers back to the dark side. Bringing Spike into the show for the final season was an equally inspired choice and the chemistry between the two "frenemies" is nothing short of brilliant. As the seasons progressed the show became so much more confident in itself and in it's fanbase, which allowed it to be simultaneously more dark and adult than Buffy ever was, while also allowing it to have a lot of fun with episodes like the genius "Smile Time". By the end of season 5 the show had made itself known as something more than just a spinoff, and the finale is a bittersweet but fitting ending to a show in the prime of it's life. It goes out fighting.
Joe is a television junkie. A film fanatic. A pop culture know-it-all. An interactive media masters student, and a bass player.
22 years old and Irish. Thinks Netflix is a Godsend.
