JOSS WHEDON
One of the ideas we had pitched the network for Angel was the idea of creating a mythos for twentysomethings, because there is none. Adolescence is very charged in American mythos, middle age is very charged in American mythos. Twentysomethings? Nobody cares. We said it would be interesting to investigate the fears and growth and the things that happen to you in your twenties, which are just as important as any other decade in your life, but doesn’t really exist, mythically speaking, in American fiction. What we realized is that there is this passage in your life during which you create the person you’re going to be. When you’re a teen, you’re in a structured environment where they’re telling you what to do. When you’re in your thirties, you’re dealing with the choices you made, but it is in fact in your twenties when you’ve made a lot of important life decisions. It’s when you first learn how to be a grown-up.
MARTI NOXON
Joss and David Greenwalt spent a tremendous amount of time talking about creating the show, as did I with them. You were creating a whole new world, and they were always really clear about things that they wanted. At the same time, it was about how do you morph this character who has been so broody and solitary into a guy in a whole new universe? So we spent a lot of time talking about what the metaphor was. Buffy had a very strong central metaphor: high school is hell, which we were able to generalize that more into young adulthood is hell. The monsters were oftentimes standing in for real-life situations. There was a lot of talk about that and what the metaphor on the show is. The WB wanted a lot of twentysomething kind of story lines; you know, take the Buffy audience and go a little bit older.
DAVID FURY
(writer, Angel)
There was a struggle early on of exactly what is this show? Buffy was very clear: we knew what the allegory was; we knew what the crux of the show was. Angel was a more difficult show. To simply say he was a vampire private detective in Los Angeles didn’t really tell us anything. Eventually Tim Minear decided it was really about trying to stay moral in an immoral world. The struggle, you put in the context of men, is how to be a good man in a bad world. Stay on the straight and narrow. Some of the allegory was addiction, alcoholism, and that kind of thing. We kind of covered a little bit of that with Willow and her magic on Buffy. But with Angel it’s about a guy who had fallen off the wagon, basically becoming Angelus, and now it’s, like, “I’ve got to atone for that and make up for it. How do I be a good man?” That was the best we could come up with at first.
TIM MINEAR
What I like about the whole idea of Angel is the concept of redemption. And this idea of recovery as well. You look at the show on its face and wonder how anyone can relate to it. It’s sort of about twentysomethings, but the lead is 240 and change. The truth is, here’s a guy who’s choosing to be good. He’s got stuff in his past that he’s got to make up for. One of my favorite experiences was writing the episode where he “eats” his family. To me, that is so interesting. You don’t see that on television every day. The lead character has not only got a past, but he’s got a huge past and it’s horrible. So the darkness appealed to me. Actually, the Joss Whedon sensibility combined with that darkness is right up my alley.
MARTI NOXON
Early on, there was a real focus on the addiction. Early on we had him really struggling with his desire to drink blood again, and that’s hinted at in the pilot. At one point it was going to be much more of a story line, born out of the season-three finale of Buffy, “Graduation Day,” where Angel has to drink Buffy’s blood. From that, we were positing that his addiction, his need, was really heightened. But the whole drank from Buffy was too far away, and it wasn’t part of the story enough for people to relate to what was going on there. But I think his drinking from Buffy was part of it and that the addiction had really been reawakened. The desire to feed was back, and it was really eating away at him. But that connection wasn’t clear enough, so it didn’t really play.
JOSS WHEDON
Part of what we wanted to say with this show is that redemption is difficult and it takes a long time and there isn’t always a goal in sight. You just have to keep trying to do right and trying to make up for what’s gone before. And if you make it easy, if you say, “Find the golden key,” that’s kind of a false hope. And the thing about a hero is that even when it doesn’t look like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, he’s going to keep digging, just because that’s who he is.
JOSE MOLINA
(former assistant to Howard Gordon)
I was a little skeptical that this dark, brooding, mirthless guy dressed all in black could really carry a show that would be fun. And I read the pilot script and I was still skeptical. I remember thinking, “This is fine, but it’s no Buffy. It’s missing the greatness of Buffy.” And I was there working on it and scripts starting coming in and there were some problems right away. Like I remember the network threw out the second script. Like completely threw it out and they had to come up with a different story. So I wasn’t the only skeptic, and then we started shooting and then the dailies for the pilot started coming in and, oh my God, they were fucking fantastic! This was Batman as a vampire. And I ate my words immediately. As soon as I saw the first cut of the pilot, I went to Joss and I was just gushing about how good it was.
JOSS WHEDON
Inevitably you look at one guy and say, “Oh, we’ll use him again,” and you never do. Or you go, “Oh, the dynamic between these two is what works,” and it doesn’t. Or there’s a different dynamic that you never expected. That being said, it was clear to me when I first sort of devised the Buffy pilot that Angel was the one character who is bigger than life in the same way that Buffy was. A kind of superhero. And I knew—as the dark, mysterious love interest—that he had the potential to be a breakout character, but I also knew he had the potential to go away after three episodes. Then we found David Boreanaz.
MARTI NOXON
The audience reaction to Angel kind of made it a necessity for a spin-off. But one of the strongest reasons is David Boreanaz emerged as a true leading man, and one whom I feel had a kind of energy and bearing that very few guys on TV had. He’s a man, not a kid, and there wasn’t a lot of competition out there for a manly, funny, versatile leading guy. So the WB was itching for a vehicle for him.
DAVID GREENWALT
So Joss comes to me and says, “Let’s do this Angel spin-off.” I think we got a guarantee of twelve episodes on the air before we had really done anything, which was terrific. We weren’t just going to make a pilot and wait. Then David Boreanaz’s agent called and said they wanted a new price for him on Buffy and they didn’t even want to talk about what we were going to pay him on Angel. This is a great Joss story. Everybody’s in an uproar and we’re in his big office and people are pacing and we’re, like, “What the fuck are we going to do? We’ve got this twelve-episode guarantee” and blah, blah, blah. So his agents are asking for all this stuff. I remember Joss just sitting like Michael Corleone, very quietly, plotting his death. He says to me, “David, I’d like you to call Mr. Boreanaz’s agent. I want you to tell them that, in fact, we’re going to spin another character off. His name is Bob Fenuti, Demon Hunter, and we’re going to make him up and spin him off.” Of course I did that and they came back, like, “Oh no, no, no, no. We didn’t mean anything we said.” So he totally flipped it back to his agents with this one really simple idea. That’s what I love about Joss: he can think under pressure.
MARTI NOXON
The other thing is that we were in danger, on Buffy, of getting into a rut. The relationship between Buffy and Angel had served the show so well, and for that reason you keep trying to extend it beyond its natural possibilities and people start getting tired of it. Yet at the same time you don’t want to let it go. It was a bit like the Beauty and the Beast TV series from the late ’80s, or even Cheers. That show survived the departure of Shelley Long beautifully and the producers brought in another quirky leading lady. Basically,
spinning Angel off served both shows, to get him his own series while giving Buffy a new world of possibilities.
SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
(actress, Buffy Summers)
I can’t say enough amazing things about David Boreanaz. In the three years we worked together, we never had so much as a disagreement and, I mean, that’s unbelievable. We worked so well together. We could gauge each other’s moods. So for me it was very daunting to be without him and there was the concern that, you know, part of the reason that Buffy worked was Angel, and you got this feeling of, “What if I can’t do it on my own? What if I need David?” But it was a very exciting time for him as well. And luckily, I thought it was a good challenge for me.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
(actress, Cordelia Chase)
What’s funny about David is by his very nature he’s a very giddy person, and silly, and it always surprised me, because he has sort of—and I mean this as a compliment, but it isn’t going to sound like that—a Cro-Magnon strength, “I will pummel you” kind of image. He looks like he could break you, but he’s so silly and really good-natured and easy to smile, so he carried the responsibility through a difficult time—having to do with his marriage—with such grace and a lot of love from his family. They came out a lot. It was a good point in both of our lives. I mean, we were going through stuff, but it was beautiful.
TIM MINEAR
I had had an experience before where I’d be on a show and the leading man was, let’s say, only OK. What I learned was that if you had a star, a guy who could really carry the show, then you could probably have a success, and I thought David Boreanaz was just that guy. A lot of people weren’t sure, based on his role on Buffy. He sort of played this one-note thing, but I thought he could do a whole lot more.
I also thought that he was a lot like David Duchovny in that this guy is a guy you want in your living room. Television is very tricky. You can go to a movie and you can see somebody like John Malkovich. You could go specifically to see that guy, but do you want him in your living room every week? I think David is sort of a classic leading man, action-star-type guy; he’s definitely got the charisma for it and he’s got the chops for it, as he proved year after year. No attitude at all. He totally set the tone on the set, and the crew loved him. A real workhorse. He had to be, because he was in practically every scene.
JOSS WHEDON
The biggest surprise—that’s not the right word—was David, who just came out of the gate swinging. Not just with the brooding, handsome, dark-guy stuff, but with the comedy and with a real sort of humanity to him—a real openness that we didn’t get to see on Buffy. We all had confidence that he could do that, but to see him sort of take center stage and completely hold his own was really gratifying and cool. Frasier from Cheers was exactly my analogy for this, because not everybody would have picked Frasier as the guy to spin off, but look what happened.
DAVID BOREANAZ
I remember we were working on an episode of Buffy. I was wearing a terrible wig and speaking in an even worse Irish accent. Joss called me and said, “I’d like to talk to you tomorrow.” I asked, “Am I getting fired?” “No, it’s a good thing.” I said, “I still think I’m going to get fired.” Went into his office the next morning and he said, “We’re thinking of doing a spin-off series. David is going to run with it; I’m going to assist with it.” “What do you mean you’re going to assist with it?” “I’ll be there, but I won’t be there.” “OK, what does that mean?” “It means he’ll run it, pass on the scripts, and I’ll read them and comment on them.” I think I was so focused on what I was doing at the time, so I didn’t really get a chance to absorb it. I left the office, called my dad and said, “They offered me my own spin-off series. This is amazing!” But I was still concerned about the bad accent I was doing. But that’s kind of how I operate: I don’t think too much about what’s going to be coming, just the here and now.
MARTI NOXON
One of the things we discovered as we went along was that the shows could be much funnier than we thought the genre would permit when we started. We’d done a couple of episodes that kind of were big, funny romps in the same way that Buffy could be, and that was a real surprise. David just had the chops. And we discovered more and more ways in which we could take advantage of that. We began doing a wider variety of episodes and the characters were continuing to expand. A lot of times the way a story arc altered had so much to do with what the actors brought to the table; we suddenly realized not to depersonalize them and recognized that they were instruments that could be played in many ways. Suddenly you had a lot more options. We learned how versatile the characters were, because the actors were so strong.
TIM MINEAR
I went to the preview where they ran the pilot of Angel for a sample audience sitting there with the knobs to vote for what they did or did not like. There were fans of Buffy, male and female; there were people who didn’t watch Buffy, male and female; and across the board the one thing they agreed on was that they all loved David Boreanaz. The men thought that this guy was really cool; they didn’t feel threatened by him and felt that he was somebody they could relate to. And, of course, the women were in love with him. That’s really special because he doesn’t come across as someone you can’t relate to, because we can all understand what it’s like to fumble and not get out what it is we’re trying to say.
DAVID BOREANAZ
I kind of took the character for what he was and I think every day there was something new and exciting about him that I learned with every script. Joss and David were always, like, “Well, we’re going to do this in episode six, we’re going to do this,” and I said, “I’m working on episode two now. I’m not concerned about episode seven or eight.” Within each episode I learned something different about him. Yes, he has a tortured soul and he has a guilty conscience, but at the same time, he was trying to rebuild that and make amends for his own true sanity, to make himself a better person. I think we saw that happen slowly but surely.
Early on, people kept talking about the pressure of my headlining the show. Pressure is something that everybody can understand. I think that pressure is something that you bring upon yourself, and I was fortunate enough to have two great parents who instilled a lot of confidence in myself and also a lot of humility. So at the same time I learned just to take things for what they are, work hard, and be loose with it. And with those ingredients, along with great cast members and a great support team, and being part of the whole rather than being part of the given, then I think it works out.
Initially, there was a bit of a challenge in finding exactly what Angel would be as a series as opposed to Buffy, and that situation came to a head during production of the second episode, when everything came to a crashing halt.
DAVID GREENWALT
We wanted to do a darker, more urban show. We set it in L.A. to make a more noir kind of show. We had all these exciting ideas and we wrote the pilot and Joss directed it. Having a twelve-episode guarantee doesn’t always mean it’s going to be smooth sailing. David Fury had written another script—I think it was going to be the second episode—and we were really going dark. For example, in the second script Angel not only doesn’t save the girl, he gets down on the floor and licks up the blood, because we thought we’d do a whole alcoholic metaphor for him. We also had a gal cop, the Kate Lockley character, who’d gone undercover and had become a real hooker and cocaine addict. The WB read that and completely fucking freaked out. There was a big meeting and we shut down.
DAVID FURY
I broke the story with Joss and David, which was a little dark. It introduced the character of Kate Lockley, the policeman, and undercover cop, but it went to darker places. There were some pretty awful things in there. It dealt with some kind of prostitutes who were ripping people apart. Anyway, she was a cop who was going undercover with a prostitution ring, and it was actually based on a movie called Report to the Commissioner. That’s where the name Lockley comes f
rom. There was a great twisted thing in the movie that he was an undercover cop that realized that this prostitute or criminal’s girlfriend is another undercover cop. He winds up inadvertently killing her, and the whole movie is told in flashback. So in putting Angel in with somebody he didn’t realize was a cop, I was trying to get that same sort of thing. David and Joss—and maybe more so David—wanted to set it apart from Buffy. He didn’t want it to be Buffy 2, so he wanted to go to a much darker place. He wanted to be pushing the envelope. That’s what I went for and a couple of weeks from production the studio just balked.
TIM MINEAR
Obviously, we were still trying to figure out what the show was at that point. This was the first episode after the pilot, and it was written before the new staff arrived. They just went incredibly dark with this thing and decided at the end of the day that it was a little bit too hopeless, a little too grim. After that episode was written and was actually being prepped, the network, too, had some concerns about it.
DAVID FURY
This is a studio from which there were virtually no notes that they ever gave on the Buffy scripts. We’d get on the notes call for a script and they’d just go, “This is great. Keep doing what you’re doing.” That’s generally how they went. Angel, because it was a new entity, may have had more scrutiny on it. When they recognized this isn’t as fun as Buffy, it’s far more dark, . . . they kind of put the pause button on and shut down production.
DAVID GREENWALT
You know what? The network was right. It would have been too much to ask of an audience too soon. We were kind of off there, and were out there a little bit. We just adjusted it to not be so dark. So we fixed it and it turned into a really good show that went to a lot of interesting places over the years. People have frequently come up to me and said, “Oh, I like Angel better than Buffy.” In the beginning, part of the problem is that the metaphor in Buffy was so clear. It was a little harder in Angel, because people in their twenties just are not that interesting. I also think part of the problem is that we were suffering a little Buffy fatigue and wanted to do something quite a bit different as opposed to something just a little bit different.
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