Slayers and Vampires

by Edward Gross,Mark A. Altman

CHARISMA CARPENTER

  I remember that! It made everyone absolutely nuts!

  BEN EDLUND

  Something didn’t quite satisfy with that character. I do remember there being kind of a fan reaction where they were not behind him, really. I don’t think the writers loved him necessarily in terms of the net results of what they had written and what ended up on the screen. They were looking to figure out how to make him work the best way he could for their purposes.

  VINCENT KARTHEISER

  Every week I’d show up and have a scene with Cordelia, then Angel would show up and I’d have some sort of conflict with him. There’d be a couple of fight scenes where I’d fight with them, even though I didn’t want to, and then I would sulk and leave. That to me was every episode, and ultimately they wrote him into a corner. There was nowhere for him to go. I think the majority of the fans really hated Connor and hated me and getting me off the show was the highest priority. And I don’t blame them.

  DAVID FURY

  In “Peace Out,” I got to give Connor a monologue to Cordelia’s comatose corpse or whatever it was. With it, I was trying to buy back some feeling for him. People became very annoyed with his character and he was whiney and repetitive. In that speech I tried to kind of remind people he’s this lost kid. I was trying to give a lot of empathy back to him, to allow people to kind of at least not hate him. I tried to give him a little speech that I thought gave him some humanity and made the character a little more three-dimensional. I felt like it was partially successful. And then of course he leaves the next episode where Angel gives him a new life.

  Connor’s speech is almost like my way of apologizing to the audience and he was kind of a pawn in this. It was kind of, like, “This is all the things that’s happened. I was stuck in a hell dimension and I’m kind of the victim of my circumstances.” But doing it in a way that I thought was giving him some dimension. Steve DeKnight and I wrote “Awakening,” and we got to do the whole fantasy thing of Connor and Angel united in battle against the Beast. I was able to avoid a lot of those episodes that had to dive so heavily into that Connor and Cordelia dynamic that people hated so much, so I feel like I dodged a bullet a little bit.

  BEN EDLUND

  Maybe Connor kept doing shit that was almost too profane to the characters the fans loved. This is just an opinion, but maybe he became an expresser of something that happens on a show in later seasons. It’s strange, but as much as you get into a show and you do it for a long time, and there’s a substantial church of love for the characters that gets built, there’s an inverse of resentment built toward them. You have to be their gods from that point forward. They won’t do anything without your sweat. After five years, the idea of a little punk kid coming back and fucking up the universe can be disproportionately alluring, because of elements that are inside the people creating the universe that they don’t even know they might be expressing. I felt like in Supernatural there was a season there, in the latter part I was involved with, where we tore away everything from the main characters. Almost because we wanted to tear down the show. You know, because you’re, like, “Fuck, this keeps going. What Jenga blocks do you pull away?” It is now a massive continent in our consciousness of what genre is and yet strangely hidden from the American populous. It’s a world cult with 61 million people watching. Though I guess that’s not on point.

  STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

  I thought the whole concept of Connor was a fascinating idea. To start with, going all the way back to where Connor was born, that great Tim Minear episode in the alley where Darla stakes herself to give birth to this impossible baby. Then having the baby stolen and coming back older, wanting to kill Angel. The whole dynamic with Angel was great. Vincent Kartheiser was just an absolute joy to work with. He was so talented. And I loved where the whole thing ended up with Angel giving him up so he can have a life. It was just so painful.

  BEN EDLUND

  With everything that happened to him, I remember feeling that the one thing we were not going to be able to do was have Angel become angelic again, really. They had run that course, so he had to be postjoy almost at that point. And then become, like, heavy is the head that wears the crown. What a weird show.

  JEFFREY BELL

  As we were talking about what to do in year four, we came up with the idea that when Cordy comes back, it’s not Cordy. It’s this other thing. We knew we wanted to deal with the apocalypse. We had been talking about one for three years, and it felt like it was time that we should have one. But when we started, I don’t think we had any idea that the show was going to be as serialized as it became in season four. Entertainment Weekly decided to list what was good and what was bad about the show. What was bad was that if you haven’t watched from the beginning, it’s like coming in at page 262 of a Stephen King novel—and that was an accurate criticism.

  Now if you were inside the Angel umbrella, season four was the most emotionally satisfying year we ever had. But if you were outside of it, it was kind of cool and interesting, but the response was, “I don’t know what the hell is going on, so I’m going to go and watch The Bachelor.” It became too serialized, even for us. What we found out is that when you’re telling a story that way, and you tell a stand-alone episode that doesn’t address the central story, people say, “How can you do that? There’s an apocalypse going on.” Also, our gang got their ass kicked almost every week. They constantly lost. They just rarely had any kind of victory at all. It was this sort of very dark, very linear type of storytelling. It was really a result of that one decision of let’s host an apocalypse.

  More than at any other time in its history, the future of Angel was uncertain toward the end of season four, the staff having to work harder than ever before to convince executives at the WB that the show should be renewed.

  TIM MINEAR

  The first thing I did was to sit down with one of our editors and we put together a clip package that ran about four and a half minutes. The idea was to show the executives all of the cool stuff we’d done over the past four years. We didn’t assume for a moment that the network actually watched the show, so we wanted to prove to them that it was cool.

  DAVID FURY

  The funny thing is that we sat there, the people who actually made the show, and as we watched the clip package, we were saying, “Dear God, we do a really cool show. To achieve this kind of production value for the amount of money we have, it’s like a movie.” At the same time, we knew that we had to shake things up a bit to convince them.

  TIM MINEAR

  Joss had the idea of them taking over Wolfram and Hart before that meeting, but we showed them this clip reel; we took in reviews; there was a lot of great press about Angel at that point. So Joss, David Greenwalt, Jeff Bell, and myself pitched to them where we wanted to take the show in the fifth season. We decided that the season finale would actually serve as a pilot of sorts for what would happen the following year. We had to do that at the end of each year, laying out where we wanted the characters and arcs to go. But this was more drastic. This approach answered any concerns on the network’s part that the show was too arcy, too soapy. The idea with them taking over Wolfram and Hart was that viewers could just tune in and understand it.

  BEN EDLUND

  What Angel does with Wolfram and Hart is selfish in a way, but it’s a chance to minimize the harm he’s inflicted on the world. And there’s a lot of Faustian shit going on at the end of season four, but it’s OK. Angel ultimately functions on tragic lives. Tragedy: you always know what’s coming.

  L.A. LAW

  “I kind of want to slay the dragon . . .”

  The seeds for the fifth season of Angel were planted at the end of the fourth when Angel, in an effort to give his son, Connor, a true life, made a deal with Wolfram and Hart to provide an alternative reality for him. The price was that, in the aftermath of Jasmine, Angel would take over the Los Angeles office of the firm. Presented by the late Lilah Morgan as a “reward,” there was obv
iously some sort of catch, though each member of Team Angel came into it believing they could nonetheless use the firm to fight evil from within. Angel’s in charge, with Fred heading up science, Lorne taking on the entertainment division, Gunn (thanks to mental enhancement) made an uberlawyer, and Wesley in charge of archives.

  These changes in the show, on a surface level, provided an opportunity to explore the nature of evil in a different vein, but more practically they had a lot to do with the struggle to get a fifth season renewal and with the need to cope with budget cuts.

  KELLY A. MANNERS

  (producer, Angel)

  Before season five, Joss called me up and said they want to cut the budget if we’re to go another season. He said, “Can we do it for two million an episode,” which is plenty when I think back. I said, “We can’t make the show we’ve been making for two million an episode, but we can make a show,” and I actually thought season five was one of the better seasons. The big challenge, of course, was in tearing down another permanent set and then, with a reduced budget, to have another million-dollar set go up on a budget that’s been severely cut as it is. That was my biggest concern.

  STUART BLATT

  (production designer, Angel)

  Wolfram and Hart became the Big Bad, but on the surface they appeared to be a big law firm or advertising agency. And Joss wanted a set where you could wander from room to room to room, because he opened the season in that set with a long Steadicam shot. The large part of the set was the two-story lobby, which had Harmony outside of Angel’s office, and then a lot of miscellaneous offices and hallways that went into Fred’s lab. We had Fred’s lab on another stage, and then there was a basement where we had holding cells. So many opportunities there.

  JOSS WHEDON

  (executive producer / cocreator, Angel)

  The thing is, the debate about whether or not the show would come back was a money thing. The fact is, the junior executives at the network really cared about the show. But when you get up to the world of president Jamie Kellner, it’s all about numbers. I was told that they would fight for the show and fight for a lead-in that makes sense. For them to take their biggest honking hit at the time, which was Smallville, and put it in front of Angel was a vote of confidence. And it showed that where it counts among the creative execs, it wasn’t about money: it was about programming. And I really appreciated that.

  KELLY A. MANNERS

  I’m the money guy, so everything for me was how the hell are we going to do this and how are we going to do it for the money and working hard with the writers to try to keep them in reality as to how much we could do for the money we had. Surprisingly enough, like I said, I really loved the season. They had to really think about it when they were writing as well.

  JOSS WHEDON

  During season four, of which I’m very proud, at one point we were, like, “Are we making 24?” The events of the episodes seemed to happen in a two-week period. It played as this one dramatic arc. We all came out saying we had to shake up the paradigm. We had the characters we needed, but there wasn’t enough for them. Somewhere in the middle of the season, I said, “Say, what if they actually ran Wolfram and Hart?” The exciting thing about it is not only the question of moral compromise, but the actual relatable question of, “I worked for Greenpeace, but now I work for Shell.” So we then had the chance to get into different stories and milieus, and B stories—there was just a new kind of energy that wasn’t so completely internal.

  DAVID FURY

  (executive producer, Angel)

  The logical thing is good trying to defeat evil, but Joss would always say, “No, there has to be a balance, and it’s much easier to balance evil when you’re running evil. When you’re the guys who run it, you can keep the balance going. You know you won’t ever destroy it. Good will never defeat evil, but there has to be a balance. Without the balance, evil wins, or there’s chaos,” which essentially happens at the end of the series.

  JEFFREY BELL

  (executive producer / show runner, Angel)

  Previously, we had been in the hotel. We were a family with everybody kind of living there. Gunn had been dating Fred, Wesley was around all the time, Lorne was living in the hotel, Angel was living there. They were all sort of there. It was very much a family dynamic. But suddenly we were in a big, corporate office. We were all grown up. It was like the difference between Buffy in high school and Buffy going away to college.

  STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

  (supervising producer, Angel)

  When I heard that idea from Joss, I thought, “Holy shit, that’s brilliant.” To be co-opted by your enemy; to basically say, “OK, we’ve been fighting you all this time. You think you can do better? Here are the keys.” They go into it knowing it’s a trap, knowing that Wolfram and Hart is up to something, but exactly what, they don’t know.”

  BEN EDLUND

  (supervising producer, Angel)

  It was a very interesting way to solve what was becoming diminishing returns on premise. Yet they had all this cool stuff and Wolfram and Hart was one of the most interesting elements, with the idea of the Senior Partners and the Powers That Be and all that stuff. That was a really interesting way of playing out that shit. By the time you got to the end of season four of this crazy-ass show, what I really liked was that Wolfram and Hart was immense in their thinking. They were playing such a bizarre game. I understood that; it was like Angel understood that they legitimately were playing a cosmic sort of gambit. Of maybe good left unmolested trying to do its best job to make things better would achieve more evil than us working 24-7 against them. Just give them the reins. I felt like the idea at the heart of it, Wolfram and Hart’s philosophy, was that they really felt the road to hell might be paved with good intentions, so they should give this over to people with good intentions and get it done faster.

  JOSS WHEDON

  The question of why Wolfram and Hart had given them the opportunity is one we were not going to answer in the first episode. They had an entire corporation under their control dedicated toward evil. Ultimately, there were questions that would definitely run through the entire season; we definitely kept the arc–soap opera nature that, quite frankly, was what we did well and loved. At the same time, we did them around episodes that would resolve themselves.

  BEN EDLUND

  Wolfram and Hart were not into Jasmine; she was an interloper to their plans. And then Angel took her out, and they sort of realized, “All right, then.” It changed their thinking about what Angel was for them. What I liked was, as big as you could make your thinking as the protagonist, this particular villain who was the uberlawyer had the long-arc view. The uber-lawyer had a bigger philosophy and a deeper, more jaded, darker, more cynical relationship to good versus evil than anyone could imagine. No investment in it. No interest. No ideological approach: “We need the humans, we’ll heal in the face of this.” All they wanted was some kind of inscrutable, horrific thing. In my mind, they just wanted hell on earth. They wanted the worst thing for people, and they thought maybe the best way to get it there was to have people who were trying their best to make the best thing for other people to happen. That was very heady shit.

  JEFFREY BELL

  So our big arc was, “What the hell are we doing here? Why do they have us here? We don’t feel corrupted, but have we been corrupted? Have we been compromised beyond what we think?” That was something that, thematically, was in a lot of the episodes. It allowed us to tell stories with a little more scale in terms of the kinds of clients we deal with. We thought that, ultimately, we’d service both sides.

  BEN EDLUND

  I may not be 100 percent on this, but I’m in the ballpark. It was certainly investigated in the debate between the characters and how they kind of ended up taking the deal. “Even if it’s a trap, it might be worth it.” That was on screen, watching the characters reason their way into why maybe it’s not crazy. “It might’ve helped if they just put the emphasis on that it’s no
t a trap.” “I think they really think we’re going to make it worse.” “I think we’ll make it better.” “We’re willing to take that bet.”

  STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

  What was fascinating was the insidiousness of the way it slowly starts to dismantle the team and turn them against each other, especially with Gunn, who goes a little bit Flowers for Algernon. He gets a taste of what it feels like to be God and then slowly gets it taken away from him. Wesley going dark and stabbing Gunn, obviously the death and resurrection of Fred. There’s just so much rich stuff that year.

  J. AUGUST RICHARDS

  (actor, Charles Gunn)

  The only thing nerve-wracking about the whole change for me was that on my very first day back for that season, I had to do my big reveal as a lawyer. I didn’t have the rest of the episode to build up to it; I just had to jump right in. That was difficult and I’d never done it before, but it actually turned out well. And it ended up setting me up for a lot of other roles as lawyers. It made me feel confident that I could do it.

  JOSS WHEDON

  Wolfram and Hart connected everything and made for a really interesting year, but it was never meant to be more than a year. That is to say, even before we were canceled, we said, “OK, this is year five. Year five is about, Can we stay pure in the heart of an evil place? Can we work for an evil corporation and still maintain our integrity? The metaphor and the question of what do they really want, what are they going to do to us, plays for the genuine flat-out suspense and the sort of overarching question of the season. But ultimately that is not a two-season question. We had a plan to shake up the paradigm for the next year. Of course, it no longer led to an exciting season six, but it’s still a good series capper.

  Going along with the reduced budget and the standing sets that most of the episodes would be filmed in was a return to stand-alone storytelling and a bit of a retreat from serialization, which had been so pronounced in season four.