TIM MINEAR
(consulting producer, season four, Angel)
It’s very easy, when you start getting arcy, for things to begin to blur together. The mythology starts to get very convoluted. If the characters start to make references to the actions in previous episodes, then it starts to have no meaning beyond that. The art is then not relating to real life in any way; it’s only relating to itself. When a show gets that arcy, it’s easy for that to happen. Also, unlike Buffy, where the metaphor was very clear—the stages of growing up—Angel did not have a metaphor, despite attempts to do so at the beginning. It’s a melodrama about men and women with a supernatural element—it’s Dark Shadows in wide screen and color.
JOSS WHEDON
Going more stand-alone was a bizarre kind of symmetry to where we had started. Amazingly enough, we started out doing that and still weren’t very good at it. I give you the werewolf episode we did, “Unleashed.” Good guest star, good idea, nothing particularly wrong there, except for a failure to make a genuine emotional connection between what was going on with the guest star and our characters themselves. That was a fault of story breaking. And then the incredible amount of money we no longer had, because of budget cuts, really showed up on screen. It got pretty tough. Again, we found our footing as the season progressed. We got better at figuring out how to do stand-alone episodes with characters that we care about that we don’t have to explain every single thing about, where we have a “previously on Angel” that’s forty-five minutes long, as it felt like in season four.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
Season four was like one big episode where you end it at the beginning of the next episode, because we would end on a cliffhanger. So you’d end that at the beginning of the next episode, and spend the next part of act one recapping what happened on the last episode to catch everybody up. That created its own difficulties. Everything was so interconnected that it was very difficult to make a move without thinking about the last twelve episodes or something. It was also really impossible to do stand-alone episodes, because we were so arcy, and in year five we went into a more stand-alone feel, which created a new set of problems, more in our brains than anywhere else. It was a different way of breaking a story, which was very challenging at first.
DAVID BOREANAZ
(actor, Angel)
Season four was very heavy in exposition, and it was deep with a lot of plotlines and story. In season five we wanted to open it up to more specific character bases and to keep it fresh on that level, rather than keep it so second story. The show worked best when it was about that, when you see each character go about doing their thing. It was interesting to watch. So season four got too serialized, but it did set up that whole Connor-Angel thing and the Cordelia thing. That kind of came to the forefront. It was important to go to those places, because it set up where we were going. That was the exciting part of it.
TIM MINEAR
Even though there’s a logic to your audience being your audience when you’re telling a story on a TV series, ideally you want it to have enough internal exposition that somebody could start at that place and begin to understand it. By the end of that episode, they start to get it. But that’s hard with a story like ours. That’s why you want to have a stand-alone episode in most instances. Some things will be arc heavier than others. You can do the episode where Darla goes into labor, she’s going to lose the baby, and stakes herself to save the baby—that’s what the episode is about. People can understand that story without understanding the entire mythology. Plus, with signposts throughout the story, in terms of internal exposition, you can help guide them through it. But it’s tricky. The best example of a TV show that was able to do that, even though it wasn’t arcy and it was a sitcom, was The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It didn’t matter what episode you tuned into, if it was a story that took place in her workplace or home, you very quickly understood who these people were, what their relationships were to one another, and what their attitudes were. To some degree, you have to do that on a show like that.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
But we definitely had to kind of find our way at the start of the season, since it wasn’t the kind of storytelling that we were used to. Jeff Bell on The X-Files was probably more used to it, although that had been a while earlier. We were definitely trying to find just the right story and tried to figure out how to tell these contained episodes. I know there were episodes we were happy with, but my feeling is that we really started hitting it toward episode eight with the big throw down between Angel and Spike. It felt like it was starting to work.
JEFFREY BELL
The WB wanted more stand-alone episodes, and I’m a guy who really likes stand-alones. So that was the biggest difference in year five, telling more stand-alone type of tales and trying to take the best of what we did in the past in terms of keeping emotional arcs alive, so we were able to tell a whole bunch of different stories: horror, comedy, romance, fable, thriller, romp.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
Because of the change, we got to do what I claim is an underappreciated episode called “The Girl in Question,” where Angel and Spike went to Italy and the Italian Wolfram and Hart. They’re trying to find Buffy and prove which of the two of them she loved the most. Then they realize that she really shouldn’t be with either of them. It was that kind of crazy, kooky buddy-caper comedy that we could slide in there. I don’t remember whose idea it was or how we were going to afford it, because we had to shoot a lot on standing sets. Soooo, it’s an Italian Wolfram and Hart and the building is exactly the same, except they have Italian people. There’s an Italian Wesley, who’s never around. I don’t know what other show you could do that on. It was just so delightfully wacky.
JEFFREY BELL
It was actually better that we didn’t have Sarah on the show. As cool as it would have been, to me what five years of Angel was about was not whether Buffy would pick Angel or Spike. To bring her in at the end kind of doesn’t honor what the five years of the series had been about.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
There was also “Why We Fight,” which took place during World War II on a Nazi sub. It felt like the stand-alone approach gave us a renewed vigor. We really felt like we started operating on all cylinders.
JEFFREY BELL
And we were able to have the show stay true to the characters and itself. I mean, we turned Angel into a puppet, we had the Mexican wrestlers . . . we went all over the place, yet [were] always true to the show. I loved that. That was my favorite thing about year five, the diverse kind of stories we’d earned the right to tell.
AMY ACKER
(actress, Fred/Illyria)
For the actors, I don’t think there was much of a difference between standalone and serialized episodes. Even if there was just a sentence or something that furthered your character in a serialized fashion, it didn’t feel like you had just paused everything else to get that. It just felt like that was a snippet of their lives, but it was still moving forward.
JOSS WHEDON
There was another side to it as well. You need the internal dynamic—it’s what people love—but at the same time you need a show where if nobody’s ever seen it, they can turn it on and not be so caught up in mythos that they’re lost. I wanted to keep the serialized arcs in terms of the emotions and the relationships, but turned it back into the kind of show where you could watch an episode, there’s a problem, it’s resolved, there are outstanding emotional issues, but you have watched an hour and they have finished a case. Not that every episode would be that.
TIM MINEAR
What was needed was mininovels for television. We had some continuing stories in season one, then started to edge toward serialization in season two. In season three we threw in a couple of stand-alone episodes and a few that were stand-alone, but blatantly serviced the arc. My feeling is we became more successful when we said, “Fuck it, it’s a novel.” People didn’t want to read a short story in the middle of a novel. T
hey want to get to the next chapter of the big story, and Angel was most successful when it was just balls-out operatic melodrama. But in season five we changed the show significantly. People wouldn’t feel like they were coming into the middle of something.
DAVID FURY
It was daunting sending the show in a new direction. Angel always existed in a true private detective paradigm. Cases came to him in different ways, but there was always the detective mystery and a clear moral goal: fight evil. Plus, there was always a “family” dynamic. The hotel was home, and Angel was “father” to his misfit crew.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
What was frustrating for us is that in the early part of the season, the new approach resulted in the numbers going up, but the hard-core fans were complaining a bit about wanting it to be more arc-like, as it had been in previous seasons. You know, where’s the Big Bad and that sort of thing? So it was really hard to strike a balance, especially that late in a series where you don’t want to alienate the fans but you’re trying to pick up new fans.
JEFFREY BELL
What we found is the change allowed us to tell emotionally compelling stories that involved our characters, and we could do that in stand-alone stories. But Wesley still pined for Fred. That didn’t go away, so that emotional line was still there. Our characters still had their relationships. The big question for us in year five is we were telling stories from within Wolfram and Hart, our evil law firm.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
What I loved, and this was as true in season five as any other season, was how dark they could take Angel and then, in contrast, how light and fun we could take him. Season five had Ben Edlund’s “Smile Time,” where we take our dark, brooding hero and turned him into a puppet. No other show could possibly do that.
No other episode is remembered by fans as being the true epitome of the diversity of Angel’s storytelling in season five as “Smile Time.” Written and directed by Ben Edlund from a Joss Whedon story, the episode has Angel going to the studio of a children’s television show that is stealing the life force from children. During his investigation, Angel finds himself transformed into a puppet.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
Ben Edlund is a mad genius, and, quite frankly, the sweetest, most even-tempered person I have ever met in my life. It’s like you physically cannot get him upset. I wish I had that in me, because I do get upset. I remember we were sitting in a room. I think it was me, Ben, and Jeff Bell. We were talking about the episode that Jeff did with the Mexican wrestler, the Hermanos Numero. Ben, out of nowhere, just says, “How about this? The phone rings and one of the brothers picks up and goes, ‘Si. Si. Ah, si.’ He hangs up, looks at the other brothers and says, ‘The Devil has built a robot.’ ” We looked at each other and we thought, “How fucking brilliant?” That was Ben. He worked on an absolute different plane than anybody else.
BEN EDLUND
“Smile Time” was my directing debut, and it was such a bizarre way to begin; to start with a show and go, “OK, we’re not going to do the show that we normally do. We’re going to do a show that should be built five feet above the ground, like a puppet show. And we’re going to do things that, engineering wise, has never been done in the pattern of this show, never been done on any show that anyone remembers.” So that was impressive to me in terms of the challenge. But you couldn’t know whether or not it would all fall apart once you started filming a puppet. And then you go, “Holy crap, we were so wrong.” Every time we shot, all the dailies looked great. I also got to write all the songs for that episode, which had to be written in, like, three days. I was writing the songs with a guitar, sleeping overnight at Mutant Enemy, working on the script simultaneously, behind deadline, and turned it in with these songs.
So the idea was to make a TV show, a legitimate TV show, with the show that had a writers’ room that looked like an actual writers’ room, and all of the branding of the show looked like it wasn’t just generic throwaway branding. When you see the puppets do their little performances, you really are watching what feels like excerpts from a legitimate ongoing show for kids. For me, that worked and I was happy with it.
STUART BLATT
We had a puppet company design and build the puppets, but we built the whole Smile Time theater stage, where all the sets were elevated, just like in Sesame Street. The puppets are working above and the puppeteers are standing or at least not laying down, so you can build sets that are four or five feet tall so that the puppeteers can walk underneath them and put their arms up. It was just superfun and creative.
JAMES MARSTERS
(actor, Spike)
They could do something like “Smile Time,” because they know they can keep the audience. When you’re that good, you can do anything. And they just went into doing everything. That episode was written by Ben Edlund, who was responsible for The Tick, a half-hour animated about mediocre superheroes. One of my favorite cartoons in the world. I remember going to him, because I had been waiting, and I got through one and a half scenes when I was, like, “Ben! I’m funny. Come on. Why am I on the sidelines?” I wanted to get right in there, and he was, like, “Oh, James, your scene is gonna be just fine for you. Don’t worry.”
There were numerous changes to the cast in season five. For starters, Charisma Carpenter’s Cordelia was still in a coma as a result of events from season four. She did return in “You’re Welcome,” but at episode’s end it was revealed that she had actually died, her visit to advise Angel coming from another plane. Additionally, with the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, James Marsters’s Spike was brought over, now fully souled and after having helped save the world. Initially he’s noncorporeal, but several episodes in he’s whole again, triggering amazing back-and-forths—both verbally and physically—between him and Angel. On the creative front, the writers were genuinely pissed that the WB spoiled the fact that Marsters was joining the show, taking away from the character’s death on Buffy and ruining any sort of surprise on Angel.
On the Wolfram and Hart front, Christian Kane returned as Lindsey McDonald, at one point even working with Team Angel toward the finale, though he was ultimately (and unexpectedly) killed by Lorne since Angel simply doesn’t trust him. Sarah Thompson appeared as Eve, Angel’s conduit to the Senior Partners; Mercedes McNab returned as the vampire Harmony and worked as Angel’s assistant; and Adam Baldwin became the firm’s Marcus Hamilton.
In regard to Lorne, season five of Angel was actor Andy Hallett’s last starring role outside a voice-over part. He passed away on March 29, 2009, from congestive heart failure. The disease’s origin came from a 2005 dental infection that spread through his bloodstream and to his heart. The pain of that loss is something still felt deeply by his costars, who cannot think of the show’s final season without sharing that sense of loss.
JOSS WHEDON
Cordelia’s situation was a little bit her call, because Charisma had just had a baby and was living the family life. Plus, you don’t need visions when you’ve got assistants saying, “B story on line one.”
CHARISMA CARPENTER
I did not leave the show, despite many people’s suspicions, to raise my child. I am the type of person that I need work, I need to work. My work is super-fulfilling to me. Yes, I wanted to be a mother. Yes, I am so grateful I have a child, but I love what I do. I would not be happy just being a mom, and I would not be happy just being an actress. Those things are beautiful things, and I think ultimately bring depth to me as a person, [and] therefore [to] my work. Unfortunately, it just didn’t work that way with Angel.
The coma was a devastating way to go, and the fans love her, especially when Doyle passes the visions on to her and she grows. Her character gets multidimensional and multifaceted and gets a heart and gains perspective and is really a part of the team. And then to find out, “Gosh, what do we do with the character?” It’s just devastating. Of my career, Angel is probably the greatest reward and the most disappointing thing all at once, but I know how spec
ial the show was.
BEN EDLUND
The coma may have come about due to some difficulties in what to do with Cordelia after she had given birth to Jasmine and what role to give this person, because the psychological truth of that person is really hard to navigate [laughs]. She had sex with Angel’s son, got pregnant, and gave birth to their child, a goddess. It’s a lot to deal with. So it was a kind of breakdown. This happens sometimes when a character in a narrative suffers a metanarrative breakdown of some kind. That may have been the strategy underlying Cordelia, leading her up to a certain point, and there was no exit strategy past that. A lot of times when you have a character go into a sustained coma, something’s not working for that character.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
Honestly, I thought I was coming back for season five. I found out when they had the upfronts that year and journalists called me at home and said, “Why aren’t you on the cast lists?” It was just kind of shitty, but not really a mystery. Look, it was a very complicated relationship, [in] which I definitely played a part . . . and there’s no easy way to go about it. Am I bummed that it went the way that it did? Totally. Could it have been done differently? Probably, but that’s the way it is. That’s the way it happened, and that’s the way it went down.
DAVID FURY
Look, there was a lot of anger about Charisma. I think probably mainly from Joss. It felt a little bit like we were all working our assess off to keep these people employed and it’s, like, you have to take that into consideration before you make any life choices. You just do. And you have to be much more vocal about it. If something happens and you tell them early on or whatever the thing is, that’s fine. But it’s the idea of just kind of showing up and, boom, “I’ve got tattoos,” or, boom, “I cut my hair in the middle of an episode,” which I think Sarah did. It’s, like, “Wait a minute, now you’re just fucking with us. You’re making it so hard to finish this episode, because you’re changing it.” There’s always that attitude of, “It’s my life and I can do anything I want to.” Well, that’s not great. Again, I don’t know the specifics to Charisma’s circumstances—I have a lovely relationship with her—I just know there was a lot of residual anger about what happened.
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