The Buffy Spin Off That Grew Into Something Much Darker
Nerdy Up North
The setup
Vampire Angel leaves Sunnydale for Los Angeles and begins helping people threatened by supernatural forces while searching for redemption. With Cordelia, Wesley and a growing team around him, his small detective agency becomes involved in a much bigger fight against the law firm Wolfram & Hart.
Angel is one of those spin offs that takes a while to stop feeling like a spin off. At the beginning you can still see Buffy everywhere in its DNA, but moving Angel to Los Angeles and giving him his own group eventually lets the show become much darker and stranger.
David Boreanaz gets far more to do here than he did as Buffy's mysterious boyfriend. Angel is still brooding, obviously, but the show discovers he is much funnier when it lets him be awkward, petty or completely confused by normal life.
Cordelia's growth is one of my favourite parts. She arrives as the same blunt, self centred character from Sunnydale, but over time she becomes genuinely important to the group. Wesley probably changes even more. Watching him go from nervous comic relief into somebody almost unrecognisable is one of the strongest long term character arcs in either show.
Wolfram & Hart is a brilliant idea for a villain because you cannot just stake a massive evil law firm. The fact that supernatural evil has lawyers, contracts and corporate offices gives Angel its own identity and lets it tell stories Buffy never really could.
It is definitely uneven. Some seasons are much stronger than others and there are character decisions later in the run that feel more frustrating than tragic. The show can also become incredibly miserable when several dark storylines pile on top of each other.
But when it works, Angel is a fantastic example of a spin off growing beyond the thing that created it. By the end it feels completely capable of standing on its own.
Positives
David Boreanaz gets much more range, Cordelia and Wesley have excellent long term development, Wolfram & Hart is a brilliant recurring villain and the supernatural noir atmosphere suits Los Angeles perfectly.
Negatives
The quality varies between seasons, some later character choices are frustrating and the show occasionally becomes so grim that it loses some of its fun.
Verdict
Angel takes a little time to find itself, but once it does it becomes much more than Buffy with a different postcode. The characters and darker world give it a personality of its own.
