Films and TV serials are primarily narrative-driven media. But since a film lasts only two or three hours, it may be possible to forgive a shoddy film script if the characters, faces, production values, setting, action, etc. are sufficiently good to make the few hours enjoyable and motivate us to suspend disbelief. The same cannot be said for TV shows, alas, which require long-term commitment and thus succumb more readily to extended critical analysis. Thus I liked 'Angel' when I was an idiotic teenager but after a few years of college had made me SEMI-literate, I knew better.
The first and biggest problem with 'Angel' was that it was a spinoff of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer', a show whose dearth of regard for establishing or obeying any consistency of in-universe rules necessarily relegated it to the least impressive of the sci-fi/fantasy genre, its popularity notwithstanding. But 'Angel' took these tendencies to the extreme. At least 'Buffy' generally portrayed demons as evil and tried to make excuses (some more convincing than others) for their occasional foray into the "morally conflicted" category. Angel threw such notions out the window. "Demon" here appears to be synonymous with "supernatural humanoid."
Thematically the show was an even worse mess than 'Buffy'. Angel is supposed to be a morally conflicted demon with a soul, and while this was mirrored cleverly at first by the half-demon half-human sidekick Doyle, the two layers of moral conflict were quickly thrown out the window once the introduction of Lorne established that pure demons could also be good and ordinary.
The progressive and feminist themes evoked in 'Buffy' fared no better here. Cloying and incoherent though they were on 'Buffy', they at least made an ounce of literary sense on a show with a female superheroine lead. A show in which the central and strongest character is a standard alpha male is in prima facie contradiction to its attempts at progressive and feminist motifs. It's an unintentionally funny commentary on the futility of feminism prima facie, but the writers clearly have no idea: these LOLcows just keep coming back, week after week, for the milking.
It's also worth mentioning that as it was clearly established that 'Buffy' and 'Angel' take place in the same universe, the complete absence of references of the apocalyptic seisms shaking the settings of the one in the other suggested the stakes were not nearly as high as the respective shows' dialogues and actions seemed to imply. Once again, I don't think this was intentional: just amusingly sloppy writing.
Like 'Buffy', 'Angel' lures us in with dark and tantilizing sets and a ridiculously attractive main cast, and keeps the unsuspecting or sub-literate entertained with enough flash, fanservice and novelty to gloss over its literary and thematic hollowness. Unable to see past itself, not surprisingly, it hasn't aged very well and doesn't really speak to succeeding generations. Leave this one in the early 2000s with all the rest of the garbage of that era.
The first and biggest problem with 'Angel' was that it was a spinoff of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer', a show whose dearth of regard for establishing or obeying any consistency of in-universe rules necessarily relegated it to the least impressive of the sci-fi/fantasy genre, its popularity notwithstanding. But 'Angel' took these tendencies to the extreme. At least 'Buffy' generally portrayed demons as evil and tried to make excuses (some more convincing than others) for their occasional foray into the "morally conflicted" category. Angel threw such notions out the window. "Demon" here appears to be synonymous with "supernatural humanoid."
Thematically the show was an even worse mess than 'Buffy'. Angel is supposed to be a morally conflicted demon with a soul, and while this was mirrored cleverly at first by the half-demon half-human sidekick Doyle, the two layers of moral conflict were quickly thrown out the window once the introduction of Lorne established that pure demons could also be good and ordinary.
The progressive and feminist themes evoked in 'Buffy' fared no better here. Cloying and incoherent though they were on 'Buffy', they at least made an ounce of literary sense on a show with a female superheroine lead. A show in which the central and strongest character is a standard alpha male is in prima facie contradiction to its attempts at progressive and feminist motifs. It's an unintentionally funny commentary on the futility of feminism prima facie, but the writers clearly have no idea: these LOLcows just keep coming back, week after week, for the milking.
It's also worth mentioning that as it was clearly established that 'Buffy' and 'Angel' take place in the same universe, the complete absence of references of the apocalyptic seisms shaking the settings of the one in the other suggested the stakes were not nearly as high as the respective shows' dialogues and actions seemed to imply. Once again, I don't think this was intentional: just amusingly sloppy writing.
Like 'Buffy', 'Angel' lures us in with dark and tantilizing sets and a ridiculously attractive main cast, and keeps the unsuspecting or sub-literate entertained with enough flash, fanservice and novelty to gloss over its literary and thematic hollowness. Unable to see past itself, not surprisingly, it hasn't aged very well and doesn't really speak to succeeding generations. Leave this one in the early 2000s with all the rest of the garbage of that era.