Angel: City Of

"Look, high school's over, bud."

Spin-offs are always a bit awkward, and this has the potential to be more than most. Unlike Buffy, who's witty and cool, Angel is brooding, fairly humourless and definitely not a people person. Worse, Buffy has established itself as an ensemble show, whereas the theme music to Angel (which rocks, by the way, and so does the tune) features only three regulars. Still, one of them is Cordelia (yay!) and she's outgoing, self-centred, funny and definitely a people person. And, going by the first episode, this really, really works. Even the fact that we begin in a bar, with the title character drinking alcohol, is something that has never so far happened in Buffy.

I love the title, although I must admit I've always had a penchant for terrible puns. It highlights the fact that there's a fourth regular character for this show: Los Angeles. Whereas Buffy has just started to explore the experience of moving from high school to university and the adjustment to a much bigger and more uncaring world, Angel expands these themes to an older demographic and the biggest possible scale: a city notorious for attracting people with hope and dreams and then cruelly disillusioning them.

Everything in the episode is about this. The fact that Russell, the baddie here, is a vampire acts as a rather neat metaphor for the way that this city, with its mirages of stardom and its uncaring harshness, sucks all the hope and life out of people. These themes are brought home all the more by the fact that they're happening to Cordelia, whom we all know and love, or bloody well ought to. We saw her lose all her money in the last season of Buffy, and so here she is, in the big city, desperate for some very unlikely success, living in a dump and wasting her time with some very Californian self-help twaddle. This is a great use of the character. Frankly, the new season of Buffy, being all about a new and unfamiliar environment, has no need of a secondary character originally designed as a queen bee type. But putting her in different circumstances, in a different show, as a primary character seems a great and promising move. It helps that Charisma Carpenter is amazing.

Then again, it may be great that Cordelia's an old friend of ours, and that she knows right away that Russell's a vampire and is blasé about it because, hey, she's from Sunnydale, but we know that no real harm or tragedy is going to befall her, at least not in the first episode. So enter Tina, who isn't so lucky, and who is so, so tragic. Unlike the slightly heightened character of Cordelia she feels like a real, brave, frightened person and we see enough of her to be devastated at her death.

She's also the catalyst for Angel, of course. He's withdrawn into himself, and just wants to help the occasional person and be left alone to mope in his mysteriously acquired Batcave. But the Powers That Be (mentioned in the very first episode, and it's already tempting to see them as the fictionalised alter ego of the writers, or basically Joss Whedon, which is fun and metatextual) have other ideas. So up pops Doyle who, aside from the facts that he's half-demon, has painful visions and is played by someone with a genuine Irish accent (the late Glenn Quinn), which has a real potential to embarrass the otherwise excellent David Boreanaz in flashback sequences, is still a complete mystery at this point. Suffice to say he's been called forth by the Powers That Be, and his first task is to recite Angel's backstory for the benefit of anyone who hasn't seen Buffy. I believe that over on TV tropes they refer to this sort of thing as "As You Know, Bob". Still, at least the script has the grace to give Angel a line that admits this. And it's all good ammunition for my "Powers That Be=Joss Whedon" theory.

Angel has to get out there and mix with people, is the message.  He needs to start caring about people, so that he can do good for its own sake rather than for the sake of his own tortured conscience. The Powers That Be / Joss Whedon definitely have a plan for him. And it gives him a character arc.

Angel is a little off-guard in the big city, interestingly. At first he doesn't manage to defeat Russell, but retreats. He simply isn't the big shot in LA that he is in Sunnydale. He's still a somebody, though, a "new player in town", and he wins out in the end, in a rather cool manner.

It's only the first episode, but already we're introduced to evil and mysterious law firm Wolfram and Hart, and also to Christian Kane, whose character is as yet unnamed. Even the "Senior Partners" get a mention, which surprises me. Already the format is taking shape, and we end with the formation of Angel Investigations and Cordelia, naturally, employing herself.

This first episode is much better than I remembered. I'll be honest and admit that I didn't really get into Angel until Season Three, but this is certainly a great start.