What were the concepts behind Angel?
Our initial concept of Angel was a little different to how the show turned out. We’d spent all these years with a very intense emotional show, albeit very funny.
The question we were always asking in the [Buffy] writers’ room was "What’s the pain? The adolescent high schooler on dating? People don’t love me?" I’ve often said that if Joss had even had even one date in High School none of us would be here today. We’ve been mining everybody’s pain, mostly his, for a long time.
So we said "This show will be easier, this Angel show, it will be older, it will be urban and gritty, it will take place in big bad Los Angeles, not this mythical Santa Barbara-like town of Sunnydale where it’s sunny and bright but terrible things happen".
We assumed it would be more of a franchise detective show in which [Angel] would every week help somebody in trouble, and we assumed it would be easier to write. As we got into doing the show we realised that we were wrong and that what we do best is really deep character work. What is most interesting to us is what is happening to the characters that we know and love.
The joy and the misery of television is, we do 22 hours a year and it’s like a big grand novel and, not go to a soapy serialised place, you can’t resist [deep character work] because you want to see the characters grow and change.
One of the great things about working with Joss is that he will allow a character to grow and change. Buffy and Angel fell in love, she found he was a vampire, they made love, he turned evil and horrible, and eventually he moved away. Much like real life, as opposed to trying to play the same thing week after week, on and on ad nauseum.
