I finally got around to starting to watch the DVD box set of Angel I nabbed for cheap from a CEX a while back.

Aside: I still object to the use of "box set" to describe a run of something being on a streaming service. One, because there's no fucking box. Two, because "box set" implies that you own it, and we all know that streaming services often "lose" shows with little to no warning. And three, because there's no fucking box.

Angel and its predecessor Buffy the Vampire Slayer are two of my favourite TV shows from "back in the day", and I haven't revisited either for a long time. To be honest, in recent years I'd been feeling a little odd about them given that Joss Whedon is apparently not a very nice person, but at some point you have to 1) separate art from artist and 2) remember that Whedon was just one part of what made those shows so good.

And so it was that I found myself watching two episodes of Angel back-to-back last night. And I enjoyed them a lot. It's always a pleasure to go back to what is probably now considered "old TV", because it's a reminder of how much things have changed… and how, although we do have some legitimately great series these days, I still, on the whole, prefer that blissful late '90s-early 2000s era. And y'know the really great thing? You can nab DVD box sets of the complete runs of all these series for a fraction of the cost buying one season of them would have cost back in the day.

Sure, for that price you probably won't get a fancy-pants Blu-Ray version, but in many cases I think that honestly might be preferable; there have been all too many examples of Blu-Ray upscales being a bit of a mess, and while standard definition shows can look a bit grimy at times, that sometimes adds to their appeal somewhat. It certainly does with Angel, and I'm sure it will with other shows, also, such as The Wire, which I've never seen, just remembered I'd never seen, and now have an £8 box set of the entire thing headed my way before I'd even finished writing this post.

But anyway. Angel. On the off-chance you're not familiar, here's the gist. Angel was a recurring character in the early seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He was a thoroughly good-looking young man in the "smouldering, brooding" mould and, of course, he was a tragic hero in that he was a vampire who had been cursed with a soul. That effectively put him on the side of the "good guys", and our heroine Buffy ended up falling hard for him. One thing led to another, they boned, and we learned exactly what the release conditions of Angel's curse — that he would return to his vampiric form if he ever experienced "one moment of true happiness" — really meant.

Long story short, Buffy managed to successfully re-curse Angel, moments before he was dragged into Hell for quite some time, and when he came back he quite understandably decided that he probably needed a bit of space. So he left Sunnydale, the setting of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and headed off to Los Angeles to start his own spin-off series. There, he became a sort of supernatural private investigator, initially supported by Doyle, a demon that has premonitions supposedly sent by the "powers that be", and Cordelia Chase, the "spoiled rich girl" character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer who had something of a humiliating crash back down to Earth when she, too, moved to LA, hoping to find fame and fortune.

It would have been easy for Angel to simply become Buffy, But Somewhere Different, but it quickly distinguished itself with a much darker tone. It went heavier on the gore — though not excessively so — and didn't shy away from looking at the bleaker side of life in the city. Don't get me wrong, Buffy got pretty dark, too, particularly in its later seasons, but Angel's 18 certificate is there with good reason.

I can't remember a lot about the complete run of Angel, which is why I'm keen to revisit it, and I really enjoyed the couple of episodes I watched last night — particularly since, as you can probably tell from yesterday's post, I was feeling pretty bleak and dark myself.

In some respects, it's obviously aged — no-one in Angel has a smartphone, for example, because it predates them, and any computer use is on a big chunky desktop PC with a CRT monitor, which is always a delight to see — but that's no bad thing. The nice thing about Buffy and Angel when they originally released was that they felt very much "of their time" — not in a way that they would age poorly, but in that they represented a good snapshot of what life was like during the years they were broadcast. Retrospectively, that makes these shows particularly interesting to look at, and contemplate quite how seismic some of the changes we've seen in society in the last 25 years have really been. (And not for the better in a lot of cases, I'd say.)

Anyway, I'm not going to rush through Angel — I'm probably going to put it on a rotation with the aforementioned The Wire and some other things I nabbed in an impromptu CEX order not ten minutes ago — but I am going to enjoy it. And if you've never seen it, I'd encourage you to seek it out; it's a great example of TV from that era, and deserves more recognition than it tends to get.

And yes, I heard the recent story about there being a possibility of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot. Not sure quite how to feel about that right now, but we'll see. For now, the original (and Angel) still exists, and is still good, and whatever ends up happening with any sort of modern reimagining won't change that.

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