Horror Television: Angel

I love Netflix. Beyond the convenience, the savings, and all those illy things, Netflix has helped me really appreciate television as an artform. Thanks to being able to get shows on DVD at a much lower cost than it would take to buy them (which, in turn, leads to me getting them a lot more frequently), I’ve burned through a lot of TV in the 18 months I’ve had my subscription: Homicide, Deadwood (Best. Show. Ever.), Millennium, Gilmore Girls (yes, really).

Without commercials, without waiting a week between episodes, without suffering through reruns and long dry spells, I’ve fallen in love with the pacing of TV, the style, the form. It’s almost to the point where I like good TV better than the average movie.

I’ve just finished watching seasons 1-3 of Millennium in the last week or so (more on that later). Watching that, and heading into this month, got me thinking about the horror TV I’ve enjoyed over the years. So here’s a series of my thoughts on the best horror/dark television shows I’ve seen.

Angel

For years I was strictly a Buffy partisan, watching Angel only intermittently. Only as Buffy began to decline in its final years did I start watching Angel and discover how good it was.

It’s a rare thing in which a spin off show surpasses its parent (anybody for Joanie Loves Chachi? How about The Lone Gunmen?) But Angel did just that.

Though the stories and themes of the series were familiar from Buffy – where they were largely tried out first – they were refined and made even higher-stakes by the time they got to Angel. Angel was funnier than Buffy, sadder than Buffy, more visually interesting, scarier.

Though it took a little while to get going (season one is nothing special; it’s not until Wolfram and Hart, the evil multidimensional law firm, enters the scene and brings back Darla, and Angel’s supporting cast grows to include Wesley, Gunn, and others, that the show really found its feet), but when it finally did, Angel was some of the most compelling TV going.

The final two seasons were particularly interesting, engaged as they were with moral and ethical issues. They also had good love stories, some deeply excellent fighting, and truly epic plots.

Consider these stories: a man kills his domineering, belittling father to save the woman who he loves, though his love is undeclared; the world is made a paradise by a psychotic ex-god and those who remember how the world used to be must decide whether to destroy paradise to restore free will; frustrated by winning only small fights in the larger battle against evil, a tiny group orchestrates a suicide mission to strike a weak blow against larger evil.

And they did all this while being funny and making me cry more than once. That’s good TV.