“Angel’s just something that you’re forced to wear.…”
Of Angel’s five-season run, it was the fourth that was the most in danger of running off the rails creatively, for a number of reasons. For starters, there was a behind-the-scenes shake-up. David Greenwalt was gone, having departed over a contract dispute with production company 20th Century Fox; Tim Minear, although involved creatively for part of the season, was serving as a show runner along with Joss Whedon on the sci-fi series Firefly; Marti Noxon was focused fully on Buffy’s final season, with David Fury taking her position as consulting producer; writer Steven S. DeKnight came over from Buffy; Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain were brought in as staff writers; Ben Edlund, following the cancellation of the aforementioned Firefly, joined the show as producer; and, while Jeffrey Bell would eventually end up serving as show runner, early on writer/producer David Simkins was brought in from outside by Mutant Enemy to guide things. His credits prior to doing the show included Dark Angel, FreakyLinks, and Roswell, and after Angel he moved on to such shows as Charmed, Blade: The Series, The Dresden Files, Warehouse 13, Grimm, and Powers.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
(supervising producer, Angel)
After spending two seasons on Buffy, Joss came to me at the end of season six and said he wanted Tim Minear to run Firefly, but he didn’t want to take Tim away from David Greenwalt and leave him with a hole in his staff—obviously this was before David left the show. So Joss asked if I could help out and move over to Angel. I’d always expressed an interest in the show, because I watched it every week. I always came down to the Angel office, which was right down below the Buffy office, [to] talk about the episodes each week. And then I’d come back up to the Buffy office and say, “Did you see that fight on Angel last night? Why aren’t we doing fights like that?” I was always talking about how beautiful it looked and it was letterboxed, and why weren’t we letterboxed? Buffy was my first love and the show I wanted to be on when it ended, but I just couldn’t resist coming down to Angel. Plus, you know, there was a promotion and raise and opportunity dangled in front of me, which didn’t hurt at all. In true Godfather fashion, Joss made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.
BEN EDLUND
(producer, Angel)
In 2001, I ended up doing the Tick live-action show, which was many things. In addition to being a nightmare, it was also a good thing. It was really hard, so I needed to take time off. Then I had no money and I needed a job, and I heard Firefly was being done. My agent told me “this spaceship show” was being done by the guy who did Buffy. I was sort of out at that point, just body surfing and trying to write a feature, so I went in. Actually, I remember, I did not know who Joss was. I went to a meeting for Firefly and I ended up shaking Tim Minear’s hand and calling him Joss. You’re supposed to not get the job after you fuck up that bad, but we had a fairly good meeting. And as I understood it, I think Tim Minear was a big proponent of mine, maybe because [laughs] I might have amused him. But very much, as I understood it, he was a champion of mine in the hiring process and I’m quite grateful to him. He had a quasi-mentor energy, which I appreciate to this day.
That was a really good camp to get in. So we worked for the twelve episodes of Firefly, it got canceled, and I was really fortunate to have been in the situation where I was able to distinguish myself, and Joss wanted me to transfer from Firefly to Angel. They brought me on and I was writing on the last part of season four. I was kind of like this bubble of investment being dragged along by Mutant Enemy for the next season. And then I did the full fifth season.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
I agreed to go to Angel. We wrapped Buffy and everybody’s taking a hiatus. I pop in to the office during a hiatus, if memory serves me correctly, to start clearing out my office. I go into David Greenwalt’s and he goes, “Hey, how you doing?” “You know, starting my vacation.” He says, “OK. You’re writing the first episode of next season.” I found out he was supposed to be writing it, but he was in negotiations with Fox to renew his deal. It wasn’t going well, so he decided to leave the show. As a result, whereas I thought I would kind of ease into the season, write an episode around six once I got my feet wet, that wasn’t the case at all. So I got to do the first episode of season four. I spent my vacation working on that episode. Then wrote it again, because it had such a loose break. That was part one of my most painful memories working for Mutant Enemy. I had written a script and Tim Minear really liked it, and Jeff Bell really liked it. Tim Minear was consulting, I believe, and they’d enlisted Jeff Bell to help oversee the show while they were looking for a new show runner. There were a lot of things about the script that didn’t work, because we didn’t dot the i’s or cross the t’s before we dove into writing it.
My note session was tortuous in my mind. It was, like, a two- or three-hour note session. I was in the room with all the other writers and Joss was being shadowed by a reporter—I want to say for The New York Times. The reporter was in the room as I was basically dismantled, having given up my vacation to write this. I can chuckle about it now, but it stung at the time. The bigger picture is, he was absolutely right. The episode needed to be rebroken, no doubt about it. But that was my auspicious start on Angel.
David Simkins at the time was under an overall deal with Fox, and, with Greenwalt leaving, it was the studio’s suggestion that he become part of the show, an idea he rejected when first broached by his agent. It was his feeling that the writing staffs at Mutant Enemy were fairly insular and it simply didn’t seem like the right fit. Ultimately, though, he was convinced to go in for an interview.
DAVID SIMKINS
(executive producer, Angel)
I was familiar with Buffy and Angel in terms of the zeitgeist of it all. I’d seen them both and liked them very much, but I was not a die-hard fan. I respected them and loved what they were doing in terms of opening the door for a different, better, more fun kind of storytelling that TV had not been exposed to before. Those two shows were incredibly groundbreaking in terms of approaching material and doing something with the vampire genre that was unique and fun.
DAVID FURY
(consulting producer, Angel)
In season four, Angel needed a little more help. I was working on the show concurrently with season seven of Buffy. This was the year that David Greenwalt left, and Tim Minear, who was going to be the new show runner, went to run Firefly. So suddenly the two main guys from Angel were gone. I was a senior writer on Buffy and they wanted me to come on. I came on as a consultant and it was a difficult time initially, because we were trying to acclimate. And they brought in a show runner who struggled.
DAVID SIMKINS
The meeting was very unusual for me in terms of how most of these interviews go. Usually when I’m being interviewed for a job like this, the questions run the gamut from what you’re watching on TV, what you like, how you work with writers in the room, do you like to break off and give the writers an idea and let them come back to you with it more fleshed out? Usually it’s kind of specific, because room work when you’re writing for television can be a bit of a crucible of sorts. A lot of emotions come out in the room, a lot of jokes, a lot of good stuff. But the interview with Joss was different in that Tim Minear was there as well. The interview was such that I was not asked a lot of questions. The sense that I’d had—and it had happened before—is that in between the meeting being set up and the meeting actually happening, another player is being offered the job. So you’re sitting there in this interview, not really being interviewed. The suspicion was that there’s somebody else waiting in the wings and they’re just waiting for the deal to close. So I sat on the couch, I listened to Joss and Tim crack a lot of inside jokes about actors and Fox executives. I did my best to laugh along, but I really couldn’t follow the thread, having not been a part of the clique. The meeting ended, and, driving home, I called my agent and said, “That was interesting, but I’m not going to get the gig.” I was already moving on mentally to the next thing.
But later that afternoon I received a phone call that I had gotten the job. I was floored; I didn’t know how I got the job. I just wasn’t sure what was happening there. But, again, I told my agent that I was going to pass, because it didn’t feel right. I respected Joss and Tim and loved the work they were doing, but it just felt with so many seasons behind Buffy and three behind Angel, I would be coming into a situation where it was already a well-oiled machine. And to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure why they weren’t hiring from within. I was a little confused by that, and then I thought what was happening was Fox was paying me since I was under contract, and it’s very common for writers or producers to be put on another show so the cost can be written off. I told my agent it felt like I was being put into a position just to make Fox happy, but he told me I was overthinking it. So for the second time, against my better judgment, I said, “OK.”
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
You can’t just bring anybody onto a Joss Whedon show to run it. You’ve got to get his sensibilities; you need to understand him. They brought in a guy—David Simkins—who was very nice, but he just didn’t mesh. It just wasn’t a good fit.
DAVID SIMKINS
One of the first things that happened after I got the job is that Joss and Tim and I all went out for dinner, ostensibly for what I thought was to explain the ins and outs, or tell me what the ropes would be that I’d have to learn. But then Joss told me that the first two scripts for the season had already been written and—and he used this exact expression—they had been “Simkins-proofed,” which he laughed at. I kind of laughed at that, too, but what I understood that to mean is that the first two scripts had been written in case I was going to screw up the start of the season. It was a bit disheartening, I have to admit, to know that I was already being seen as a bit of an interloper and a bit of a nuisance. But I understood that. I knew that Joss’s relationship with the studio was a bit tense and that he was having some problems on Firefly, that they weren’t happy with the way things were going there. Buffy was wrapping and they wanted Angel to stay on. It’s something that, if I was in Joss’s position, I would have considered if I knew that someone like David Greenwalt was leaving. I would want to get a head start. I don’t think Joss meant it maliciously; it was just that sometimes Joss says things that are truthful, but there can also be a bit of cruelty in that truth. That’s what makes his writing so good is that he’s honest in the stories he tells and the characters he writes.
But I buried all that and got a hold of the first three seasons of Angel, watched every episode, and absolutely fell in love with the show. So I felt I was ready when we opened the room for real and I met the writers, sat in the writers’ room, and was eager and on board and happy to be a part of it.
DAVID FURY
David Simkins couldn’t quite acclimate to our way of working. He didn’t quite understand the show and he didn’t quite understand Joss’s sensibilities. And we did. We were much more in tune. The people that Joss hired and kept were people whom he basically mentored in the way of doing things, the way to tell stories, and the way to break those stories. And it was an odd experience, because to get someone from outside the family to run the show was a bit of a feeling of them abandoning their show. I was there as a consultant, but at some point it became very difficult to help. We weren’t talking the same language. You realize, “Oh, we have a problem here,” and we’re not going to be telling the kind of stories that meant something or work for us.
DAVID SIMKINS
Usually when you’re hired as a show runner, if it’s for your own show or a first season you’re coming in on, you have a certain autonomy. You’re definitely filling out a list of requirements a studio or network has for the show. If you’re hired for a detective show, you don’t make it a musical … unless you’re Joss, and then it’s great. In this case, I was very aware that there was a specific language to this show, a shorthand and a familiarity that all of the writers had with these characters and this concept. My initial thought was to sit down, shut up, keep my eyes open, and just make sure that the trains ran on time. To do that, I had to let these trains be driven by people who knew how to drive them. I was there to watch the narrative arcs in terms of where the characters were going and [make] sure things were carried forward. I had no inclination to come in and redefine the show or say we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that. That wasn’t my job. I was basically hired to make sure the stories, outlines, and concepts got to Joss in a timely manner. And when he approved or disapproved of those ideas, to make sure that all got relayed to keep things running as smoothly as possible.
DAVID FURY
Joss was very focused on Firefly and they didn’t seem to want to think about Angel. They said, “Good luck with it.” The feeling was almost they couldn’t care less; just let somebody else run it. I don’t know if that’s the case, but it felt that way at the time. I would seek out Tim and Joss; I would go to the set of Firefly to try and talk to them about, “Here’s where we’re at with my story to the third episode,” and I would be going to them directly, because I wasn’t getting what I needed from David Simkins. Everyone was kind of struggling and morale was down. It was a very tricky time. I just wanted us to be able to do good work. I wasn’t looking for anybody to get in trouble or leave. I was just concerned that the show was going to fall apart, and that’s exactly what was happening.
DAVID SIMKINS
Having the first two scripts written, we had a bit of luxury there where we could take some time to figure out what the third and fourth episodes would be. We had some continuing stories and arcs that we had to honor, so that was included as well. I would say to Joss or Tim, “What do you think of this?” or, “How does this work?” Jeff Bell, bless his heart, one day I was sitting with him at the table in the writers’ room and was sort of noodling on an idea, and Jeff leaned over and very sweetly whispered, “That’s not this show,” and I was very thankful, because that was the kind of thing I was needing to know coming into a situation that was new. I looked to Jeff for that; he was very good at that sort of thing.
DAVID FURY
To some extent I separated myself. I would basically use Joss as the de facto show runner and go to [him] and Tim for notes rather than going to David for my episode. And David seemed at that point fine with that. I was more like, “Let’s wait and see when David tries to write the show if he grasps the way it’s done.” Sometimes until you actually do it, you don’t really understand why you’re doing it this way. But he never got the chance; they just kind of moved on anyway. I had actually proposed that Jeff Bell would be an ideal choice to run the show, because Jeff had worked closely on it in the last year and was already a producer there anyway. I said, “I think you need to promote somebody from within who knows the show and knows the Mutant Enemy way of doing things, and I think it should be Jeff.” In the end they agreed.
DAVID SIMKINS
The details of what went down is that we were looking for our third script idea. I’d gone to Joss and pitched a concept about a villain who was trading futures. Not in a stock market sense, but this character had a way to identify the potential in someone’s future abilities. Like if you were going to grow up and become a world-famous surgeon, he would know this, take your future, hold on to that mojo from you, and sell it on some kind of black market to the highest bidder. It was kind of an odd concept. David Fury got the nod to write the script, and I remember clearly one day in the writers’ room, we were trying to break the story.
Now I’m very much the kind of person where you just keep going wherever the story goes. You know it’s going to end up in the weeds at some point and you’ll pull it back. I’m sure David is that way, too, but for whatever reason on that particular day he turned to me and said, “I don’t get this. I don’t understand what this story is about.” I said, “Well, David, I don’t think any of us do. That’s kind of the point of why we’re here, trying to break this.” But then I realized later that there was a bigger issue going on. I got the sense that David was not particularly happy with my presence there. I could be completely reading into that, and I have nothing but respect for David—he’s obviously a very accomplished and talented writer—but for whatever reason, there was an issue there.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
I remember I was on set for the first day of shooting on that season premiere. David Simkins and I were on set. Then he left to go back to the office. A couple of hours later I got a call that he had been let go. They had Jeff Bell step in as kind of an interim show runner, although, of course, in classic fashion they wouldn’t give him the title until the next season. I can’t say enough good things about Jeff Bell. Gracious, calm, good humored, just really lovely. He got everything dumped on top on him and just executed the season wonderfully in my opinion.
DAVID SIMKINS
So David wrote the outline for episode three, which got approved. Then he wrote the script and delivered it. It was the first script coming in under my tenure, so I was very nervous about it and was already predisposed to be very hypercritical of the draft. I’d never worked with David before, I didn’t know his writing process, and I just wasn’t sure about it, so I gave the draft to a couple of veteran Angel writers on the sly to read and to come to me. I just needed somebody to give me some kind of barometer. The reading I got from them was not positive. It concerned me to the point where I went to Tim and said, “I’m not sure about this. What should I do?” Tim and Joss were up to their eyeballs with Firefly and I felt terrible about bringing them into this question, because it wasn’t your job to do that. It was my job to make that decision, but I thought out of deference to David I needed to go a little higher up the food chain and get an opinion. And the opinion I got was that the script was fine. That’s what I needed to know.
The next day at the office, I got a call from my agent and was told that I was being let go. It was shocking. I was not prepared for that. Joss called me later in the day when he had the time to tell me he was sorry, and he apologized for the situation, but added, “I just don’t have time to teach you how the show works.” I was like, “OK.” I hung up the phone, packed up my stuff, and left.
DAVID GREENWALT
(consulting producer/cocreator)
I happen to know Simkins before and after that. A great guy and good writer, but not a Joss fit. Or not an Angel fit. I remember he had a few issues with something we were breaking, and he goes to talk to Joss about his issues. Next day, he’s gone. I left and it fell to Jeff Bell’s very capable shoulders. For Simkins, it was an impossible situation. There are just certain people who fit in that Joss mold, in that Joss world, and certain others did not, and never the twain shall meet. Edgar Allan Poe would’ve done really well there. But it was not his fault in any way, shape, or form; they should’ve given it to Jeff in the first place anyway. I don’t know if they went for Simkins because he had more experience running a show or something.
JOSS WHEDON
(executive producer/cocreator, Angel)
David Simkins had a deal with the network. He’s a smart guy, and I thought I’d give him a shot.
DAVID SIMKINS
I honestly think it would have been tough for anyone to come in there and try to figure out how the show worked. I didn’t think it’s about the show mechanics itself; it was about the personalities involved. Those guys were working together for so long [that] they all understood each other, and I just don’t think there was any time. Especially for them. They had a lot going on. It was just easier for them to go on. And once they brought me in out of deference to the studio, then it was OK if they let me go. They tried, right? They were going to do it the way they wanted to. I get that, but I wish I’d listened to my inner warning system at the very beginning. I wished Joss well, hoped the season would be fantastic, and went off and did something else.
ELIZABETH CRAFT
(staff writer, Angel)
Part of the problem, in David Simkins’s defense, is Joss was so busy at the time. It’s not like he had a lot of time to spend with David, you know? You needed someone who could literally know what Joss would like and what he wouldn’t. And coming from the outside, that’s very difficult. Jeff Bell had been there, so it just was so much easier for Jeff to know what kind of things Joss responds to. And from our staff-writer perspective, it was terrifying. We were like, “Oh my God, we’re going to be swept out.” But in the midst of all this, Joss came in hours after the David Simkins situation went down. He was like, “Just so you know, everything is fine.” [laughs]
SARA FAIN
(staff writer, Angel)
“You’re not going to be out of here, so you can just relax.” It was actually really thoughtful of him.
JOSS WHEDON
Honestly, who’s going to walk into David Greenwalt’s job and just be able to do it? It’s a nearly impossible task. We’d hoped there would be a fit somewhere, but there wasn’t and we sort of took care of it sooner rather than later, just because we needed to get the process working with the people who do it. It seemed abrupt and I felt bad that I put him in that position. It’s a one-in-fifty chance that there was going to be a match there, like a marrow donor, and it didn’t work.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
(actress, Cordelia Chase)
With season four, I felt that the Three Stooges—the main men who ran our shows and made it great—all left. David Greenwalt left to do Miracles, and I missed him terribly. My character missed him. Tim Minear wrote great stuff for Cordelia, but then he left to work on Firefly. And Joss had already been busy with other things for a while, although I knew he always had his hand in things, overseeing story lines and deciding what happens when, and the others would make it happen. Those decisions were obviously his and very important and key and brilliant, but without those three, how could the show possibly be the same? How could it not suffer?
TIM MINEAR
(consulting producer, Angel)
I had a hand in breaking stories pretty consistently through episode seven or eight. Then after I finished working on Firefly, I came back from episode fifteen, which was the last episode with Faith. I wrote that story with Mere Smith, and then did the season finale. When David Greenwalt left, there was much involvement on my part, and then Firefly eventually completely took over and I sort of abandoned them. That was actually a word that was bandied about.
Embracing the show for the first time was actor turned director Sean Astin (The Goonies, the Lord of the Rings trilogy), who helmed season four’s “Soulless,” an Angelus-centric episode.
SEAN ASTIN
(director, “Soulless”)
I played in a friendly card game with a couple of writers—doesn’t that sound like the start of an action movie? I was the actor in the writer card game, so they were really happy to take my money all the time. I was back from New Zealand and shooting Lord of the Rings and was reacclimating to American life with things like this card game. I really wanted to roll my sleeves up and get in the hour-drama directing chair. Basically, I draped myself over David Greenwalt, who would act nice even though he’d taken most of my money, and refused to let him leave our friend’s house until he had promised me something. Anything. And he said, “Well, you can come and shadow Tim Minear, because we don’t just hand out episodes like Chiclets. You have to be part of the show.” So I followed Tim around learning what I needed to.
Angel was in its sweet spot. It was season four. The characters were well established; the way it was photographed had a very distinct look; the actors knew their thing. Basically the show was a well-oiled machine. Or a train going down the tracks and basically for a guest director to step in, it’s like, “Oh, hey, can you be a conductor for a little bit,” and your job is to not crash the train. Just let the train keep going in the direction it’s going. There are little ways in which you can put your own stamp on it, but you know, you’re not going to come in and reenvision. What I like about television compared to features is the pace. It moves a little faster.
My episode was a bottle show. There was one day out on location, to a house in downtown L.A. where there is a big mass murder. We also did a couple of vamp fights, which I loved. I love shooting the vampire fight sequences and I pretty quickly grasped how the visual effects guys were doing the dusting, when they “poof” a vampire. They hit them with the thing and they just dissolve or whatever. So just working with the stunt guys and working with the visual effects guys, I found that really fun. The rest of the time we were down in the basement of the hotel, with Angelus in a cell. David Boreanaz was great for the first two days, and then at the end of the third day of being in a four-by-four cell, he had this look in his eyes like, “OK, we need to not be doing this anymore.”
Even with personnel in place, season four was a challenge in more ways than just an occasionally bored vampire. Season three had ended on a cliffhanger, with Angel sunk to the bottom of the ocean and Cordelia having ascended to a higher plane, though the rest of Team Angel—with the exception of the lying and duplicitous Connor—have no idea where either of them are. Angel’s disappearance is resolved when Wesley, with a coerced Justine, puts clues together, locates the container, and rescues Angel and returns him to the hotel.
Eventually Cordelia, who had been helplessly watching matters unfold, also finds herself returned to the hotel, but with no memory of anyone. And that is just the start in a season that goes pretty far out there: an apocalypse is rising because of the birth of Connor—who never should have been brought into existence in the first place; the “Beast” for a time blots out the sun (thus giving full rein to vampires and demons); when the world seems to be ending, Cordelia, trying to give Connor something real to believe in, decides to sleep with him, which Angel witnesses; Angel’s soul is taken through mystical means, and he becomes Angelus, in the belief the team can get some clues about the Beast; Angelus escapes; Faith is recruited by Wesley to break out of prison to help capture Angelus (which she does after what can best be described as an acid trip); Cordelia is pregnant, apparently with Connor’s child, and the child’s gestation is happening extremely quickly; Cordelia is manipulating Connor against his father; Willow uses magic to restore Angel’s soul; the Beast is beaten, the sun begins to shine again, and Cordelia gives birth to a goddess named Jasmine (Gina Torres) before slipping into a coma; Jasmine seemingly brings peace and tranquility to everyone, though she hides her true nature (and the fact that she has to eat people to survive). All told, a simply insane year of storytelling, much of it triggered by the fact that in real life actress Charisma Carpenter had become pregnant, and the writers—who had intended on making Cordelia the Big Bad—were put into a corner so that, in essence, both Cordelia and Charisma gave birth to Jasmine.
Probably the most grounded relationship came from the romance between Fred and Gunn that heats up until the episode “Supersymmetry,” where Fred wants revenge against her former professor, who purposely sent her to Pylea. Ultimately, she changes her mind, but Gunn steps in for her. That murder creates an unmovable wedge between them. Gradually, a relationship starts between Fred and Wesley.
J. AUGUST RICHARDS
(actor, Charles Gunn)
That change, I thought, was fantastic. I thought it was heartbreaking and fun. The killing of the professor character was probably the hardest scene I shot my entire time on Angel, because it was nearly impossible. There was so much that was not there that was happening. There was so much that had to be created. We had to talk loud even though it was quiet. That’s just something I remember being very difficult.
Every season on Angel I remember specifically there being one day a year that I was afraid to go to work, because I was being asked to do something I didn’t know if I knew how to do. One season I had to juggle in a scene. They offered to get me a stuntman, but up until that point I had done most of my own stunts, and I didn’t want to stop there. I had a week to learn how to juggle and I did and it went great. In season five I had to do a scene with myself, and that was in the White Room with Joss directing.
Again, talking about great notes, he was giving me notes that I don’t know if anybody else would understand, but he and I had a shorthand, I guess, or at least were on the same planet, because I know what he means. We do the scene a couple of times where I was with myself in the White Room, and the last take he said, “Now this time give me a little Laurence Fishburne and a little Southern preacher.” I knew what he meant and we did it, and it was great. A lot of the work I’m most proud of is stuff that he’s directed me in.
JOSS WHEDON
What was exciting about season three was that for once we weren’t going to wrap everything up with a bow, which led to something very exciting to me, because I’d never really done cliffhanger endings. And the beginning of every season is always the hardest part of the season, because you really have to gear up and get people involved. Having solved the problems the season before, you have to introduce new ones. On Buffy, every year something is happening in school, but, still, we’re always trying to find our footing. On Angel, season four we came in swinging, because we had already had all of this unresolved, exciting stuff.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
I enjoyed the hell out of season four, and I even have some fond memories that aren’t up on screen. Like the first episode where they dredge Angel out of the box at the bottom of the ocean. Originally he was supposed to have a beard he had grown, because he was down there for so long. We did makeup tests of David in the beard and raggedy clothes … I really wish I had a copy of this. My first reaction was he looked like the guy from Monty Python’s Flying Circus who’s on screen right before the music starts. And something I’d written in that episode was a whole bit we couldn’t afford where Angel breaks out of the box at the bottom of the sea, and, after struggling through most of the episode, he swims to the top and breaks the water, but it’s daylight and he gets incinerated. Then he realizes he’s still in the box. I always regretted not being to shoot that bit.
JOSS WHEDON
What I came to at the start of season four was, “So that’s why people always do cliffhangers. It makes everything much easier.” As a result, with season four we just went to the mattresses. It was as twisted as you could imagine, and everything about it just excited me.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
It’s weird, my stomach totally turns when I think about the relationship between Connor and Cordelia. I liked him as a person and everything, and I liked working with Vincent, but I didn’t like my character being with him. It’s icky to kiss someone else when you’re pregnant. It’s got to be icky for him, too. But if Angel and Cordelia had gotten together, that would have been a big snore fest, so what else were the writers going to do?… But Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, that whole season was rough. Like I said, I was pregnant, and we were doing these continuous episodes and my belly is growing and I was in the same costume—and it was wow! That was tough.
DAVID BOREANAZ
(actor, Angel)
The relationship between Angel and Connor was pretty volatile. Surprisingly, Vince and I, we always kind of laughed and said we’d like to do more scenes together where we’re kind of more together, a father-son relationship, and build on that. But then he had to go off and screw my girlfriend. That was all wrong as far as Angel was concerned; that was just kind of weird.
KELLY A. MANNERS
(producer, Angel)
What’s interesting is that in season four Charisma was going to become the evil character. Joss had broken the story arc, but about a month before we started, Charisma walked in and goes, “Oh, by the way, I’m pregnant.” Joss almost tripped over. That’s how Gina Torres came to be on the show as Jasmine. That threw a big wrench into Joss’s plans. I thought he was going to cry, because it had to change his whole vision for that season. I know Joss loved having Gina; I think she brought quite a bit to the show. Like I said, she was a life vest because Joss’s vision got fucked up. I think in a way she saved that season.
DAVID FURY
Charisma felt that everyone got angry at her over her pregnancy, and she’s not wrong. I’m not going to say that I had a particular problem with her pregnancy, but the thing with Charisma is she led her life as she wanted to without considering ramifications on her role on the shows. For instance, she wound up getting a bunch of tattoos and one of them was a cross that was on her wrist. And I’m going, “You got a tattoo of a cross on your wrist when you’re on a vampire show, and crosses have an effect on them? We have to hide that now.” It’s little things like that. These seem like little things. By all means she has the right to have a child, and I have no idea what the circumstances were, but it wasn’t timed well. It wasn’t timed to help us with production and allow us to write around it.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
My pregnancy in season four, that was a fucking mess. That whole season I wish I could undo or redo; that was kind of when the wheels went off. They didn’t know I was pregnant; for whatever reason, over the summer I wasn’t able to reach Joss to tell him. Then finally my agent told Kelly Manners and I got a call from Joss. The plan for the character was to go a different way, and then with the pregnancy news it was such a wrench that it changed everything. He said, “I have to change the entire season!” Now I don’t know how much of that was just him being pissed off, disappointment, or if it genuinely was, “Oh, fuck,” because there are lots of times where you just work with someone being pregnant or around it—you stand behind a desk or whatever. Maybe for my character, who was kind of sexy and was never behind a counter, and wearing midriffs and tank tops, maybe that just didn’t work.
AMY ACKER
(actress, Fred)
That wasn’t my favorite story line, but there are a lot of pieces in that I really like, like when Gina was on. You know, that was when Charisma was not sure if she was coming back, so I think the story kind of came with them figuring out what she was going to do. She was pregnant, so that was kind of a surprise, trying to work in this whole thing. That probably wasn’t the original master plan for the show. It was sort of determined by circumstances. They made it work.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
I honestly have compassion, because I can’t imagine being a storyteller and having a vision and working so hard on that idea and then, you know, the actor is throwing you for a loop and you have to adjust accordingly. I didn’t really show for the first six months, but I was definitely working a lot of hours and having some side effects, so it became a concern, but, like I said, I have compassion for them and compassion for myself as well. I was in my thirties and had been with my partner for a really long time, had gotten pregnant, so that is my life and a forever thing. Acting is what I did for a living, so for me I was really torn. Not on whether or not to keep the baby, of course, but the fact that it was not greeted as good news. That the people I’d spent seven years with were left feeling like they were in a bind. And I’m such a people pleaser and spent so much time trying to do my best, because I’m not the smartest on set and it’s very difficult for me to memorize lines and I had to work twice as hard as everyone else. So with that need to please, and the fact that nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news, it was unfortunate that it was seen in that way. And for it to have ultimately felt like a choice or sacrifice for anyone, that the truth is you can’t have it all, was disappointing and a really big life lesson. And also it was difficult to be in the moment of being pregnant and to enjoy that process, because for the first six months I worked. And in the last trimester we had to make concessions for the schedule. Well, it is what it is, and I really think it affected my relationships with those people in a way. Of course, my son is worth it, but there’s a sadness there as well that I’ll probably always carry about that time.
DAVID FURY
There was a lot of rejiggering of thoughts about where the characters should be at this point and arcs of relationships. It just threw everything out the window. And these things happen all the time. You know, when Seth Green left Buffy, he was a big part of the show and then suddenly he left and we had to write him off, but that helped us introduce Tara. So some of these things worked out well, but we weren’t looking to write off Charisma. She was very much a big part of the show, and having to suddenly present her pregnancy on the show and explain it … well, these are things that make it tricky for us, that’s all. It wasn’t for me to decide. All I’m told is the parameters of what I’m writing. “You don’t have Charisma.” Or, “You’ve got to use Charisma minimally.” Or so and so has hurt his leg; he has to be sitting through the whole episode. Weird stuff, and you go, “OK, I’m going to go write that.” I don’t really involve myself with the personal lives, but, hey, it keeps things interesting.
JOSS WHEDON
The evil Cordelia was something we had been planning for a while, but not the Cordelia-being-pregnant part of the story. Season four saw a cap—except for one episode of season five—of the Cordelia arc. The thing with Cordelia that was beautiful is that I got to tell the Buffy story from the movie, which I could never tell on the series. The idea of the movie was that this girl is a ditz, because nobody has ever asked her to be anything else. When you actually put it to her, when there’s more required of her, she steps up, she becomes stronger, she becomes interesting, and she becomes a hero. That’s sort of what we got to do with Cordelia, but once that’s done and she’s having a baby, it’s coma time. Can you squeeze more milk from something usually? Yes, but we really resolved what we wanted to do with the character and because we knew we had to have her go for a period, because of circumstances, it just felt right to wrap it up and move on to new things—which we did with season five.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
They had to write Cordelia out? I don’t know if I’ll ever believe it, but I accept it, although there’s a part of me that feels like we were dealing with some of the most creative people that have ever been in TV, and they couldn’t figure it out? I don’t know. I think I’m a complicated person, I think I’m lovable, I think I tried really hard, but I also think there were things at work, and pressures and insecurities that the job made me feel would rear its head.
By the time I got pregnant, it was seen as the last straw. That’s kind of what I suspect was where they were at with that, and it makes me sad. I’ve had lots of years to reflect on that, and I’ve seen Joss and Alyson and Alexis, and I saw them at Arizona Comic-Con recently, and they always have the most beautiful things to say about my talent and how amazing I was, and it’s sweet and it brought tears to my eyes, because I didn’t know they felt that way.
Who knows, maybe they were just being kind, but I really felt nice. And when I saw Joss, it was complicated. Not to say we’re not friendly and I wouldn’t hug his neck if I saw him tomorrow, but there’s this feeling when I walk around him of, Does he think I ruined his TV show? Does he really believe that? And that makes me sad.
DAVID FURY
I don’t know what the story direction originally was, but I think in terms of relationships and in terms of development between, say, Angel and Cordelia, it might have gone in a different way had her pregnancy not been introduced into it. It just affects how everyone relates to each other. Sometimes you write yourself into a corner. Here we have a romantic relationship developing between Angel and Cordelia, a love relationship that can never be, because there’s no drama in that. Cordelia’s back, what’s going to be the big problem in getting these kids together? What if she’s not herself and she’s the one actually plotting Angel’s demise? It just creates emotional resonance from the perspective of the fact she’s a mother figure to Connor, and the fact that she was a potential lover of Angel. There’s just a lot more emotion.
TIM MINEAR
And the audience knows her. It’s like when Angel became Angelus on Buffy, and suddenly he was the bad guy. One of the other things, too, when we had her ascend to heaven because she was a higher being. I think we ended up hating that and that this was kind of a way to take it back.
DAVID FURY
It was her body being used by this thing, but there’s an emotional connection there because you don’t know what’s going on with her. With the direction Cordelia’s character took, it became impossible to bring her back to where she was. To bring her back to just superficial wisecracking Cordy. A lot of people missed that, but we felt we moved her out of that arena. To try and bring her back would be false and fake.
JEFFREY BELL
(co–executive producer, Angel)
Cordelia went through an amazingly remarkable arc. She came in as this very sort of self-absorbed cheerleader and wannabe actress and grew in depth and character and became a love interest for Angel. And as people who watched a lot of television will tell you, it’s always more interesting if they don’t quite get together but have the feelings. She kept growing stronger and then there was this whole paranormal thing happening with her that ended with her going away at the end of season three, coming back in season four, and we were excited to think, “Cordelia’s the bad guy, or the thing inside Cordelia is the bad guy.” We were talking about Angelus and that Faith was going to show up, and we were holding up sparkly things to the fans when we knew that Cordelia was going to kill Wolfram & Hart’s Lilah Morgan.
STEPHANIE ROMANOV
(actress, Lilah Morgan)
In the script, they had it that Angel was the one who killed Lilah as Angelus, because they didn’t want anyone to know the shock surprise that it was Cordelia. Although I knew it was her, it wasn’t until the day of shooting that the final page was handed out where it spelled it out. Before it said, “Lilah goes down a hallway and Angelus follows.” On that day the rest of the crew got the right script page. I was shocked, but, being that I was a Wolfram & Hart gal and everybody else had already gotten killed, I was shocked it went as long as it did. My question was always, “Do I finally get killed in this script?” I figured it was a matter of time, because they were killing off everyone else. I had only auditioned for a guest part, and they just kept adding to it and bringing me back. I never had a deal or anything, so it turned into a much bigger thing than I ever thought it would be.
I actually had a great time doing it. I loved playing Lilah, and that year was probably the most fun for me, because they were writing more for her and season four was the only year that we got to see some colors. That was always frustrating to me. Being there as part of the law firm, it was basically playing the same scene over and over again. But they always gave me the really fun lines, which is the nice sarcasm that is a joy to play. So I was happy it went as long as it did. Why look a gift horse in the mouth? I enjoyed it, but it was over for me and freed me up to audition for other things, which was OK. To all endings there are beginnings.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
It’s hard for me to separate the realities of what was going on and the story line. I liked when Cordelia and Lilah would go head-to-head, but when Cordelia was doing it, because it was the right thing to do. Because she was so evil. Lilah had it coming, but I think that the performance could have been better if I wasn’t so caught up in other stuff that was going on at the time, to be honest.
JEFFREY BELL
Trying to make things work with Charisma’s pregnancy was tricky. I think we managed to do it and brought Gina Torres in as Jasmine. But I think at the end of the season, when we were needing the Big Bad to battle, Charisma was having a baby, so Gina came in and that worked out really nicely. We couldn’t get Charisma back at the end of the season in a meaningful way.
TIM MINEAR
From the beginning, Angel had a reputation for the big turn.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
I’m glad to have been part of something so special. Having worked with David, Tim, and Joss heading up the show was a lifetime of lessons and information about writing. I can identify a piece of shit from something else in the writing process. Their work ethic was so strong. I don’t know how Joss did it all, and I didn’t know how it all turned out for him personally, but I felt really lucky to have been a part of that. It was a very good situation for a very long time, so I feel very lucky to have had that to use as a watermark for the future.
By season four, Angel had largely done away with the idea of crossovers with characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Faith notwithstanding), but to help conclude season four, Alyson Hannigan’s Willow was brought in to work a little of her mojo in fighting off ultimate evil.
JEFFREY BELL
Willow coming over came about because we needed sort of a powerful witch, wizard, magical person. Rather than bring in some guest star to do it, the thought was, “How about Willow?” Alyson came over and really served a huge help for us.
The evil Cordelia story line concludes with her giving birth to the goddess Jasmine, played by Firefly’s Gina Torres. This was also where Ben Edlund made his first major contribution as the writers were trying to solve the Jasmine threat.
DAVID FURY
We knew Cordelia was coming back from her ascension and that it wouldn’t be entirely her. What we didn’t know was how we were going to climax the season in what would have been a fight between a nine-month-pregnant lady and Angel. We figured she would give birth around episode eighteen or so, so we debated for a long time on how to work the pregnancy in. We’d already done Cordelia demonically pregnant, we had Darla, so what we realized was that whatever she gave birth to would have to be the Big Bad. But it wasn’t until we were breaking the specific stories later on that we realized that our first idea, that the Big Bad might be a powerful guy, would work better if it was a woman. And not some big evil woman, but, instead, someone wonderful. She was going to bring peace and tranquility to the world, which was a big twist after the Beast. And she had a genuine point to make in her logic of giving the world peace—admittedly, without free will. There was a Garden of Eden parable there in the idea of, “You get to live in the Garden of Eden, but I make the rules and you can’t choose to eat this apple.”
BEN EDLUND
When I came in, they were still working hard on figuring out the Jasmine story line and how the mechanics of that were going to work with the cults. They brought Zoe from Firefly over to be Jasmine, so it was fun. It was a family affair. I helped Jeff Bell, who was running Angel at that point, break an episode he was going to work on called “Magic Bullet,” if I’m not mistaken. I was raring to go. We sat down, and I felt like I was very handy in that break coming in from an outside point of view. Everyone had been in the same loops they’d been in for a season, so I had just come out and suddenly sat down and it was my job to assess where they were, try to possibly offer another pair of eyes. I was able to see a few things that turned out to be useful solutions. Part of it was the question of how to make it so that someone who had fallen for Jasmine could be woken up again. And my solve was you needed the blood of Cordelia.
TIM MINEAR
There were a lot of changes made because of Charisma’s pregnancy. One example is that we had wanted Cordelia to come out of her coma in “Peace Out” and for her to be the one to put her fist through Jasmine’s skull rather than Connor, but she couldn’t work the kind of hours that were necessary. She could come in and be in a coma.
The other part of putting an end to Jasmine required, in the episode “Sacrifice,” for Angel to travel to another dimension for answers. Edlund, who wrote the episode, believes that it captured just how insane—in the best possible way—Angel was as a series. Its insanity is particularly evident when Angel, a vampire, stands before crab-humanoid hybrids to find the solution to remove a goddess.
BEN EDLUND
It was all very, very nuts [laughs]. At Firefly and also at Angel, I had a tendency to do a lot of drawings, predesigning, while I was writing. Not to diminish all of the amazing foundational work done by the people who really had to do that stuff, but I draw a lot. So it was really enjoyable to be able to collaborate on that and throw in on the process to design this creature. And that shit is so over the top—Angel is great that way. Angel would do things no other show would do. Like Ray Harryhausen crap with these creatures. You know what I mean? Most shows just shirk away from that and go, “We’re not going to get involved in that, it’s too ambitious, it’s going to look like crap.” I like how it looks, even if it looks a bit computery and dated. I remember watching Ray Harryhausen when I was younger. Star Wars had come out, and then you would watch Sinbad and it was still cool. Star Wars blew it away, stripped the doors off it, and I still liked Sinbad, because I liked that little homunculus, or the little Pegasus, or whatever the hell they had. All that stuff was great. I feel that you can still have a design that feels good even if the CG is wherever it’s at for the time. You can still have a sequence that’s developed with filmmaking in mind, even if it’s jittery and jumpy. It still does something. It’s even more lovable, like the way Wes Anderson uses animation in The Life Aquatic.
The show in general and that sequence—Angel in the other dimension—was so hard-core in its fantasy. I loved being able to do stuff like the guy going to the humans, “You can’t go there, because your little mouse lungs won’t even take the atmosphere. It takes a dead man to go there.” Those are things that are just woven down deep into this shit. You could also make a whole movie where the whole point is, “It takes a dead man to go there.” But we’re doing eighteen thousand things at once. At the end of the episode, they’re like, “You gotta go, man, it takes a dead man to go there.” But that’s also while there’s a hive mind being formed and a massive battle between the full cast and all of these National Guard dudes that Jasmine is running, and then she’s taking all the wounds from the battle of the others … and laughing about it. So there’s, like, six different genre overnotes going at once. I thought it was a good demonstration of where Angel had gotten up to, and running from that in year five we went from a Nazi-submarine episode to Angel turning into a puppet. The show was, like, a feast of crazy.
With dessert still to come after Jasmine’s defeat. Her followers, without her, feel lost and are filled with despair, having believed they were experiencing pure joy. Connor, who always recognized Jasmine for what she was, now has nothing. Flipping out, he takes hostages—including the still-comatose Cordelia—in a condemnation of everything. Angel sets out to stop him, and seemingly fulfills the season-three prophecy of the father killing the son. In “reality,” an alternative timeline is created (through a deal struck between Angel and Wolfram & Hart—in which Angel takes over the Los Angeles office of the firm, explored fully in season five). According to this timeline, Connor is a perfectly normal teenager being raised as part of a family. As far as the rest of the world (sans Angel, in an echo of season one’s “I Will Remember You”) is concerned, the son of vampires Angel and Darla never existed.
JEFFREY BELL
We were trying to be true to his character. As such, we didn’t give him a break and ultimately realized there was no way to bring him into normal society, thus Angel’s sacrificial decision at the end of the year, which I found emotional. That was the perfect payoff for that character.
TIM MINEAR
Connor’s fate was something we discussed before the character was cast. We knew we were going to go to that sort of epic, mythic place with father and son. It was in season three that I had the prophecy “the father will kill the son,” and that was a place we were really considering going. What we didn’t know was the way that it would ultimately shake out. We decided that we didn’t want Angel to kill Connor in way that he would kill him, so this was a good alternative. The whole notion of taking away free will in exchange for happiness, and Angel fighting against that and, in the end, doing that for his kid … that had an irony that I loved.
VINCENT KARTHEISER
I knew people were reacting really strongly to Connor, but I didn’t know why, because I didn’t know the show’s history. To me, the character lost its thrill about four episodes in. From there on out, I felt like I was doing the same scene over and over and over.
CHARISMA CARPENTER
I remember that! It made everyone absolutely nuts!
BEN EDLUND
Something didn’t quite satisfy with that character. I do remember there being kind of a fan reaction where they were not behind him, really. I don’t think the writers loved him necessarily in terms of the net results of what they had written and what ended up on the screen. They were looking to figure out how to make him work the best way he could for their purposes.
VINCENT KARTHEISER
Every week I’d show up and have a scene with Cordelia, then Angel would show up and I’d have some sort of conflict with him. There’d be a couple of fight scenes where I’d fight with them, even though I didn’t want to, and then I would sulk and leave. That to me was every episode, and ultimately they wrote him into a corner. There was nowhere for him to go. I think the majority of the fans really hated Connor and hated me and getting me off the show was the highest priority. And I don’t blame them.
DAVID FURY
In “Peace Out,” I got to give Connor a monologue to Cordelia’s comatose corpse or whatever it was. With it, I was trying to buy back some feeling for him. People became very annoyed with his character and he was whiny and repetitive. In that speech I tried to kind of remind people he’s this lost kid. I was trying to give a lot of empathy back to him, to allow people to kind of at least not hate him. I tried to give him a little speech that I thought gave him some humanity and made the character a little more three-dimensional. I felt like it was partially successful. And then of course he leaves the next episode where Angel gives him a new life.
Connor’s speech is almost like my way of apologizing to the audience and he was kind of a pawn in this. It was kind of like, “This is all the things that’s happened. I was stuck in a hell dimension and I’m kind of the victim of my circumstances.” But doing it in a way that I thought was giving him some dimension. Steve DeKnight and I wrote “Awakening,” and we got to do the whole fantasy thing of Connor and Angel united in battle against the Beast. I was able to avoid a lot of those episodes that had to dive so heavily into that Connor and Cordelia dynamic that people hated so much, so I feel like I dodged a bullet a little bit.
BEN EDLUND
Maybe Connor kept doing shit that was almost too profane to the characters the fans loved. This is just an opinion, but maybe he became an expresser of something that happens on a show in later seasons. It’s strange, but as much as you get into a show and you do it for a long time, and there’s a substantial church of love for the characters that gets built, there’s an inverse of resentment built toward them. You have to be their gods from that point forward. They won’t do anything without your sweat. After five years, the idea of a little punk kid coming back and fucking up the universe can be disproportionately alluring, because of elements that are inside the people creating the universe that they don’t even know they might be expressing. I felt like in Supernatural there was a season there, in the latter part I was involved with, where we tore away everything from the main characters. Almost because we wanted to tear down the show. You know, because you’re, like, “Fuck, this keeps going. What Jenga blocks do you pull away?” It is now a massive continent in our consciousness of what genre is and yet strangely hidden from the American populous. It’s a world cult with 61 million people watching. Though I guess that’s not on point.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
I thought the whole concept of Connor was a fascinating idea. To start with, going all the way back to where Connor was born, that great Tim Minear episode in the alley where Darla stakes herself to give birth to this impossible baby. Then having the baby stolen and coming back older, wanting to kill Angel. The whole dynamic with Angel was great. Vincent Kartheiser was just an absolute joy to work with. He was so talented. And I loved where the whole thing ended up with Angel giving him up so he can have a life. It was just so painful.
BEN EDLUND
With everything that happened to him, I remember feeling that the one thing we were not going to be able to do was have Angel become angelic again, really. They had run that course, so he had to be postjoy almost at that point. And then become, like, heavy is the head that wears the crown. What a weird show.
JEFFREY BELL
As we were talking about what to do in year four, we came up with the idea that when Cordy comes back, it’s not Cordy. It’s this other thing. We knew we wanted to deal with the apocalypse. We had been talking about one for three years, and it felt like it was time that we should have one. But when we started, I don’t think we had any idea that the show was going to be as serialized as it became in season four. Entertainment Weekly decided to list what was good and what was bad about the show. What was bad was that if you haven’t watched from the beginning, it’s like coming in at page 262 of a Stephen King novel—and that was an accurate criticism.
Now if you were inside the Angel umbrella, season four was the most emotionally satisfying year we ever had. But if you were outside of it, it was kind of cool and interesting, but the response was, “I don’t know what the hell is going on, so I’m going to go and watch The Bachelor.” It became too serialized, even for us. What we found out is that when you’re telling a story that way, and you tell a stand-alone episode that doesn’t address the central story, people say, “How can you do that? There’s an apocalypse going on.” Also, our gang got their ass kicked almost every week. They constantly lost. They just rarely had any kind of victory at all. It was this sort of very dark, very linear type of storytelling. It was really a result of that one decision of let’s host an apocalypse.
More than at any other time in its history, the future of Angel was uncertain toward the end of season four, the staff having to work harder than ever before to convince executives at the WB that the show should be renewed.
TIM MINEAR
The first thing I did was to sit down with one of our editors and we put together a clip package that ran about four and a half minutes. The idea was to show the executives all of the cool stuff we’d done over the past four years. We didn’t assume for a moment that the network actually watched the show, so we wanted to prove to them that it was cool.
DAVID FURY
The funny thing is that we sat there, the people who actually made the show, and as we watched the clip package, we were saying, “Dear God, we do a really cool show. To achieve this kind of production value for the amount of money we have, it’s like a movie.” At the same time, we knew that we had to shake things up a bit to convince them.
TIM MINEAR
Joss had the idea of them taking over Wolfram & Hart before that meeting, but we showed them this clip reel; we took in reviews; there was a lot of great press about Angel at that point. So Joss, David, Jeff Bell, and myself pitched to them where we wanted to take the show in the fifth season. We decided that the season finale would actually serve as a pilot of sorts for what would happen the following year. We had to do that at the end of each year, laying out where we wanted the characters and arcs to go. But this was more drastic. This approach answered any concerns on the network’s part that the show was too arcy, too soapy. The idea with them taking over Wolfram & Hart was that viewers could just tune in and understand it.
BEN EDLUND
What Angel does with Wolfram & Hart is selfish in a way, but it’s a chance to minimize the harm he’s inflicted on the world. And there’s a lot of Faustian shit going on at the end of season four, but it’s OK. Angel ultimately functions on tragic lives. Tragedy: you always know what’s coming.