L.A. LAW

“I kind of want to slay the dragon.…”

The seeds for the fifth season of Angel were planted at the end of the fourth when Angel, in an effort to give his son, Connor, a true life, made a deal with Wolfram & Hart to provide an alternative reality for him. The price was that, in the aftermath of Jasmine, Angel would take over the Los Angeles office of the firm. Presented by the late Lilah Morgan as a “reward,” there was obviously some sort of catch, though each member of Team Angel came into it believing they could nonetheless use the firm to fight evil from within. Angel’s in charge, with Fred heading up science, Lorne taking on the entertainment division, Gunn (thanks to mental enhancement) made an uberlawyer, and Wesley in charge of archives.

These changes in the show, on a surface level, provided an opportunity to explore the nature of evil in a different vein, but more practically they had a lot to do with the struggle to get a fifth season renewal and with the need to cope with budget cuts.

KELLY A. MANNERS

(producer, Angel)

Before season five, Joss called me up and said they want to cut the budget if we’re to go another season. He said, “Can we do it for two million an episode,” which is plenty when I think back. I said, “We can’t make the show we’ve been making for two million an episode, but we can make a show,” and I actually thought season five was one of the better seasons. The big challenge, of course, was in tearing down another permanent set and then, with a reduced budget, to have another million-dollar set go up on a budget that’s been severely cut as it is. That was my biggest concern.

STUART BLATT

(production designer, Angel)

Wolfram & Hart became the Big Bad, but on the surface they appeared to be a big law firm or advertising agency. And Joss wanted a set where you could wander from room to room to room, because he opened the season in that set with a long Steadicam shot. The large part of the set was the two-story lobby, which had Harmony outside of Angel’s office, and then a lot of miscellaneous offices and hallways that went into Fred’s lab. We had Fred’s lab on another stage, and then there was a basement where we had holding cells. So many opportunities there.

JOSS WHEDON

(executive producer/cocreator, Angel)

The thing is, the debate about whether or not the show would come back was a money thing. The fact is, the junior executives at the network really cared about the show. But when you get up to the world of president Jamie Kellner, it’s all about numbers. I was told that they would fight for the show and fight for a lead-in that makes sense. For them to take their biggest honking hit at the time, which was Smallville, and put it in front of Angel was a vote of confidence. And it showed that where it counts among the creative execs, it wasn’t about money: it was about programming. And I really appreciated that.

KELLY A. MANNERS

I’m the money guy, so everything for me was how the hell are we going to do this and how are we going to do it for the money and working hard with the writers to try to keep them in reality as to how much we could do for the money we had. Surprisingly enough, like I said, I really loved the season. They had to really think about it when they were writing as well.

JOSS WHEDON

During season four, of which I’m very proud, at one point we were like, “Are we making 24?” The events of the episodes seemed to happen in a two-week period. It played as this one dramatic arc. We all came out saying we had to shake up the paradigm. We had the characters we needed, but there wasn’t enough for them. Somewhere in the middle of the season, I said, “Say, what if they actually ran Wolfram and Hart?” The exciting thing about it is not only the question of moral compromise, but the actual relatable question of, “I worked for Greenpeace, but now I work for Shell.” So we then had the chance to get into different stories and milieus, and B stories—there was just a new kind of energy that wasn’t so completely internal.

DAVID FURY

(executive producer, Angel)

The logical thing is good trying to defeat evil, but Joss would always say, “No, there has to be a balance, and it’s much easier to balance evil when you’re running evil. When you’re the guys who run it, you can keep the balance going. You know you won’t ever destroy it. Good will never defeat evil, but there has to be a balance. Without the balance, evil wins, or there’s chaos,” which essentially happens at the end of the series.

JEFFREY BELL

(executive producer/show runner, Angel)

Previously, we had been in the hotel. We were a family with everybody kind of living there. Gunn had been dating Fred, Wesley was around all the time, Lorne was living in the hotel, Angel was living there. They were all sort of there. It was very much a family dynamic. But suddenly we were in a big, corporate office. We were all grown up. It was like the difference between Buffy in high school and Buffy going away to college.

STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

(supervising producer, Angel)

When I heard that idea from Joss, I thought, “Holy shit, that’s brilliant.” To be co-opted by your enemy; to basically say, “OK, we’ve been fighting you all this time. You think you can do better? Here are the keys.” They go into it knowing it’s a trap, knowing that Wolfram & Hart is up to something, but exactly what, they don’t know.”

BEN EDLUND

(supervising producer, Angel)

It was a very interesting way to solve what was becoming diminishing returns on premise. Yet they had all this cool stuff and Wolfram & Hart was one of the most interesting elements, with the idea of the Senior Partners and the Powers That Be and all that stuff. That was a really interesting way of playing out that shit. By the time you got to the end of season four of this crazy-ass show, what I really liked was that Wolfram & Hart was immense in their thinking. They were playing such a bizarre game. I understood that; it was like Angel understood that they legitimately were playing a cosmic sort of gambit. Of maybe good left unmolested trying to do its best job to make things better would achieve more evil than us working 24-7 against them. Just give them the reins. I felt like the idea at the heart of it, Wolfram & Hart’s philosophy, was that they really felt the road to hell might be paved with good intentions, so they should give this over to people with good intentions and get it done faster.

JOSS WHEDON

The question of why Wolfram & Hart had given them the opportunity is one we were not going to answer in the first episode. They had an entire corporation under their control dedicated toward evil. Ultimately, there were questions that would definitely run through the entire season; we definitely kept the arc–soap opera nature that, quite frankly, was what we did well and loved. At the same time, we did them around episodes that would resolve themselves.

BEN EDLUND

Wolfram & Hart were not into Jasmine; she was an interloper to their plans. And then Angel took her out, and they sort of realized, “All right, then.” It changed their thinking about what Angel was for them. What I liked was, as big as you could make your thinking as the protagonist, this particular villain who was the uberlawyer had the long-arc view. The uberlawyer had a bigger philosophy and a deeper, more jaded, darker, more cynical relationship to good versus evil than anyone could imagine. No investment in it. No interest. No ideological approach: “We need the humans, we’ll heal in the face of this.” All they wanted was some kind of inscrutable, horrific thing. In my mind, they just wanted hell on earth. They wanted the worst thing for people, and they thought maybe the best way to get it there was to have people who were trying their best to make the best thing for other people to happen. That was very heady shit.

JEFFREY BELL

So our big arc was, “What the hell are we doing here? Why do they have us here? We don’t feel corrupted, but have we been corrupted? Have we been compromised beyond what we think?” That was something that, thematically, was in a lot of the episodes. It allowed us to tell stories with a little more scale in terms of the kinds of clients we deal with. We thought that, ultimately, we’d service both sides.

BEN EDLUND

I may not be 100 percent on this, but I’m in the ballpark. It was certainly investigated in the debate between the characters and how they kind of ended up taking the deal. “Even if it’s a trap, it might be worth it.” That was on screen, watching the characters reason their way into why maybe it’s not crazy. “It might’ve helped if they just put the emphasis on that it’s not a trap.” “I think they really think we’re going to make it worse.” “I think we’ll make it better.” “We’re willing to take that bet.”

STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

What was fascinating was the insidiousness of the way it slowly starts to dismantle the team and turn them against each other, especially with Gunn, who goes a little bit Flowers for Algernon. He gets a taste of what it feels like to be God and then slowly gets it taken away from him. Wesley going dark and stabbing Gunn, obviously the death and resurrection of Fred. There’s just so much rich stuff that year.

J. AUGUST RICHARDS

(actor, Charles Gunn)

The only thing nerve-wracking about the whole change for me was that on my very first day back for that season, I had to do my big reveal as a lawyer. I didn’t have the rest of the episode to build up to it; I just had to jump right in. That was difficult and I’d never done it before, but it actually turned out well. And it ended up setting me up for a lot of other roles as lawyers. It made me feel confident that I could do it.

JOSS WHEDON

Wolfram & Hart connected everything and made for a really interesting year, but it was never meant to be more than a year. That is to say, even before we were canceled, we said, “OK, this is year five. Year five is about, Can we stay pure in the heart of an evil place? Can we work for an evil corporation and still maintain our integrity? The metaphor and the question of what do they really want, what are they going to do to us, plays for the genuine flat-out suspense and the sort of overarching question of the season. But ultimately that is not a two-season question. We had a plan to shake up the paradigm for the next year. Of course, it no longer led to an exciting season six, but it’s still a good series capper.

Going along with the reduced budget and the standing sets that most of the episodes would be filmed in was a return to stand-alone storytelling and a bit of a retreat from serialization, which had been so pronounced in season four.

TIM MINEAR

(consulting producer, season four, Angel)

It’s very easy, when you start getting arcy, for things to begin to blur together. The mythology starts to get very convoluted. If the characters start to make references to the actions in previous episodes, then it starts to have no meaning beyond that. The art is then not relating to real life in any way; it’s only relating to itself. When a show gets that arcy, it’s easy for that to happen. Also, unlike Buffy, where the metaphor was very clear—the stages of growing up—Angel did not have a metaphor, despite attempts to do so at the beginning. It’s a melodrama about men and women with a supernatural element—it’s Dark Shadows in wide screen and color.

JOSS WHEDON

Going more stand-alone was a bizarre kind of symmetry to where we had started. Amazingly enough, we started out doing that and still weren’t very good at it. I give you the werewolf episode we did, “Unleashed.” Good guest star, good idea, nothing particularly wrong there, except for a failure to make a genuine emotional connection between what was going on with the guest star and our characters themselves. That was a fault of story breaking. And then the incredible amount of money we no longer had, because of budget cuts, really showed up on screen. It got pretty tough. Again, we found our footing as the season progressed. We got better at figuring out how to do stand-alone episodes with characters that we care about that we don’t have to explain every single thing about, where we have a “previously on Angel” that’s forty-five minutes long, as it felt like in season four.

STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

Season four was like one big episode where you end it at the beginning of the next episode, because we would end on a cliffhanger. So you’d end that at the beginning of the next episode, and spend the next part of act one recapping what happened on the last episode to catch everybody up. That created its own difficulties. Everything was so interconnected that it was very difficult to make a move without thinking about the last twelve episodes or something. It was also really impossible to do stand-alone episodes, because we were so arcy, and in year five we went into a more stand-alone feel, which created a new set of problems, more in our brains than anywhere else. It was a different way of breaking a story, which was very challenging at first.

DAVID BOREANAZ

(actor, Angel)

Season four was very heavy in exposition, and it was deep with a lot of plotlines and story. In season five we wanted to open it up to more specific character bases and to keep it fresh on that level, rather than keep it so second story. The show worked best when it was about that, when you see each character go about doing their thing. It was interesting to watch. So season four got too serialized, but it did set up that whole Connor-Angel thing and the Cordelia thing. That kind of came to the forefront. It was important to go to those places, because it set up where we were going. That was the exciting part of it.

TIM MINEAR

Even though there’s a logic to your audience being your audience when you’re telling a story on a TV series, ideally you want it to have enough internal exposition that somebody could start at that place and begin to understand it. By the end of that episode, they start to get it. But that’s hard with a story like ours. That’s why you want to have a stand-alone episode in most instances. Some things will be arc heavier than others. You can do the episode where Darla goes into labor, she’s going to lose the baby, and stakes herself to save the baby—that’s what the episode is about. People can understand that story without understanding the entire mythology. Plus, with signposts throughout the story, in terms of internal exposition, you can help guide them through it. But it’s tricky. The best example of a TV show that was able to do that, even though it wasn’t arcy and it was a sitcom, was The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It didn’t matter what episode you tuned into, if it was a story that took place in her workplace or home, you very quickly understood who these people were, what their relationships were to one another, and what their attitudes were. To some degree, you have to do that on a show like that.

STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

But we definitely had to kind of find our way at the start of the season, since it wasn’t the kind of storytelling that we were used to. Jeff Bell on The X-Files was probably more used to it, although that had been a while earlier. We were definitely trying to find just the right story and tried to figure out how to tell these contained episodes. I know there were episodes we were happy with, but my feeling is that we really started hitting it toward episode eight with the big throw down between Angel and Spike. It felt like it was starting to work.

JEFFREY BELL

The WB wanted more stand-alone episodes, and I’m a guy who really likes stand-alones. So that was the biggest difference in year five, telling more stand-alone type of tales and trying to take the best of what we did in the past in terms of keeping emotional arcs alive, so we were able to tell a whole bunch of different stories: horror, comedy, romance, fable, thriller, romp.

STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

Because of the change, we got to do what I claim is an underappreciated episode called “The Girl in Question,” where Angel and Spike went to Italy and the Italian Wolfram & Hart. They’re trying to find Buffy and prove which of the two of them she loved the most. Then they realize that she really shouldn’t be with either of them. It was that kind of crazy, kooky buddy-caper comedy that we could slide in there. I don’t remember whose idea it was or how we were going to afford it, because we had to shoot a lot on standing sets. Soooo, it’s an Italian Wolfram & Hart and the building is exactly the same, except they have Italian people. There’s an Italian Wesley, who’s never around. I don’t know what other show you could do that on. It was just so delightfully wacky.

JEFFREY BELL

It was actually better that we didn’t have Sarah on the show. As cool as it would have been, to me what five years of Angel was about was not whether Buffy would pick Angel or Spike. To bring her in at the end kind of doesn’t honor what the five years of the series had been about.

STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

There was also “Why We Fight,” which took place during World War II on a Nazi sub. It felt like the stand-alone approach gave us a renewed vigor. We really felt like we started operating on all cylinders.

JEFFREY BELL

And we were able to have the show stay true to the characters and itself. I mean, we turned Angel into a puppet, we had the Mexican wrestlers … we went all over the place, yet [were] always true to the show. I loved that. That was my favorite thing about year five, the diverse kind of stories we’d earned the right to tell.

AMY ACKER

(actress, Fred/Illyria)

For the actors, I don’t think there was much of a difference between stand-alone and serialized episodes. Even if there was just a sentence or something that furthered your character in a serialized fashion, it didn’t feel like you had just paused everything else to get that. It just felt like that was a snippet of their lives, but it was still moving forward.

JOSS WHEDON

There was another side to it as well. You need the internal dynamic—it’s what people love—but at the same time you need a show where if nobody’s ever seen it, they can turn it on and not be so caught up in mythos that they’re lost. I wanted to keep the serialized arcs in terms of the emotions and the relationships, but turned it back into the kind of show where you could watch an episode, there’s a problem, it’s resolved, there are outstanding emotional issues, but you have watched an hour and they have finished a case. Not that every episode would be that.

TIM MINEAR

What was needed was mininovels for television. We had some continuing stories in season one, then started to edge toward serialization in season two. In season three we threw in a couple of stand-alone episodes and a few that were stand-alone, but blatantly serviced the arc. My feeling is we became more successful when we said, “Fuck it, it’s a novel.” People didn’t want to read a short story in the middle of a novel. They want to get to the next chapter of the big story, and Angel was most successful when it was just balls-out operatic melodrama. But in season five we changed the show significantly. People wouldn’t feel like they were coming into the middle of something.

DAVID FURY

It was daunting sending the show in a new direction. Angel always existed in a true private detective paradigm. Cases came to him in different ways, but there was always the detective mystery and a clear moral goal: fight evil. Plus, there was always a “family” dynamic. The hotel was home, and Angel was “father” to his misfit crew.

STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

What was frustrating for us is that in the early part of the season, the new approach resulted in the numbers going up, but the hard-core fans were complaining a bit about wanting it to be more arc-like, as it had been in previous seasons. You know, where’s the Big Bad and that sort of thing? So it was really hard to strike a balance, especially that late in a series where you don’t want to alienate the fans but you’re trying to pick up new fans.

JEFFREY BELL

What we found is the change allowed us to tell emotionally compelling stories that involved our characters, and we could do that in stand-alone stories. But Wesley still pined for Fred. That didn’t go away, so that emotional line was still there. Our characters still had their relationships. The big question for us in year five is we were telling stories from within Wolfram & Hart, our evil law firm.

STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

What I loved, and this was as true in season five as any other season, was how dark they could take Angel and then, in contrast, how light and fun we could take him. Season five had Ben Edlund’s “Smile Time,” where we take our dark, brooding hero and turned him into a puppet. No other show could possibly do that.

No other episode is remembered by fans as being the true epitome of the diversity of Angel’s storytelling in season five as “Smile Time.” Written and directed by Ben Edlund from a Joss Whedon story, the episode has Angel going to the studio of a children’s television show that is stealing the life force from children. During his investigation, Angel finds himself transformed into a puppet.

STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

Ben Edlund is a mad genius, and, quite frankly, the sweetest, most even-tempered person I have ever met in my life. It’s like you physically cannot get him upset. I wish I had that in me, because I do get upset. I remember we were sitting in a room. I think it was me, Ben, and Jeff Bell. We were talking about the episode that Jeff did with the Mexican wrestler, the Hermanos Numero. Ben, out of nowhere, just says, “How about this? The phone rings and one of the brothers picks up and goes, ‘Sí. Sí. Ah, sí.’ He hangs up, looks at the other brothers and says, ‘The Devil has built a robot.’” We looked at each other and we thought, “How fucking brilliant?” That was Ben. He worked on an absolute different plane than anybody else.

BEN EDLUND

“Smile Time” was my directing debut, and it was such a bizarre way to begin; to start with a show and go, “OK, we’re not going to do the show that we normally do. We’re going to do a show that should be built five feet above the ground, like a puppet show. And we’re going to do things that, engineering-wise, have never been done in the pattern of this show, never been done on any show that anyone remembers.” So that was impressive to me in terms of the challenge. But you couldn’t know whether or not it would all fall apart once you started filming a puppet. And then you go, “Holy crap, we were so wrong.” Every time we shot, all the dailies looked great. I also got to write all the songs for that episode, which had to be written in, like, three days. I was writing the songs with a guitar, sleeping overnight at Mutant Enemy, working on the script simultaneously, behind deadline, and turned it in with these songs.

So the idea was to make a TV show, a legitimate TV show, with the show that had a writers’ room that looked like an actual writers’ room, and all of the branding of the show looked like it wasn’t just generic throwaway branding. When you see the puppets do their little performances, you really are watching what feels like excerpts from a legitimate ongoing show for kids. For me, that worked and I was happy with it.

STUART BLATT

We had a puppet company design and build the puppets, but we built the whole Smile Time theater stage, where all the sets were elevated, just like in Sesame Street. The puppets are working above and the puppeteers are standing or at least not laying down, so you can build sets that are four or five feet tall so that the puppeteers can walk underneath them and put their arms up. It was just super fun and creative.

JAMES MARSTERS

(actor, Spike)

They could do something like “Smile Time” because they know they can keep the audience. When you’re that good, you can do anything. And they just went into doing everything. That episode was written by Ben Edlund, who was responsible for The Tick, a half-hour animated about mediocre superheroes. One of my favorite cartoons in the world. I remember going to him, because I had been waiting, and I got through one and a half scenes when I was like, “Ben! I’m funny. Come on. Why am I on the sidelines?” I wanted to get right in there, and he was like, “Oh, James, your scene is gonna be just fine for you. Don’t worry.”

There were numerous changes to the cast in season five. For starters, Charisma Carpenter’s Cordelia was still in a coma as a result of events from season four. She did return in “You’re Welcome,” but at episode’s end it was revealed that she had actually died, her visit to advise Angel coming from another plane. Additionally, with the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, James Marsters’s Spike was brought over, now fully souled and after having helped save the world. Initially he’s noncorporeal, but several episodes in he’s whole again, triggering amazing back-and-forths—both verbally and physically—between him and Angel. On the creative front, the writers were genuinely pissed that the WB spoiled the fact that Marsters was joining the show, taking away from the character’s death on Buffy and ruining any sort of surprise on Angel.

On the Wolfram & Hart front, Christian Kane returned as Lindsey McDonald, at one point even working with Team Angel toward the finale, though he was ultimately (and unexpectedly) killed by Lorne since Angel simply doesn’t trust him. Sarah Thompson appeared as Eve, Angel’s conduit to the Senior Partners; Mercedes McNab returned as the vampire Harmony and worked as Angel’s assistant; and Adam Baldwin became the firm’s Marcus Hamilton.

In regard to Lorne, season five of Angel was actor Andy Hallett’s last starring role outside a voice-over part. He passed away on March 29, 2009, from congestive heart failure. The disease’s origin came from a 2005 dental infection that spread through his bloodstream and to his heart. The pain of that loss is something still felt deeply by his costars, who cannot think of the show’s final season without sharing that sense of loss.

JOSS WHEDON

Cordelia’s situation was a little bit her call, because Charisma had just had a baby and was living the family life. Plus, you don’t need visions when you’ve got assistants saying, “B story on line one.”

CHARISMA CARPENTER

I did not leave the show, despite many people’s suspicions, to raise my child. I am the type of person that I need work, I need to work. My work is super fulfilling to me. Yes, I wanted to be a mother. Yes, I am so grateful I have a child, but I love what I do. I would not be happy just being a mom, and I would not be happy just being an actress. Those things are beautiful things, and I think ultimately bring depth to me as a person, [and] therefore [to] my work. Unfortunately, it just didn’t work that way with Angel.

The coma was a devastating way to go, and the fans love her, especially when Doyle passes the visions on to her and she grows. Her character gets multidimensional and multifaceted and gets a heart and gains perspective and is really a part of the team. And then to find out, “Gosh, what do we do with the character?” It’s just devastating. Of my career, Angel is probably the greatest reward and the most disappointing thing all at once, but I know how special the show was.

BEN EDLUND

The coma may have come about due to some difficulties in what to do with Cordelia after she had given birth to Jasmine and what role to give this person, because the psychological truth of that person is really hard to navigate [laughs]. She had sex with Angel’s son, got pregnant, and gave birth to their child, a goddess. It’s a lot to deal with. So it was a kind of breakdown. This happens sometimes when a character in a narrative suffers a metanarrative breakdown of some kind. That may have been the strategy underlying Cordelia, leading her up to a certain point, and there was no exit strategy past that. A lot of times when you have a character go into a sustained coma, something’s not working for that character.

CHARISMA CARPENTER

Honestly, I thought I was coming back for season five. I found out when they had the upfronts that year and journalists called me at home and said, “Why aren’t you on the cast lists?” It was just kind of shitty, but not really a mystery. Look, it was a very complicated relationship, [in] which I definitely played a part … and there’s no easy way to go about it. Am I bummed that it went the way that it did? Totally. Could it have been done differently? Probably, but that’s the way it is. That’s the way it happened, and that’s the way it went down.

DAVID FURY

Look, there was a lot of anger about Charisma. I think probably mainly from Joss. It felt a little bit like we were all working our assess off to keep these people employed and it’s like, you have to take that into consideration before you make any life choices. You just do. And you have to be much more vocal about it. If something happens and you tell them early on or whatever the thing is, that’s fine. But it’s the idea of just kind of showing up and, boom, “I’ve got tattoos,” or, boom, “I cut my hair in the middle of an episode,” which I think Sarah did. It’s like, “Wait a minute, now you’re just fucking with us. You’re making it so hard to finish this episode, because you’re changing it.” There’s always that attitude of, “It’s my life and I can do anything I want to.” Well, that’s not great. Again, I don’t know the specifics to Charisma’s circumstances—I have a lovely relationship with her—I just know there was a lot of residual anger about what happened.

So, yes, they decided to write her out of the show. But I couldn’t be more thrilled to be the one to bring her back for “You’re Welcome.” It was largely Joss figuring out she needed a proper farewell, and I was very grateful to be the one to do it, because it was great fun and it was great fun working with her. I’ve got to say, she was an absolute doll to work with and she and David got along great. It was a nice little reunion. There was no bitterness between anybody. You’ve got to give it up for that. Wherever the anger was, obviously it was all [water] under the bridge. She definitely deserved a better good-bye than going into a coma, and I’m so glad we were able to do that.

CHARISMA CARPENTER

Coming back was … complicated. I didn’t want to do it. My only request was, “I just don’t want Cordy to die. I’m not going to come back for you to kill her.” At the time I was actually working on a show called Miss Match with Alicia Silverstone and having a great time there. It was shot on the same soundstages that Buffy used to shoot in. David Fury, who wrote the episode, came to see me in my trailer at Miss Match to talk to me about it. I was pretty angry with the way things were, and I had really no desire to give that show any more than I had already given. Then, of course, my personal feelings got put aside and I thought of the fans. You know, there’s always two sides to me, where you want to act like the petulant child and be like, “Fuck you, I’m not coming back!” Then there’s the other part of you that goes, “This is a huge part of your life. It’s an amazing show and it’s the right thing to do for the fans.” The higher-minded self gives you the kind of closure that you need to move on.

So when David Fury came to see me, I said I’d come back, but I wanted this amount of money—my feeling was if you’re having me back, you’re going to pay me what I deserve for the first time ever in the history of the show—and the second thing was I didn’t want Cordy to die. So I signed the contract and then David says, “I have to tell you something. We’re going to kill Cordy,” and I’m like, “Of course you’re doing this after I signed the contract.” But he goes, “Hold on, just hear it out.” He tells me how she dies, and I’m in tears now for a completely different reason, which is that it was really well told and beautiful. That changed everything.

I came to set, Joss sent me a really nice bouquet of flowers and a beautiful note, which I have framed in my room. It basically said, “I think it’ll be one of the sweetest stories you’ve ever told, thanks for coming and ‘You’re Welcome,’” which was a play on words with the title of the episode. And it was a really beautiful episode.

JEFFREY BELL

We were all excited that James Marsters became a part of the show. He’s a good actor and an interesting character. Throwing him into the mix only helped. He died a glorious death at the end of Buffy, a truly heroic death, and we didn’t want to shortchange that. What we needed to do was deal with that in an honest way that didn’t diminish what he did and allowed him to come back in a meaningful way.

JOSS WHEDON

What Spike brought to the show is what he brings, which is a little anarchy and a blond: two things that we needed. He’s the guy to confront everybody all the time over what they’re doing. You can’t have your characters constantly going, “What are we doing in this evil law firm? Make mine black with no sugar.” Eventually you would start to think that they’re patsies or idiots. You needed that voice, and to me Spike was that voice to start with. There was a lot more to do than that, but when I thought of it initially, he was the guy who was really bridling against what was going on.

JAMES MARSTERS

One of the great things about going over to Angel was that I could just be the dick again, like I had been on Buffy in the early years. I could just be the jerk and try to give Angel a headache on a daily basis. And, again, David is great. He was always really nice to me, so was Sarah.

J. AUGUST RICHARDS

It was really great to have James come to the show, because he brought so much. He’s so invested in his character, and I love that about him. He’s very easy to work with as well. When he came over, there was no friction at all. He’s just about the work and he’s so good. A great addition to the show.

STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

James Marsters—I could not love him more. He was brilliant as Spike. He was brilliant on Buffy with the darkness and the rage and the passion, along with the humor. Then he just brought that to Angel with a new spin on it. He and Boreanaz together were just absolutely gold—the way they hated each other, but also kind of really meshed in a way they couldn’t with other people.

JAMES MARSTERS

I got to go back to a version of Spike that was vicious and not as tortured as the Spike that Buffy had on its last few seasons. They were like, “Yeah, he has a soul, but he still is in competition with Angel. He’s still gonna try to outdo him at all times” [laughs]. It was him coming into balance, you know? Like, the character had gone through his fire walk. That character had come out of that difficult period of getting his soul and now he’s coming to balance and becoming a fun character again.

JEFFREY BELL

The addition of Spike works on a drama level and a comedy level. Both James and David were really good at that. That, and the changes in most of the characters, just opened up a lot of storytelling opportunities. Once again,… some decisions made very early in the year allowed us to tell a very different kind of season in year five [than in] year four.

JAMES MARSTERS

My intent joining the show was to make life as miserable as possible for Angel. I just absolutely wanted to be pitted against him, to have to work with him and hate him anyway was absolutely hilarious. As I discovered with Principal Wood on Buffy, Spike functions well with an enemy or someone he can be surly to. David plays that really well, too. I don’t know if it’s about good and evil. Even if Spike’s good, he hates Angel anyway, because Buffy could obviously never get over him. And Angel would hate Spike, because he’s been with her. The dynamic was set up for some delightful conflict between the characters.

DAVID FURY

The most significant element we were looking to add to Angel’s character was that of the ever-put-on big brother Spike. Spike was a character Angel was powerless to get rid of, first because Spike was a ghost, then simply because he’s a vampire of virtually equal strength. It provided us with a true comic foil for Angel, allowing for some funny and sometimes interestingly poignant scenes.

BEN EDLUND

I remember we were pitching ideas about Spike—I was so excited—and I pitched this moment where Spike as the vampire ghost had drawn some enemies into some part of Wolfram & Hart. Nina the werewolf was staying overnight, so there was a moment where there could be some guys trying to get in. They’re the equivalent of burglars or whatever the fuck they were—assassins—and they run into a ghost of a vampire and then a werewolf jumps out of the ghost [laughs]. Spike is just there and he goes, “Yeah, I’m a ghost, but this is a werewolf,” and then the werewolf jumps out of his chest. This show is fucking awesome, man. The only time I’ve ever heard that as a possible game to play—the ole werewolf jumps out of a vampire-ghost’s chest. That, to me, is Angel. At one point I was pitching that the Big Bad at a certain point was a scarab that they kept in a box, almost like the typewriter from Naked Lunch. It didn’t even matter if it got in or didn’t get in, because other things almost as crazy did.

CHRISTIAN KANE

(actor, Lindsey McDonald)

I’d been wanting to come back to the show, and when they asked me to, I asked Joss for a favor. Joss said, “You have to trust me. I can’t tell you what’s going on, but you have to trust me.” I said, “I trust you, anything you want, but if I could just not get beat up by everybody…” I come back for season five, first episode I’m getting thrown around a strip joint by Spike. He’s beating me up. I’m doing it, and during filming I look at Joss and go, “Duuuuude. This is exactly what we talked about. The first thing I’m shooting is this.” He just repeated, “Trust me,” and, sure enough, Lindsey got to kick some ass that season.

J. AUGUST RICHARDS

When I think about fifth season, I think about the episode “The Life of the Party,” because Andy Hallett was the life of the party. He was the life of the set. He was so funny and made everybody laugh constantly. Losing him was a great tragedy. He was a really good friend. He was a really good man and a really good person, and all of us miss him very much. It was just wonderful working with him. I also had the pleasure of traveling a lot with him by doing conventions. He made the conventions a party.

AMY ACKER

Andy was awesome. We had a great friendship, too. We lived really close by each other. He had such a hard job; he would be there in the wee hours of the morning, when it was still dark outside, to start getting that makeup on and stay after to get it off. He worked harder than any of us and managed to still make everyone laugh and be the kind of center of it all, because he was pretty fantastic.

MARK LUTZ

(actor, Groo)

There’s a lot of stuff that I hold private about Andy, but there’s a lot of things that people should know about him. The best thing was his spirit, that show business quality they call “it.” He had it in spades. He was a Pied Piper—everyone that met him loved him, and he was always his best to all of his fans. He had this innate ability to meet you and instantly find some common thread you both shared, whether it be the esoteric or something right on the surface. He would bond with you instantly and you’d feel like you knew him all your life.

CHARISMA CARPENTER

Andy was probably one of my favorite people to be around. He was always witty, always funny, and he’s kind of like Jerry Seinfeld in a way, because there are a lot of funny people, but there’s not a lot of people who are clean funny. The things he would say were so beyond his years; he was this old man stuck in a young man’s body. I remember he saw a pair of pumps, and he said, “You have to have these. They reminded me of you and I’m going to get them for you.” He was out with his girlfriend at the time and he said, “Charisma needs to have these.” It was the weirdest thing anyone ever did for me, and he was just so sweet and fun and charming. Always lit up the room.

MARK LUTZ

When they started with the character of Lorne, they weren’t sure if he was going to be a one-off or maybe a little bit recurring here and there. To go to full cast member by the last season, that’s a testament to what he brought to the show. And it was an element that only bolstered what was an all-star lineup.

DAVID BOREANAZ

Andy was always laughing and always spreading his joy and his humor and his energy, which in itself was fantastic to be around. We would always compare jackets and where his came from, because his were always so loud [laughs]. A great, beautiful soul that was taken way too early from us. Every day was hard for him, because he endured, I think, two hours of makeup just to get into that character. But he was a trooper, and behind that was a great person and someone who was a lot of fun to work with.

One of the most shocking developments was the death of Fred, when she becomes “infected” with the spirit of an ancient, extremely powerful demon named Illyria. Even more shocking was the manner in which Fred died, and a moment later Amy Acker came to her feet as the resurrected Illyria.

AMY ACKER

Joss asked me to meet him for coffee, which was weird, because he didn’t usually do that. I went and met him and we’re sitting there and he said, “I’m going to kill Fred,” and then waited an extremely uncomfortable time before adding, “I’m making you into this demon goddess.” A few weeks later, Aly [Hannigan] and Alexis were getting married, and, at their wedding, Joss showed up and handed me and Alexis some scenes that he had written for Illyria and Wesley. They weren’t scenes that were actually ever in the show; they were designed to test it out. Then, after Alexis came back from his honeymoon and we were all back, Joss had Alexis and me over to his house one night to work on those scenes. He had all these lights in his house that were different colored. We were reading the scenes and he said, “I want her to kind of move almost like an insect.” So we were experimenting with different moves, and then he started changing the colors of the lights in the room. He had a red light, then he tried a yellow light, then he got the blue light and he was like, “Oh, yeah, she’s gonna be blue.” So we got to develop the character in a way that you wouldn’t normally get to do.

STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

Joss wrote and directed “A Hole in the World,” and then I did the next episode, “Shells,” where you see Illyria for the first time. Because Joss was directing it and she dies at the end of his episode, he directed the first scene at the top of my episode. I had something to work off of. But I cannot tell you how stunned we all were with Amy Acker’s performance. She would just give this spot-on chilling performance as Illyria. I call, “Cut,” and then she would be Amy again, who was the sweetest woman in the world. She would ask, “Was that OK? You want me to do anything different?” I’m like, “Holy shit!”

KELLY A. MANNERS

Amy Acker was just amazing in that moment. I never forgot that transition that she made. Illyria was, in a lot of ways, a better character than Fred was. I loved Fred, but Illyria was fascinating. The way that Amy created this entirely different person for us, within seconds [of] seeing it on screen, I was like, “Holy shit, what happened there?”

BEN EDLUND

If you were going to cast someone whom we’d only seen play Fred, the last thing you would ask for is super ice queen, strong woman. Because a lot of women who can do the kind of wilting-violet thing, they don’t have the Geena Davis thing of putting real iron in. There’s people who can do the accountant and there’s people who can do the action hero. It’s like you’re asking a person to just pull it like an action hero trope, which is a villain element, out of their tool kit without casting them for it. She did amazing.

JAMES MARSTERS

Holy God, what a great actor! I was fooled by Amy. Fred is very close to the Amy that she presents to the world; just absolutely sweet and loving, patient and kind, and I had no faith that she could do Illyria at all. And I had no idea how talented she was. I just remember being blown over when I first saw her as Illyria. She just rocked it. It was amazing. I should know better, because she’s a great actor. You get fooled. They’re so good, you’re just like, “Oh, that’s just them.” Same thing happened to me with Charisma Carpenter. I assumed that Charisma was like Cordelia and so I never bothered to get to know her. I avoided her, because I thought she was like that head cheerleader that drove me insane as a young, awkward punk rocker in high school. I just thought, “I am not going to get by that person.” I guess it was an episode of Supernatural we were both on where we got to talk and I discovered she’s a sweetheart, absolutely wonderful.

DAVID FURY

The death of Fred and birth of Illyria was pretty remarkable. That’s all Joss. He loves Amy, but he loves pain as well. You want to kill a character and Amy was such an amazing actress that he went, “I’m going to kill Fred, because that’s going to be devastatingly painful and I’m keeping Amy, but she’s going to become this new character.” It’s brilliant. Even as you see Illyria, you hold the pain of Fred’s death and the knowledge that that’s not Fred. It was an amazing group of actors.

STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

I loved how she got to really stretch. One of the great tragedies about the show being canceled at the end of season five is Joss had really great plans of where to take Illyria. It was also so bittersweet with Wesley still being in love with her, but trying not to be because he hates her—she actually killed the woman he loves. But she’s kind of sympathetic, and he starts to fall in love with her again. It was just all so juicy.

AMY ACKER

I would say playing Illyria was definitely harder than playing Fred, because I had the makeup and the different movements and the different voice. I had been so accustomed to being Fred that, you know, it’s kind of scary when you’ve got everyone used to seeing you in one part and then you show up the next day and you’re like, “I’m this different person,” and it’s really different. At the end of the first week of Illyria, one of the camera guys came over to me and he was like, “Amy, we just wanted to say we’re sorry we haven’t been talking to you and hugging you like usual this week. It’s that that we’re all a little scared of you.” I was like, “Oh, that’s nice.”

JOSS WHEDON

In season five we had to dance around a lot of things and I figured it out as we went and still tried to keep the integrity of it. I loved the sort of free associativeness of being able to do stand-alone that at the same time started to weave in the stuff that the people actually show up for, which is the character material that progresses things. Killing Fred was one of the most painful experiences of my career, and certainly one of the most lovely. It was like writing a big poem. I wanted to show people what else Amy could do, so I wanted to kill her and create an entirely new character for her to play. It’s an opportunity you can only have on a fantasy show, and she pulled it off magnificently.

DAVID FURY

Joss’s idea for Illyria was in the mix a long time before Angel was canceled. In fact, if we knew we were going to be canceled, we may not have done it, if only because we barely had any time to do anything with the character. It was almost as if Fred died in vain.

While year five was flourishing creatively despite the numerous obstacles placed before it, the WB nonetheless chose to cancel the series at the end of the season. There were a couple of factors that precipitated that decision, one being that Joss Whedon insisted on an answer about renewal earlier than usual so that he could craft a proper ending if necessary. And that fed into the fact that the network was developing a primetime reboot of the gothic-horror soap opera from the 1960s, Dark Shadows, which they would have, unlike the situation with Angel, owned a piece of. Additionally, did they really want two vampire-centric shows on the network at the same time? They delivered their answer with an early cancellation, a decision that bit them in the corporate jugular when Dark Shadows turned out to be a disaster and failed to go to series.

DAVID FURY

My memory is that Joss didn’t want to be played with the way he was in season five of Buffy, so he wanted an early answer about season five of Angel. He said, “Tell us we’re picked up. We deserve it. The show is doing better than ever: the ratings are up; the critics are praising the show.” And they went, “All right,” and then quickly came back that it was canceled. Which I believe they regretted almost immediately. And certainly since then I’ve heard a lot of things that they realized it was a bad mistake, but it’s kind of like you can’t let a creator, actor, or star dictate when they decide to pick up a show. So I don’t know if they were making an example or what, but they kind of shot themselves in the foot by not picking Angel up.

IAN WOOLF

(first assistant director, Angel)

I don’t think anyone was anxious to get out of there. It was actually a surprise to us when they canceled the show, because on the one hand they have this hundredth-episode celebration, with all of these speeches from the executives at the WB and Fox, how great we were, blah, blah, blah. Then, like a month later, we were told the show was being canceled. I was like, “What? Wait a second. What happened between the hundredth episode last month and now?” At the point we were told that we weren’t going to come back for a sixth season; it was in January. We typically wrapped in March, so the last three months it was kind of a little bit sad. People were starting to jump ship to get on other shows, because it’s all about paying your mortgage.

JAMES MARSTERS

We were not expecting to get canceled. When I came on the show, a lot of Buffy watchers who may not have been watching Angel came over to the show. And so our numbers were really good on that final season. We were really sure that we were gonna have a long run, but the network had a pilot in the works from the creator of ER [Dark Shadows], which was the medical show that launched George Clooney. They decided to run with that and cancel us, and I don’t think the pilot turned out as well as they had hoped. They were looking for another Angel for many years and ended up regretting the fact that they didn’t run with it.

JEFFREY BELL

Most of our people dealt with pain through humor. So there were a lot of horrible jokes, there were some tears, and there was also the feeling of, “What are you going to do?” The writing had been on the wall, and we escaped it for a couple of years, but at that point it finally caught up with us. So the reaction was all over the place. There was loss. When I first heard the news from Joss, I thought, “Oh, that’s too bad.” Then, when we went over to tell the crew, I found myself profoundly sad. It really didn’t hit until we were over there on the set. That day, a Friday, was a bust. We came in on Monday to work and there was a really strange sense of humor in the office, because we were all still reeling.

STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

Thankfully we knew early enough from the network that we weren’t being renewed that we could plan how to wrap it up, which was vital instead of it just ending and never coming back.

KELLY A. MANNERS

We knew it was the beginning of the end, so we tried to enjoy it. Deep down in our hearts we knew there would be no season six. We all just went in with the best attitude we could and had as much fun as possible producing it, and that came out with what we put on the screen.

CHRISTIAN KANE

We were filming a scene where I was down in the basement, in the dungeon, getting my heart cut out every day by a demon. It was me, David, James Marsters, and Kelly Manners. Joss came in with Kelly and broke the news that we had been canceled. David took it very well and went to his trailer. David knew he was always going to have a career, because he was a good actor. He took it very well, and I walked Joss out. Right when we got to the stage door, I said, “Are you all right?” And Joss said, “Yes.” I said, “What are you going to do?” And he replied, “I’m going to fucking kill you.” And I was all right with it. I was fine with it at that point, because I knew it was over. I had, arguably, the worst death in the world, because I felt like I should have been there for the final fight. I felt like after all these years, Lindsey deserved to be there. Angel had a trust in him and he even said, “You’re good in a fight.” Interesting story: we filmed my death scene—where Lorne shoots me—two and a half months before the finale, even though it was in that episode. We filmed it at 6 A.M. on a blocked stage with six people. Joss did not want people to know. We filmed it and it took an hour and a half to film. By noon the next day, people knew I died. Somebody had leaked it.

Back then, it was very upsetting to me that A, I had to die. B, I was killed by a flunky. I hated it. Now, after all these years, I understood what Joss was doing. I was never upset about the fact of what he was doing, because in the middle of the show, when you think I’m going to be there at the end, I died. It was a great, great moment and it was shock value. I was upset about it until about five years ago with the passing of my dear friend, Andy Hallett. I thought, “There’s no better way that I could’ve gone out.” I was killed by my best friend. Andy didn’t want to do it—he was very scared of guns—and he didn’t like the fact that he was the one.

AMY ACKER

I would say the positive feeling stayed until the end of the series. From being on Buffy and then going on to Angel, David might have been ready to play a different character. But not in any sense that we weren’t all crushed when it was canceled. In the last episode where I transform from the Fred form to Illyria and punch the demon through his face, that was the last day of shooting. I was just, like, crying a river everywhere. Joss wrote that scene even though I don’t think he wrote that whole episode. He didn’t direct that whole episode, but he came in to watch that scene be filmed.

JEFFREY BELL

The great thing about David is he really has the attitude of one door opens as another one closes. Joss said he took the news the same way he took the news when they said, “Oh, we’re going to create a show around you.” He was like, “Oh, cool.”

DAVID BOREANAZ

I always prescribe to the idea that when every season is over, I consider the series over until it gets reordered and then I move on from there. So when I learned about the show not being picked up from Joss, I didn’t really have much of a reaction. For me, you take the show for as long as you can, you learn from it, you work on a character for X number of years and you build with it and you take it as part of your résumé. For me, it was almost like a relief of pressure, so to speak. To have those words come in, it really took a lot of weight off of my shoulders. It wasn’t like I was rejoicing, but at the same time it felt right.

IAN WOOLF

As the seasons go by—and this is typical—the cast gets more restless. In the first couple of seasons they’re all happy to be there, but as the seasons go by, none of the actors want to be there. They don’t want to come to work. They want to get their big salaries and they don’t want to show up. That’s typically what happens; they just get tired of it. Then when it’s all over and said and done, it’s like they don’t realize how good they had it. Because being on a long-running TV show is like winning a lottery, especially for the cast. For the crew, there’s so many more jobs out there for them. But for the cast, it’s a finite amount of jobs for those people, especially the series regulars.

I remember Kelly Manners telling me about a year after Angel, after he was done, he was walking through the halls of Fox to go to an interview for another show, and who does he see sitting on a folding chair with some sides, waiting to go onto an audition? Alexis Denisof. He looked up at Kelly and he said, “You know, you were right. I didn’t realize how good we had it.” Because Alexis was one of the ones that complained. He really wanted out. Now he’s sitting there in a folding chair, waiting to audition for a job. He didn’t work for a long time. It’s like there’s nothing you can say to these guys, because the actors typically surround themselves with their PR people, their agents, their managers. Their egos get built up and up so they think that this is never going to end. And it does.

DAVID BOREANAZ

I actually felt stronger about leaving toward the end of season four, but when they kind of revamped the show in year five, it was a good enough thing to have happened just for the story structure and the people and the fans. Season five ended up being a thoroughly enjoyable year for me. Probably the best year of all the years since the first one. It just turned out better than I expected in terms of the characters and the story lines.

STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

At the same time, the Angel cast knew it was the golden time. That’s not to say that on occasion people don’t get pissy, because everybody’s human. You have a bad day; you’re there for fourteen hours—it’s going to happen. But we had such a fantastic cast and crew. Kelly Manners, our physical producer, kept everything moving and figured out a way to pay for the crazy stuff we came up with. Ross Barryman, our DP—without him the show would not have been the same. I mean, it’s not just that he designed the lighting; he helped the director design their shots and helped them come up with better ideas of how to shoot something. I would not have been able to direct the three episodes that I did without Ross by my side. It was such a huge load off to have these people where it was not about egos, it was not about what they want, but it was about what’s best for the show. It makes all the difference in the world.

DAVID BOREANAZ

In this business, things happen so quickly and so fast that I’ve always focused on getting the first episode done, then the following episode and not be so concerned about story lines and where the character is heading. I really kind of keep that unpredictable for myself, because you never know what’s going to happen. Walking around thinking it’s never going to end or that you’re invincible—that’s one of the traps of Hollywood, [so] that you have to really be cautious and aware of who you are as a person. And you have to remain strong in that foundation, which is something that I got from my parents growing up. They gave me that and it’s helped considerably to get through it all.

JOSS WHEDON

We had such a hard time getting the fifth season at all that I came into it figuring that it might be our last. What I came up with at the very beginning of the year was a season ender that would have closure for the entire show as well, but also opened up a lot of interesting avenues should we get a sixth season. I then became convinced that we would continue, because things were going so well. So while it was a horrible blow to find out that we were being canceled, I didn’t have to change what we were doing and could proceed straight ahead. What we planned to go out on was very much a statement that applies to what the show has been about since day one.

STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

When we knew it was ending, the story became serialized again and it became much more about destroying-the-Illuminati kind of deal and taking out the enemies. A Godfather-esque bit that we had to plan for and have be a little more extended. But that was the interesting thing: nothing really changed when we found out we had gotten canceled. It still ended the same way. Joss devised an ending that would work as a series ender or a season ender. One thing that was different was that we had squirreled away enough money to try and make it slightly bigger. Besides that, it ended exactly the same.

I looked at the Internet response when we were canceled, and by then episodes sixteen or seventeen aired and a lot of people were saying, “They obviously made that last-minute change, because they were canceled,” which of course is not true. By the time we found out we were canceled, episode seventeen, where Illyria appears, was already being edited. It had already been shot. One thing the fans often don’t realize is the lapse between when they see an episode and we actually do an episode is a month. We usually had three or four weeks of postproduction and there would be two weeks of filming and a couple of weeks to write the script. Another hard thing about TV is that you can’t adjust to the fans on a turn of a dime. If they express dislike of a character, chances are they’re going to see that character for four or five more episodes because they’re already shot.

DAVID FURY

The finale is very much how we discussed it would be before we got word of our cancellation. The body count would probably have been different since we were going to explore the Illyria-Wesley relationship in season six, but, otherwise, launching into what looks like a no-win battle was exactly where Joss had wanted the season to end up.

BEN EDLUND

The apocalypse was exactly where Wolfram & Hart wanted things to end up. Had Angel and the other characters not taken on the firm, they would have kept doing their battles against evil and coming out on top, but they got manipulated into taking on this thing, which triggered the apocalypse they wanted in the first place. You would say basically that Wolfram & Hart did not want the status quo. Angel and our plucky champions were protecting the status quo, which was a nonapocalypse universe. Wolfram & Hart decided the best way to actually get it to work the way they wanted was to just lay down and let the good intentions people pave the road right over you, straight to hell.

KELLY A. MANNERS

When you know a show is ending, morale definitely gets affected. You don’t have the excitement you had every other season, because normally you’re working to make sure you get the next season. When you’re on a sinking ship and the band’s still playing but you know it’s sinking, you’re not dancing.

BEN EDLUND

It was sad, but not tragic, is what I remember. But I had only done a year and a half at Mutant Enemy where others had done seven. So I had sort of blown in and had a really amazing time there and worked on one of the best sci-fi shows ever in Firefly. Then flipped over to something that was like an extraordinary toy box. That’s what Angel was, the toys were all out and no one said, “Put those toys away!” They said, “No, put them on screen, let’s go!” That was beautiful, and it was really wonderful people. And the way of working, although it was very demanding in terms of one’s time, it was really fulfilling. I was in the right place to move on. It also felt like once that lock on all those talent jobs that had been drawn together broke, there was a kind of feeding frenzy in the air. It made it feel not that bad, because you got this feeling that people were getting a crack at all these amazing writers and producers that had been locked away in this one area. It was time, in a way, to open up the door and let these remarkable television craftspeople and artists out in to the mainstream.

AMY ACKER

It just didn’t feel like it was supposed to be ending. I mean, Joss had already said he had an idea for season six, and it seemed like we still had good ratings and a great fan base and all of that. So it just felt a little bit wrong. Like, “We’ll be back next year, won’t we?” [laughs]. There was a fan movement to keep it going; billboards going around saying, “Save Angel.” You know, they were motivated to try and keep the show on the air. You kind of had a little bit of hope that that might have happened.

STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

I know the fans really threw their backs into getting the show picked up for a sixth season, but at the time it was definitely over at the WB, and UPN definitely passed, which was not surprising. I mean, ultimately it’s kind of a numbers game. The WB really didn’t make any money off the show and UPN just simply couldn’t afford it. They really took a bath on Buffy, and the reason they took a bath on Buffy is that they couldn’t come up with any product to launch off of it. They had a great lead in, but they couldn’t get the material to be their next hit, and Enterprise wasn’t really helping them either. So the feeling on Angel was that it was over, and it was very bittersweet. On the one hand, we would have loved for it to come back and for us to do another season; on the other hand, we also felt like we were finishing strong. And it’s always nice to finish a show on the upswing and not when it’s limping off into the sunset.

JOSS WHEDON

While this is a good note for the end of this particular movement, I didn’t feel this particular symphony was over. Originally, I wanted to go out after five seasons of Buffy, because I was tired. It wasn’t that I didn’t think there were more stories to tell. And I’m glad I got to do those last two seasons. With Angel, the burnout level was not as high. I didn’t have to run it day to day. I had great partners on the show, and it wasn’t a drain on me. And it redefined itself so much so many times that it remained very fresh. The show had done extraordinary stuff from the very first season.

STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

In the final year, we were able to do so many cool things and so many things that you just don’t see on TV. The puppet episode is a great example. You know, one week we get a puppet episode, [and] the previous week you were at the bottom of the sea in a World War II sub, because the show was constructed in such a way that you could do anything. And Joss really would go to those places—to dark, scary places. He’d go for the lighthearted puppet places as well.

BEN EDLUND

The Whedonverse lived in a place where there was darkness plus this ability to let the air out, something that was not dissimilar from the pattern developed by Xena. What I thought Xena did very well, and part of why it got around the way it did, was that it wasn’t Conan the Barbarian asking everyone to take these people seriously. “They’re wearing animal skins—don’t take them seriously!” Take their emotional truth seriously, and have fun with the fact that you’re almost in a spaghetti barbarian movie. And there’s a sense in the Whedonverse that you want the breeze to be blowing through there.

JEFFREY BELL

To me, what five years of Angel were about is asking specific questions. Why are we in Wolfram & Hart? What are we fighting for, why are we fighting, and what are we fighting against? Will Angel get to be a real boy? Will Spike? And these guys who clearly hate each other but also love each other, and this gang who has been with them—what’s going to happen with them? We turned Angel into a puppet, we had Nazi subs and Mexican wrestlers, but we’ve always remained true to the show.

BEN EDLUND

The hinge between a Nazi sub and a puppet show was Angel finding its optimal versatility and true kind of muscle group. I don’t know how much of Angel is what it is because of that. It’s a rich field of ideas that manages to land our feeling story, but one of the things I enjoyed most about working there was how wild the ideas could get. Those were always helped by stand-alones, or at least some element of stand-alone in it. I don’t have a particular axe to grind as far as the ratio of it, because I went in and worked on far more serialized shit and enjoyed that, too.

TIM MINEAR

It was the end of an era. For a moment there, there were three Mutant Enemy shows on the air with Buffy, Angel, and Firefly. Then there was Buffy and Angel. Then there was Angel, and then there were none.

JOSS WHEDON

People were asking why Angel was canceled when it was, and I sort of asked the same thing. That was a bit of a blow out of the blue. The message we always tried to give with the show is that redemption is really hard and it takes your whole life, and it involves fighting all the time, sometimes against things that can’t be beaten. The last episode of Angel reflects that strongly. And the fact that through all the years of trying to find the format and trying to find the regulars and trying to find the relationships, that we held true to that premise and, in fact, came full circle to it, means to me that we really had something there. The whole time, in all the various incarnations, we always had the thing that I wanted, which was an exciting, strange, tough, funny, melodramatic show about the idea of redemption and what it is to be a human being.

STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

Creatively the show accomplished so much. On a technical level, it’s a beautiful show. Just stunning. We were one of the cheapest hour dramas on TV and you couldn’t tell, because of the way it was filmed, thanks to the incredible Ross Barryman and our production values, and the choreography of the fights. Deeper than that, creatively I go back to the feeling that it created a mythological character in a battle between good and evil, where it’s not always black and white. We were more than willing to go to a very gray place. Angel, our hero, has done some horrible things with a soul. I mean, he locked up the lawyers with the vampires, and, in what is the best episode ever done, Tim Minear’s “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been,” he has a chance to save these people in the hotel but instead says to the demon, “Take them all,” because they deserve it. It’s moments like that that you will not see on another TV show: where your hero will do something like that, and you’re surprised by it.

DAVID BOREANAZ

The writers allowed me to do certain things that had been fantastic for me and exciting, because there’s a lot of history to that character. I had the ability to use his palette really well with each show, depending on what they’re asking for. Angel was multidimensional and had a lot of colors that I enjoyed tapping into. We opened him up and used his sarcasm in a very vulnerable way. The writers were great at using him in all sorts of different ways. I’d say the overall experience of doing the show was remarkably up-and-down. I kind of look at it as a huge arc for myself, personally striving and challenging myself every day, making the character fresh, unique, and different. Our job as actors is to communicate what the writer is trying to achieve, take their stories,… look at it as a whole, and … do our best to facilitate that. I was really a part of the whole, rather than an individual.

Personally, I was able to play a character that’s 240 years old, and I’ve had the experience of playing the action hero, the experience of playing a demon, being very vulnerable at certain times. The palette that I had at my fingertips was a very rare thing. I wasn’t flapping around in a cape like Dracula. There was a lot to this character that I learned from starting at the beginning.

STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

I kind of compare Angel to Jack Bauer on 24. Here’s a guy who knows right from wrong, and knows about the battle between good and evil and realizes that to fight evil sometimes you have to do horrible things for the greater good, and he has no qualms about it. He regrets it and perhaps it haunts him, but he will do it. Angel’s the same way. He will go to a very dark place to help save humanity, even if it means damning himself, which is something you don’t see a lot on TV. There’s not a lot of the antihero left. I’ve always loved antiheroes. You know, Luke Skywalker is great, but Han Solo, now you’re talking: the rogue, the guy who’s never on the up and up, but usually on the side of good. Those are the characters to me, where that gray area makes them interesting. And not just Angel. You can go to all of our characters and there’s a lot of gray there. I mean, Wesley went all dark and kept a slave girl in his closet. Gunn being hooked on brain juice, and Spike of course, who tries so hard to be good.

Take the character of Fred. Sweet, innocent Fred, who almost killed a guy, but you know he was asking for it, and, still, you know what happens to her. She gets her soul destroyed and her body inhabited by an ancient demon, which really shows you that in this universe anything can happen to anybody. Nobody’s safe, and it’s kind of like the real world. Nobody’s safe, but there’s hope.

DAVID BOREANAZ

Buffy was a pop culture phenomen[on] from the start. Our show remained just under the radar, and I found that refreshing instead of being this huge success. We felt successful in our storytelling and what we did show to show. I wasn’t looking to be number one in certain areas, I just wanted to do good work—wherever that landed us on the radar. The bottom line is that we remained loyal to our fans, and they were loyal to us.

STUART BLATT

Buffy was the flagship and, not taking anything away from it, but Angel, as far as I’m concerned, elaborated on that. Unfortunately, it always got looked at as a spin-off, and because it wasn’t a girl-power show, it didn’t get the same kind of credibility. And we did some crazy stuff on that show.

DAVID GREENWALT

You do a lot of things that don’t always land, but the success of Buffy and Angel—and by success I mean the way it reached people of all ages and emotionally—was so satisfying, because you work so hard. Yes it’s much more fun if it’s a hit than if it’s not. You’ve got to work as hard whatever one you’re doing. I was very sad to kind of leave Joss and Marti. We were very close and that kind of broke my heart a little bit, but I was very happy. Then I went on to do my own thing and the shows I worked on were really good, but with the exception of Grimm they just didn’t take off for whatever reason. That was a good six years, and I’ll never forget that.

CHARISMA CARPENTER

Both Buffy and Angel were so layered. They really hit on themes that are quite deep, and there’s a loneliness that people tap into with Buffy and Angel. Living your destiny at the expense of everything that you want for yourself. How do you negotiate those things through life? Just thinking about Buffy as a Slayer and Angel as a vampire, and sacrificing their relationship to a greater cause. Loneliness, and what it’s like to take on that burden. I think people can relate to that. The dialogue … to this day, I don’t think you can match it. The quipping, and the wit, and the way the language was made its own by all the wonderful writers.

Personally, I never grew more in my life or learned more about myself than working on those shows. It brought up everything for me—every demon, every button for you and about your childhood. “Am I enough? Am I smart enough? Am I talented enough? Am I worthy?” I learned work ethic. I learned when to keep my mouth shut. I learned what battles to pick and who not to piss off. I actually learned a lot by pissing people off.

JOSS WHEDON

Buffy had a paradigm that was new. Angel was a guy who looks like a hero and is a hero. There were things about it that make it a very unique show, but on the surface of it you could have looked at it and said, “That’s an action show on the WB,” and not many people got “the more” unless you watched it. With Buffy, even if you don’t watch it, you say, “That’s the idea,” and it has that grand mission statement: high school is hell, little girl kicks butt. Angel didn’t have that. Angel was only as good as the show itself. I honestly believe if Buffy had not been as good as it was, people still would have watched it, because they liked the idea. I’m glad that people thought it was good and I worked hard to make it good. Angel will always be perceived by people as only a genre show and you really have to sort of watch it to understand what we had going on.

DAVID BOREANAZ

This show and this character will be remembered for its sense of risk, its sense of style: a uniqueness to deliver story in a different manner; a uniqueness in character to expand with the other characters around him, to evolve into different types of characters, to be ever changing; the angst of conflict within him. There’s so much to be remembered and so much to be proud of about this show. And its use of mythology and verse and language and texture—just the way it was shot. It will be remembered for a lot of things.

Angel’s evolution remained an ongoing thing. I don’t think for this type of character that there will ever be an end to his evolution. As far as his personal journey—God, it was leaps and bounds. The guy just completely came out of the shadows, opening up, and became more vulnerable with a better sense of himself from the people around him. The evolution was amazing; emotionally he evolved tenfold. And then with the show’s ability to shift from the darker places to humor and back again … what a fantastic journey to be able to do that. It was great for me, because it enabled me to tap into those places on different levels and expand on those for different roles. I was able to use those opportunities in other parts. I really enjoyed the flexibility of the character and how the writers allowed me to interchange with him and move places. I welcomed that; it’s one of the reasons I enjoyed it so much.

JOSS WHEDON

We never made an episode where it was, “Let’s just do something cool.” It’s very much about the grown-up emotions, the decisions we’ve made. Territory that Buffy began to explore in its later seasons. The terrible decisions we’ve made and the life we’ve spent trying to come back from that. The show has an intense, epic melodrama that very much set its own tone. What it was trying to say, like Buffy, is mutable, but basically it was about, “How do I live? What do my actions mean? If I’ve made mistakes, how do I find peace and answers?” You never do. You have to keep fighting. I would never make an episode of television that didn’t have something to say, because that would be pointless and the work is too hard.

It’s an approach that may separate these from other shows, but I think it’s also hurt. Television is designed to be comforting. It is designed for you to always know what you’re in for. And my television is always designed for you not to. The idea that if this is a funny scene, someone should keel over dead. If this is a scary scene, there should be a joke. If this is a wacky farce, there should be sudden, gut-wrenching melodrama. I always want to change it up. Angel had had a more consistent tone, with the exception of the Pylea adventure, which was basically, “Can we make The Wizard of Oz?” Basically, it had always been very serious with a wry edge to it, whereas Buffy—who knew? My shows will never be giant hits, because they’re not that. Ultimately, they work on a different model, and for a genre show to do that, I think it scares people a little bit.

DAVID GREENWALT

These shows were so personal to Joss. We sat in together on a lot of dailies, a lot of pages, and stuff that he’s always been so generous to me in public and in private. But in my mind I was there to serve Joss Whedon and to do my best to write like him. Into every generation one is born. That’s Joss Whedon.

And nothing seemed to sum up Joss Whedon better than the last episode of the series, particularly the final shot when hordes of the forces from hell have been sent by the Senior Partners to destroy Los Angeles and Team Angel, but to their last breath the group is willing to continue the battle, Angel raising a sword, stating he wants to slay the approaching dragon, and leading them to what will likely be their deaths.

CHRISTIAN KANE

Interesting bit of trivia about that final episode: David Boreanaz and I are the only two actors who appeared in the first episode and the last one. Our good buddy Glenn Quinn checked out, and Charisma had left the show. Alexis and my dear friend J. August Richards weren’t on the show in the beginning.

JAMES MARSTERS

The problem with the ending was that we had no money. We had the big buildup of the monsters—hell is opening up; all the monsters are coming: oh, no! We only had enough budget for, like, a two-and-a-half-second shot of computer-generated Hellmouth opening up and all the dragons and stuff. And the only thing left to do was just dump ice water on the cast for the rest of the night and hope for the best. I think a lot of shows put into the position that Joss was put into wouldn’t have even tried. They would have said it was impossible to wrap it up, it would’ve been just another episode and then—surprise, surprise—we’re not coming back. That does happen, but Joss was not satisfied with that, and he moved heaven and earth to try to wrap it up. I’m impressed that he did as well as he did.

STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

I wish the show had continued on; we had more stories to tell. But I’m thankful that we got a chance to wrap it up. Where it ended, I love the fact that it didn’t end with, “Oh, OK, everything’s great. We defeated evil. We won.” It ended, if memory serves me correctly, with Gunn wounded, probably going to die. They’re going into this impossible battle against the forces of evil, but they’re never going to stop fighting. I thought it was a great, great note to end on. I thought Jeff Bell did a phenomenal job with that last episode, and I’m very proud of where we ended up. That season, to me, was just so delightful.

J. AUGUST RICHARDS

I know that ending is really controversial. People love it or they hate it, but what’s funny is that the more years that go on, the more I understand what Joss was trying to say or what they were trying to say with the ending of Angel. The essential question is, if you knew you were going to lose, would you still fight for what you believe is right? Would you still fight for good or what you believe to be good? The answer that the characters came up with was yes. My character was the one who asked the question. That means more to me now, especially in these times politically. I was actually just thinking about it over the last few days, and the meaning of that has become even more relevant for me right now in our history and where we are as a nation. I think it’s beautiful and was perfect.

KELLY A. MANNERS

That last big fight in the rain was the last thing we shot, and there were lots of tears. You become a family when something like that goes for five years. We didn’t make a lot of changes in the crew, so it was very emotional. And what a way to end. Standing soaking wet and then saying cut, print, good-bye.

J. AUGUST RICHARDS

That last scene was us in an alley, facing the giant in front of us, facing forty thousand on the left and forty thousand on the right. In an odd way, that was my good-bye to the characters and that world. When the comic books came out and continued the story, I had no desire to read them, because it was finished for me.

JAMES MARSTERS

When I produced theater, we would do a lot of shows that were big risks. I always said, “You guys. We’re jumping off the cliff with this one. You know, we’re either going to fly or we’re going to splat.… so we better start flapping.” And the cast started flapping hard. I’m reminded of the final scene in Angel, which was meant to be the most heroic thing that Joss could think of for Angel to do, which was to sacrifice his life for the good of other people when he knew he would lose. “Let’s go to work!” That’s the point of that episode; we know we’re going to die, but we can’t help but try anyway. And I think that that’s the ultimate heroic act.

DAVID BOREANAZ

We ended Angel like an open-ended book. You kind of see the characters going out with a fight, which has been prevalent for Angel since the inception of the show. He’s always going to be fighting, which is true today with humanity and all of the things that are going on in the world. It ends with a battle for his own self, and a battle for humanity. Striving for excellence and continuing the good fight, whatever that good fight is.

JOSS WHEDON

We got to see how efficiently Wolfram & Hart could pick these people apart. We got to see how that affects Angel. His attitude about what he does and why he does it has always been so shifting and, to me, so interesting. He has to go to a very dark, weird, selfish place to start playing at a level that Wolfram & Hart had been playing off of from the start. We tied up some loose ends, but not all of them, because life doesn’t work that way. But the situation at Wolfram & Hart deteriorates to the point where there is a reckoning and a bloody one—because ultimately they’re not going to sit down and play canasta.

BEN EDLUND

Best. Ending. Ever! What I love is the last shot where you get these fucked-up people, and the story, especially in a season where things got more grim, has Angel being like a pencil driven into a pencil sharpener, and the point was that shot, right? They will never stop fighting. He will never stop. He swings at the camera and it’s over. But it’s never over.