The WB has announced that this will be their last season for Angel. I can’t say that this is a great loss. They’re having a good season, but the show never lived up to its Buffy roots. It floundered, never seeming quite sure of what it wanted to be or where it was going. (The fact that all of the original cast except for the guy who plays Angel have gone is a sign; this far into Buffy, all of the key original cast was still aboard except for the guy who played Angel.)
Still, it comes at an odd time here. We’ve been watching a lot of Angel. We’re watching the new episodes every week, and my wife has been recording and watching all of the earlier stuff. She never saw it before. I had pushed Buffy on her for a while in reruns, and she watched it lightly at first. Now that she’s more invested in it, she’s watching them all again from DVD and getting a lot more of the context. Problem is, now that she’s watching so much Angel she’s slowed way down on Buffy, and the Angels she is now watching take place after the Buffies, just to confuse matters.
I do hope this is not the last of the Buffiverse we see, but I want to see it only so long as they can have a good unified vision of what they’re doing. I’m not sure Angel achieves that even in this, its best days.
