Well, season one of Angel starts off really strongly. We have lots of really great things going on. The show has a really dry sense of humour and it’s not afraid to mix really great laughs with heartbreak. The season begins with Angel fighting a couple of vamps in an alley, one of whom is the Lost’s future Sawyer Josh Holloway, and when the damsels in distress try to offer him thanks he rebukes them for fear of coming to close to them. It becomes clear that nearly draining Buffy to death in the climactic episodes of last season of Buffy have haunted him and drastically changed the way he deals with human interaction. He’s too scared that it will happen again to let anyone come close, even for a moment of gratitude.

The show doesn’t have the corny or cheesy mentality that drives a lot of Buffy, so its stories can be much darker and the show immediately takes itself much more seriously. Not that Buffy didn’t become a really serious, and sometimes very depressing, show in its later years, but Angel started off with the mentality of showing the real world. This show isn’t meant to be a supernatural allegory for adolescence, it deals with the nuanced evils in the world like the evils of apathy and of banality.

In the coming episodes, the show will grow, and, while it won’t reach its apex until its later seasons, these early episodes show a show ready to deal with the big ideas. Also, this is the first time I’ve watched the Buffy and Angel episodes interleaved since they aired that way lo those many years ago so it’s great to experience all those fun little cross-references anew.