Angel dead?

…we went to Joss [Whedon] to let him know that this would be the last year of [Angel] on The WB.

This looks bad. This looks really bad.

I wonder how much this has to do with the fact that the series for which Whedon is best known, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was scooped from the WB by UPN. From what I understand of the entertainment world (which is, admittedly, very little) it’s possible Angel was included near the end of Buffy‘s WB run as a dealmaker; once Buffy left, WB had no reason to keep Angel going, and indeed they’ve been trying to cancel the series for a couple of years, ever since UPN’s coup.

As Donna and I were discussing earlier today, Angel has gone in a direction we’re not particularly fond of this season, moving away from longer-term story arcs and into one-shot episodes and mini-arcs. (Did network executives learn nothing from Babylon 5?) Even so, it’s fared much better in its new incarnation than the zombified corpse that NBC refers to as The West Wing, largely due to the excellent staff of writers.

With UPN close to cancelling Enterprise (thankfully) I hope they’re looking very closely at scooping the other Buffiverse show, if only as thanks to Joss for keeping them alive for a few more years than they’d have had otherwise. Does lightning ever strike twice in TeeVee Land?