I don’t run a weekly TV series, much less a weekly TV series whose fantasy/horror premise requires a good deal of stunt work and special effects, which spun off from another series whose canon is a fairly complex root system of its own. So, I can claim to understand the limitations the writers on such a show have to work within, and up to a certain point, I do understand them — doing what I do for a living, I’ve developed kind of a heightened sense of why TV is put together the way it is sometimes.

But I don’t understand it in the sense that I’ve done it myself — that an actor comes into my office and tells me she’s pregnant and I have to write with an eye to that when the season arc is already planned out, that I have to look down the long hallway of 22 hours of programming and figure out how to re-hang half the doors before opening them. It’s not an easy job, the medium has restrictions, and I can sympathize with that up to a point.

But the problem with the fourth season of Angel is that I did sympathize with the creative team up to a point — and then the creative team pushed me well beyond said point. What went wrong?

Before I get into that, let me say first that I didn’t loathe the fourth season — far from it. I liked it a great deal; this isn’t a bad review. It’s a diagnosis of wasted potential. Unfortunately, a lot of what I liked about the season got obscured by various distracting elements that I didn’t like — or, more to the point, just couldn’t understand, and by “couldn’t understand,” I mean in the “as written, this is confusing” sense and in the “I think this is the wrong creative choice” sense.

Okay, enough abstracts — let’s get into concrete examples. The customary warnings re: spoilers and boring process exegesis apply.

Cordelia. Where to begin. I’ll take the nitpickiest part first: what is going on with foregrounding Charisma Carpenter’s gigantic breasts in every shot? If the character is not yet pregnant, you might want to draw attention away from the fact that her already formidable bosom is half again as big as when we last saw it. Writing around the pregnancy is really your only choice here, at least until you can position the plot around it properly, but next time, tell the costume department that that’s the plan, and frame her shots a little tighter. I could see a difference immediately — in her face, in her butt, I could tell she had put baby weight on, and Carpenter looked great, actually, but that isn’t the point. Viewers read the entertainment press; don’t dare us to find evidence that an actor is pregnant. Sit down and redo the shot list.

And after you do that, put together a Plan B for the story arc, and let the actress in on it. I don’t doubt that it played better if you watched it on a weekly basis, instead of all the episodes right in a row like I did, and if you didn’t know in advance that Cordy is the Big Bad like I did…but I don’t think it played much better. One of the writers admits on the commentary of a mid-season episode that, at that point, Carpenter had no idea Cordelia would become the Big Bad. So, she’s just playing her scenes straight — scenes like, you know, seducing Connor during the rain of fire. And several episodes’ worth of scenes after that.

Let’s review: She had developed feelings for Angel; she knows Angel had developed feelings for her; she works with/for Angel; and she slept with his son. Who is a teenager, and who has a wretched haircut, and who has never known the touch of a woman because he spent his formative years in a hell dimension. Her stated reason for doing the Posturepedic polka with Connor, at the time: it looks like everyone’s going to die so what the hey. Fine. But then when everyone doesn’t die? How does the Cordelia character move forward from that? Because if she’s not the Big Bad, she’s mortified, I think — and if she is the Big Bad, she’s got to telegraph a steely no-regrets attitude somehow. Carpenter sort of split the difference, emotionally, and I don’t blame her for that, but — it’s disorganized writing, at best.

I mean, basically, they had the character make a decision that said one of two things: 1) I have plunged us all into a horrendous Freudian clusterfuck, or 2) I have ulterior motives that bear all the hallmarks of evil. And then they just kind of…tabled the issue. Again, I sympathize with the limitations, and I understand that a lot of last-minute scrambling probably had to happen, but you need to have that Plan B in place already, not make it up as you go along.

Connor. Another area where the failure to delineate the Big Bad and do the prep work caused some problems for me. The addition of Connor period caused some problems for me, because the Jump The Shark rule about not adding a kid exists for a reason. In the case of Angel, giving Angel a child had some interesting implications, but…you know how Michael on Lost is always “my son” this and “my son” that, and in addition to never using the kid’s name, he becomes a monomaniacal character who sees everything through the prism of his child’s welfare, and Jack offers him a drink of water and he’s duty-bound to respond, “Yeah, I need to stay hydrated so that I can find my son“? It’s not that parents don’t, or wouldn’t, behave this way; it’s that, week in and week out, it’s not interesting to watch. For a few weeks, sure. For a season or more? Every week, the same gritty delivery of “not without my son” and “this is about my son” and “I’m going to save my son” and “give me back my son”?

“Well, but the wrinkle is that his son hates him.” Right, but: see above. It’s like the writers threw the entire father-son angst aspect of the relationship in neutral for a dozen episodes to focus on that pile of bricks calling itself the Master’s second in command, which is a valid choice, creatively, but Connor’s ongoing petulance and distrust and refusal to listen to reason — it’s not that it’s unsympathetic, or out of character. It’s that it’s a serial TV show, not a movie, and either you can evolve the character somewhat and resolve a couple of the issues, or you can put him in dry dock somehow until you need him again for the plot, but “meanwhile, Connor is still conflicted” isn’t the solution.

Buffy had the same problem in the sixth season regarding Buffy’s downward spiral and how she supposedly hooked up with Spike to purposefully degrade herself so she’d feel something. I didn’t love the Spuffy pairing, but as far as seeing what they’d intended to do there, sure, I could dig it. But then it just went on and on and on, she fucks him against a dumpster, she works at a burger joint, she’s divorced from genuine emotion and self-medicating with pain and self-loathing, YEP, WE GOT IT, MARTI. The idea itself is not a bad one, but again, this is not a movie, and it’s not that viewers can’t handle unremitting darkness or depressive choices or whatever; it’s not about giving us a happy ending that doesn’t fit. It’s about understanding that a realistic portrayal of an emotional state is not automatically good television.

Connor is a frustrating character for me, because while I get where he’s coming from, he’s…annoying, a lot of the time, and while I think his twitchy, PTSD-ish interactions with other characters ring true, it did get old after a while, like, again with this? The character has to move forward. It’s not convenient, particularly, in series TV, to try to get your characters out of various ruts while plotting your major and minor arcs, and trying to fit those developments together so it seems organic — it’s not an easy job. But it is in fact the job on a serial drama, like it or not.

With that said, I applaud the choice to transplant the character and end his arc — it worked dramatically, and it worked creatively. Abrupt, true, but I liked that about it, that the writers sort of said, “Well, we really have to do this or the show is going to bog down hopelessly.”

Fred and Gunn. Fred freaks on her prof, Gunn pretty much kills the guy for her, they both share the guilt and it breaks them up. …Okay, then. I didn’t enjoy that relationship, because it cut Gunn’s balls off, and I didn’t cry when it ended, but I kind of didn’t understand why that needed to happen in Season Four. To open the door for Wesley? That didn’t really happen. To create friction within the group? That seems like a weird reason, and if that’s the impetus, it failed. If it’s another case of the writers realizing they’d painted themselves into a corner and had to end the relationship, I can respect that, but I don’t think I understand why it couldn’t have waited until S5.

And speaking of Wesley…oh, Wesley. I’ve always liked his character, and while I didn’t mind the dark turn, I felt like his customary overly genteel and nerdy flailing gave the show a levity it needed. Once he went all Lilah-boinking bad-ass, it lost that wackiness, and Lorne wound up carrying that load — and I love me some Lorne, but he’s a small-doses character, and Wesley’s estrangement from the rest of the Angel Investigations gang went on too long, in my opinion. Once the sun got blotted out, it did seem like perhaps a grudging agreement to chalk it up to bad information and try to work together would have made the most sense, but no, Wesley remains divorced from the rest of the core group. It’s not a huge thing; I just think it would have worked better if he’d come back to the fold sooner.

And in fact, it’s an issue with the whole season — the sense that entire subplots got paused while we dealt with other things. Prior seasons seemed to weave everything together much more deftly, but S4 just dropped some of its threads for long stretches of time, to the point where I noticed it and would say out loud, “Um, Cordelia? Anyone remember her? Comatose somewhere?” Fred is on her out-of-town jaunt, fleeing Jasmine’s followers, and we got a bunch of scenes that repeated themselves; no Cordelia, Connor filler scenes. Gunn is off with Electric Gwen, and it turns into a standalone episode while Angel is setting Cordy up, but then that all happens in the last minute of the ep. It came off as…not thrown together, but just sort of disorganized, like the writers themselves kept smacking their foreheads all, “Ohhhhh yeah, that guy. Shit.”

Show, don’t tell. Enough with the endless exposition about how very very dangerous Angelus is. Show him breaking a few necks instead of giving other characters a line every five minutes about how he’s a greater scourge than Spanish flu. Also? These people know his legend, and they fight demons and evil for a living. I did not buy for a second that Angelus’s Mean Girls head trips would work on any of them, much less set them all on each other and make everyone all pouty. Bringing Angelus back is fine, but if you don’t want to put your show’s hero in the position of doing unforgivable things, then…don’t. Trying to have it both ways like that, it’s too obvious.

Jasmine. It’s spot-on commentary on organized religion — so smartly written, and it didn’t over-explain what it wanted to do there. I did find the casting of Gina Torres problematic, because I just don’t like her much, and I think bringing in a Firefly cast member is…well, gimmicky, but I don’t think it’s a problem anyone could really have “fixed,” except maybe with shooting tricks so that we never saw Jasmine’s human face. Torres did a great job with the material; she just didn’t work for me.

And finally, Lilah. Stephanie Romanov is one of TV’s underrated bitches; she’s such a glass of lemonade in the Lilah role, so I liked that she came back.

But the writers could have spent five minutes figuring out why, and how. “The why is because Wolfram & Hart wanted Angel to –” Okay, okay, fair enough. Sort of a deus ex Tartaro, but as a denouement to the Jasmine/”we chose free will over guaranteed happiness” storyline, I liked it, because again, it’s a TV show, not a philosophy class, so let’s shake the tree and see what falls out. But the whole time everyone’s taking their tours of the W&H facility, I’m sitting there all, “What do you mean, ‘It’s not really her’?”

It’s that kind of carelessness that drives me nuts about Whedon & Co.’s later work. I don’t know whom exactly to blame in the case of Angel S4 because I think Joss had his hands full with the final season of Buffy — but that turned into a hot mess in about four episodes, for the same reason, namely that nobody sat down and spent a minute, or five, or thirty, figuring out how the internal logic would work — why the First Evil showed up, where the First Good is, how the balance is going to get struck.

And you have to do it, especially in the fantasy/supernatural genre. You have to stop sometimes and just make sure your world has laws and that you have followed them, or explained why they’ve changed. You can take yourself off the hook pretty easily with a couple of lines amounting to “because I said so” — which is not the most elegant solution, but the idea is to signal to the reader/viewer that you know it’s an issue and you’ve taken the time to come up with a rationale. With Lilah, it’s all “it’s not really her” this, “oh, it’s her, but not exactly” that, “she’s not a vamp” the other thing — fuck, just say she’s a ghost! They address the fact that she’s not a vampire, they address the fact that she’s still working for Wolfram & Hart with the perpetuity-clause thing — but they can’t take a two-minute meeting in the hall and decide if she’s a W&H hologram or a haunt or what?

The one thing that drives me insane about Angel and Buffy but also about 24, and Lost, and any number of other shows or movies, is when the writers clearly don’t have a plan — and when they just as clearly think we won’t notice. The First Evil? Not thought out, and it was evident. The Initiative? Ditto. What was down the hatch? Ditto. Sometimes the plots come together in the end, sometimes they don’t — Lost drives me nuts with the time-buying Kate flashbacks, like, we can see what you’re doing, and it ain’t plotting the present day, because you didn’t think this show would get picked up and you haven’t done your homework, but I think that show can still get its shit together. And again, I can absolutely sympathize with the difficulty. The Subheroes is just a death march of notecards and re-outlining and chain-smoking, as you can see. …Oh, wait, you can’t, because I can’t make any damn headway with it at the moment. I absolutely understand that stories sometimes have a way of telling themselves in ways you can’t anticipate, and that’s just on paper — add actors and union camera guys and vampire teeth, forget it, it’s like commanding an army blindfolded, I’m sure.

But if that’s the case, you need to account for that ahead of time. You need to get the whole team into the office on a Saturday and make sure everyone’s clear on what’s going on. You need to identify the trouble spots and come up with fixes. You need to not park one of your lead actors in a coma; you need to not cougar-trap characters you don’t know what to do with.

And you need to understand that, if you’ve done that kind of good, thoughtful work in the past, wisenheimers like myself will expect you to keep doing it in the future. Sorry, dude.

{NB: I watched a lot of S4 while I had the flu. If the fever (or the customary senility around here) caused me to biff any facts, let me know.]

January 9, 2006

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