"Let's Go to Work": The Legacy of Angel A Slayage Special Issue

Following the vampire with a soul on his quest for redemption on the Noir streets of Los Angeles, the series functions as "an extension of the Buffyverse," offering a rich expansion of what Matthew Pateman describes as "one of the most successful tele-mythopoeic worlds" (131), while also standing as a distinct, self-contained series that, according to AmiJo Comeford and Tamy Burnett, "provides viewers with a sophisticated, complex narrative and cast of characters, which together create a thought-provoking, high quality, and, yes, entertaining television experience" (1). [...]Angel exists within an established tradition of serialized, sympathetic vampire texts that includes James Malcolm Rymer's Varney the Vampire (1845-1847), Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles (1976-present), Dan Curtis' Dark Shadows (1966-1971), and the Canadian television series Forever Knight (19921996), Angel's most direct progenitor as it told the story of Nick Knight, an 800-year-old vampire looking for redemption by working the night shift on the Toronto police force (see Giannini "Forever Knight, Angel, and Supernatural"). While some of the series, including True Blood (2008-2014) and The Vampire Diaries (2009-2017), seem more indebted to Bufy and Twilight (2008-2012), others opted to focus on the conflicted and morally ambiguous vampire-protagonist in the manner of Angel. Since 2005, these vampires have steadily populated television screens in the form of: [...]Angel's choice to locate its series Big Bad not within an individual monster but in the inter-dimensional law firm Wolfram & Hart is extended to Dollhouse's (2009-2010) Rossum Corporation, both offering a critique of global corporate capitalism (see Giannini, Joss Whedon Versus the Corporation).