Angel Series Now Streams Free 27 Years After Its 1999 Debut

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is widely considered one of the best and most influential TV shows ever made. Creator Joss Whedon built a rich mythology of vampires, demons, witches and the bureaucratic organization that fights them. It gave Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her friends, the Scooby Gang, seven seasons of escalating threats. That world building also fed one of the best spinoffs of all time, which now streams for free if you don’t mind a few ads.

Angel premiered in 1999 and ran alongside the fourth season of Buffy. It follows the soul-stricken vampire played by David Boreanaz, who leaves Sunnydale to become a paranormal private investigator in Los Angeles. Buffy didn’t hit its stride until season 2, and Angel also took time to find its footing. Whedon and his co-showrunner David Greenwalt had to work out what they wanted from it. The show could easily have stayed a supernatural crime procedural. Instead it grew into a series with episodes as good as the best of Buffy. Whether you’re finally starting Angel or rewatching it for the umpteenth time, the whole series is free on Tubi.

The show opens as a highly episodic neo-noir. Angel meets a generic LAPD detective who doubles as a love interest and helps him find cases involving ghosts, demons and other supernatural creatures. He gets help from Francis Doyle (Glenn Quinn), a half demon who has visions of people in need. He also works with Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter), the former Sunnydale mean girl who gives up her dreams of Hollywood stardom to protect people.

The show improves around the middle of season 1, when Doyle dies heroically and passes his prophetic powers to Cordelia. Wesley Wyndam-Pryce (Alexis Denisof) takes his place. He is the slimy, self-righteous and incompetent Watcher of the twisted vampire slayer Faith (Eliza Dushku). Wesley was one of the most hated characters on Buffy, and he begins as a joke. He is an egotistical “rogue vampire hunter” who tries to make up for his failures by serving as the team’s occult advisor. He grows into one of the show’s best characters, a relentless crusader who embodies the show’s neo-noir sensibilities through his willingness to do almost anything for justice.

The ensemble came together in season 2, when the vampire-hunting street fighter Charles Gunn (J. August Richards) joined the main cast. The season also introduced the demon bar owner Lorne (Andy Hallett) and Winifred Burkle (Amy Acker), a physics genius who spent years trapped in a demon realm. Their very different skills and personalities gave the writers endless room for teasing banter, unlikely romance and clever problem solving.

Buffy had some far weaker plots and seasons, and Angel hit a big snag too. The show introduced Angel’s teenage son Connor (Vincent Kartheiser), who ends up impregnating an amnesiac Cordelia and putting her in a coma she never wakes from. The plot looks especially bad in light of allegations by Carpenter that Whedon harassed her when she got pregnant and fired her soon after she gave birth. The payoff involving their twisted child Jasmine (Gina Torres) was strong, but Connor was extremely annoying. Carpenter and Cordelia deserved better.

Darker than anything on Buffy

Angel had several significant villains, including the time-traveling demon Sahjhan (Jack Conley) and the vengeful vampire hunter Daniel Holtz (Keith Szarabajka). The greatest recurring threat was the extremely evil law firm Wolfram & Hart. The firm stands for the corrupt power structures and perverted law at the core of the noir genre, except that its employees literally sell their souls and represent demons. For four seasons, Wolfram & Hart antagonized Angel and his allies while trying to use him in a larger scheme tied to an apocalyptic prophecy. Then, in a brilliant twist at the end of season 4, the firm offers Angel and his crew the chance to take over its LA branch.

It’s the ultimate devil’s bargain, and season 5 marks a hard pivot as the show becomes far darker than Buffy.

Buffy touched on the anxiety of people without supernatural powers who try to keep up with the chosen one. Angel tackles that theme brutally through Gunn. Wolfram & Hart gives him a mental upgrade that makes him an expert lawyer overnight. When those skills start to fade, his feelings of inadequacy push him to make a deal he knows is wrong to get the knowledge back. The consequences are more terrible than he could have imagined.

Season 5 has several plotlines like that, which give Angel’s team endless resources while taking away everything they value. The season began after Buffy had wrapped. It gave a new home to Spike (James Marsters), who could lighten the mood as a foil for Angel while continuing his own redemption arc. Season 5 also dealt with other fallout from the end of Buffy, including an unstable young woman who develops Slayer powers and escapes a mental institution to try to kill Spike. Angel also has a rare perfect finale, an episode full of brutal surprises and deeply satisfying conclusions to the show’s biggest plot and character arcs.

Angel could have coasted on the popularity of Buffy. Instead it stands on its own as a darker, more mature drama, sharpened by its willingness to reinvent itself over five seasons. It mixes black comedy with real horror and delivers emotionally devastating episodes like “A Hole in the World” and “Awakening.” The Buffy cameos went beyond fan service and added depth to the characters, which set a new standard for what a spinoff could do. If you enjoyed Buffy but never watched Angel, now is a good time to visit a very dark version of the City of Angels.

Angel is available to stream for free on Tubi. It’s also on Hulu and Prime Video.

Source: Polygon