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RSS FeedWhich Joss Whedon TV series was better: Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel?
Results so far:
| Buffy | 68% | 460 votes | Total: 674 votes | |
| Angel | 32% | 214 votes |
Buffy
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Add to FavoritesBuffy definitely started everything and ended everything with a bang. If it wasn't for Buffy Angel wouldn't even have started. This is a tough one to debate because Angel was so good as well, but Buffy just takes the cake.
Here are a few reasons Buffy wins first prize.
#1) Buffy gets the ever growing Scooby gang including Willow, Xander, Oz, Tara, Giles, Anya, Cordelia, Dawn, even Wesley, and dark slayer Faith. Angel and Spike also had a place in Buffy's group. They stuck by each other and helped each other out when ever they could. Though Angel gets a cool group of his own it just doesn't surpass Buffy's posse.
#2) Buffy also gets the great romance factor that poor Angel doesn't get the liberty of having much of. Her main men were mostly Angel, Spike, Riley, and Ben. Each of them were different and played an important part in Buffy's life.
#3) Though Angel is a good and effective fighter, not to mention hero, Buffy is much stronger and can take Angel on almost any day of the week.
#4) Even though Buffy dies she refuses to stay dead which is a major plus. Of course Angel came back after she defeated him as Angelus, but it's just not the same as Buffy's dilemma of dying. Slayers may be strong, but none have been nearly as great as Buffy in the staying alive department.
#5) Angel may have a soul, but he still shows many signs of evil. He fights it and that makes him a great character. But Buffy just doesn't waver from good and that's what makes her a greater force of good and, therefore, nearly unbeatable.
#6) Did Angel end too abruptly? Buffy's last TV episode just blew me away and ended with more class than Angel's did. I think that the ending is one of the most important parts of a TV show and Angel's didn't really do anything for me. Buffy's last episode though~ wow! I'm still in awe.
#7) Buffy's family plays an important role in Buffy's life. Angel's a vampire and doesn't have much of a real family except for Conner and the vampires he sired. The episodes where Buffy's mom got sick, passed away, and Buffy had to raise Dawn were so sad and moving. I couldn't really find anything that dramatic in Angel.
#8) The musical episode of Buffy was just hilarious and touching. The music, the things that they sang about, the way they did it~ it was all so original and perfect to the end.
With Buffy's great sense of slaying humor and incredible friends she remains at the top of my list of supernatural greatness.
Learn more about this author, Samantha Overmyer.
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Angel
While I realize that Angel would not be here without Buffy, the fact remains that Angel is a superior show in many respects. It didn't take Buffy very long to get completely bogged down by teenage soap opera. Angel has its fair share of soap opera moments, granted, but whatever it has adds to the character development instead of subsuming it. The Angel/Buffy love story was a lot of angst that I could do without, but at least it was better than Buffy/Spike. There's a reason that fandom has coined the term "Spikeification" to refer to the weakening of a once-awesome villain in the name of character development. Even his jump to Angel for its fifth season could not save Spike's character.
The mythos that began in Buffy is not fully developed until Angel. The latter series opens a broader and more varied world of demons, spirits, gods, and parallel universes. Much of this is made possible by the fact that Angel has much tighter story arcs. Each season of Buffy had its own story arc which would be resolved by the season's end, but the story in Angel is much more continuous and crosses seasons. The struggle against Wolfram & Hart was established at the very beginning, giving the show greater direction than Buffy-which, like most teen dramas, seemed to lose track of what its original point was once the characters went off to college.
Angel's darker tone also helped make it more interesting. (Buffy became "darker and edgier" in its last few seasons, true, but as it didn't start out that way such a move seemed out of place.) Even after the awkward reset for season 5, during which the story arc was unclear and fluffy, amusing episodes dominated, we saw one of the darkest moments in the series: the death of Fred. Had Angel lasted another season, Illyria, and her interactions with the other characters, would have developed in even more interesting ways. The endings of both series fit their general tone-Buffy's with a bittersweet sense of finality, and Angel's with a sense of great uncertainty and hopelessness as the characters went up against people who had, for the entire series, been too powerful for them to fight-but Angel's series finale was more poignant because of its greater realism. Sometimes we want a story in which evil can be triumphed, and Buffy provides that; but Angel provides something more unpredictable and exciting, a story in which we are never quite sure who is going to win.
Learn more about this author, Amelia Hill.
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