Falling 'Angel' hopes for turn for the better

[Mark Holtz]

From Yahoo/USA Today (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=680&ncid=680&e=6&u=/usatoday/20030507/en_usatoday/5135546):

Falling 'Angel' hopes for turn for the better

For the past seven seasons, David Boreanaz has been happily employed as the sexy, soulful vampire Angel, first on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and then on its undersung WB spinoff Angel. Though he has a guest appearance coming up on the last two episodes of Buffy, his angelic star turn may end tonight (9 ET/PT) as Angel airs its season and possibly its series finale.


To forestall that stake through Angel's heart -- and persuade WB to pick the show up for a fifth season -- producers Joss Whedon and Tim Minear have come up with an episode that takes the series in a new direction. For four years, Angel and his friends have fought against the supernatural law firm Wolfram & Hart. Now, Wolfram's evil powers-that-be are offering to turn the firm and its resources over to Angel.

Full Article Here (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=680&ncid=680&e=6&u=/usatoday/20030507/en_usatoday/5135546)

[Lyle_JP]

Perhaps if the WB hadn't changed their timeslot twice and left them in their very successful Monday night slot the ratings wouldn't have slipped. Truthfully, the ratings have been much stronger on Wednesday than the Sunday ratings were, almost to the previous Monday levels. Now the WBs excuse for possibly canceling the show is not the ratings (which are respectable again), but the show's "lack of growth potential".

Basically, I don't think the WB has forgiven Joss for moving Buffy to UPN. For that matter, I don't think Joss ever really forgave the WB for exiling his Buffy Season 3 finale to late July.

[Mark Holtz]

The decision for WB to pull Earshot and Graduation Day, Part 2 was due to Columbine High School, and then the copycat events. However, Graduation Day was already fed to the Canadian stations, so it aired in Canada.

WB did air Graduation Day as a two-hour movie the week prior to the premiere of the fourth season.

[Lyle_JP]

Yes, I remember. Joss approved of the decision to postpone "Earshot", which was a storyline that dealt with school shootings, and included some rather crass dialog about them from Cordelia. But the postponing of Graduation pt. 2 was something else altogether.

Months had past since the Columbine tradgedy, the WB had already promoted the hell out of the episode, had sent the episode description to all the television guides, and only decided, THE DAY IT WAS TO AIR, to pull it. And they gave no reasonable explanation for pulling it, failing miserably to explain how battling a 30 foot snake-demon had anything to do with bringing back bad memories of Columbine.

Joss was furious at the WB's decision, especially since they made no effort to tell him or 20th Century Fox Television their plans; they just did it. When fans, who had copies of the episode from the Great White North, asked Joss if they should make copies available to others that wanted them, Joss said "Yeah, pirate that puppy." This made the WB furious, and the network president scolded Joss publicly, saying "We paid $1 Million for that episode, and we'll prosecute anyone who pirates it."

Joss never had a good working relationship with the WB after that.