While year five was flourishing creatively despite the numerous obstacles placed before it, the WB nonetheless chose to cancel the series at the end of the season. There were a couple of factors that precipitated that decision, one being that Joss Whedon insisted on an answer about renewal earlier than usual so that he could craft a proper ending if necessary. And that fed into the fact that the network was developing a primetime reboot of the gothic-horror soap opera from the 1960s, Dark Shadows, which they would have, unlike the situation with Angel, owned a piece of. Additionally, did they really want two vampire-centric shows on the network at the same time? They delivered their answer with an early cancellation, a decision that bit them in the corporate jugular when Dark Shadows turned out to be a disaster and failed to go to series.
DAVID FURY
My memory is that Joss didn’t want to be played with the way he was in season five of Buffy, so he wanted an early answer about season five of Angel. He said, “Tell us we’re picked up. We deserve it. The show is doing better than ever: the ratings are up; the critics are praising the show.” And they went, “All right,” and then quickly came back that it was canceled. Which I believe they regretted almost immediately. And certainly since then I’ve heard a lot of things that they realized it was a bad mistake, but it’s kind of like you can’t let a creator, actor, or star dictate when they decide to pick up a show. So I don’t know if they were making an example or what, but they kind of shot themselves in the foot by not picking Angel up.
IAN WOOLF
(first assistant director, Angel)
I don’t think anyone was anxious to get out of there. It was actually a surprise to us when they canceled the show, because on the one hand they have this hundredth-episode celebration, with all of these speeches from the executives at the WB and Fox, how great we were, blah, blah, blah. Then, like a month later, we were told the show was being canceled. I was, like, “What? Wait a second. What happened between the hundredth episode last month and now?” At the point we were told that we weren’t going to come back for a sixth season; it was in January. We typically wrapped in March, so the last three months it was kind of a little bit sad. People were starting to jump ship to get on other shows, because it’s all about paying your mortgage.
JAMES MARSTERS
We were not expecting to get canceled. When I came on the show, a lot of Buffy watchers who may not have been watching Angel came over to the show. And so our numbers were really good on that final season. We were really sure that we were gonna have a long run, but the network had a pilot in the works from the creator of E.R. [Dark Shadows], which was the medical show that launched George Clooney. They decided to run with that and cancel us, and I don’t think the pilot turned out as well as they had hoped. They were looking for another Angel for many years and ended up regretting the fact that they didn’t run with it.
JEFFREY BELL
Most of our people dealt with pain through humor. So there were a lot of horrible jokes, there were some tears, and there was also the feeling of, “What are you going to do?” The writing had been on the wall, and we escaped it for a couple of years, but at that point it finally caught up with us. So the reaction was all over the place. There was loss. When I first heard the news from Joss, I thought, “Oh, that’s too bad.” Then, when we went over to tell the crew, I found myself profoundly sad. It really didn’t hit until we were over there on the set. That day, a Friday, was a bust. We came in on Monday to work and there was a really strange sense of humor in the office, because we were all still reeling.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
Thankfully we knew early enough from the network that we weren’t being renewed that we could plan how to wrap it up, which was vital instead of it just ending and never coming back.
KELLY A. MANNERS
We knew it was the beginning of the end, so we tried to enjoy it. Deep down in our hearts we knew there would be no season six. We all just went in with the best attitude we could and had as much fun as possible producing it, and that came out with what we put on the screen.
CHRISTIAN KANE
We were filming a scene where I was down in the basement, in the dungeon, getting my heart cut out every day by a demon. It was me, David, James Marsters, and Kelly Manners. Joss came in with Kelly and broke the news that we had been canceled. David took it very well and went to his trailer. David knew he was always going to have a career, because he was a good actor. He took it very well, and I walked Joss out. Right when we got to the stage door, I said, “Are you all right?” And Joss said, “Yes.” I said, “What are you going to do?” And he replied, “I’m going to fucking kill you.” And I was all right with it. I was fine with it at that point, because I knew it was over. I had, arguably, the worst death in the world, because I felt like I should have been there for the final fight. I felt like after all these years, Lindsey deserved to be there. Angel had a trust in him and he even said, “You’re good in a fight.” Interesting story: we filmed my death scene—where Lorne shoots me—two and a half months before the finale, even though it was in that episode. We filmed it at 6 A.M. on a blocked stage with six people. Joss did not want people to know. We filmed it and it took an hour and a half to film. By noon the next day, people knew I died. Somebody had leaked it.
Back then, it was very upsetting to me that A, I had to die. B, I was killed by a flunky. I hated it. Now, after all these years, I understood what Joss was doing. I was never upset about the fact of what he was doing, because in the middle of the show, when you think I’m going to be there at the end, I died. It was a great, great moment and it was shock value. I was upset about it until about five years ago with the passing of my dear friend, Andy Hallett. I thought, “There’s no better way that I could’ve gone out.” I was killed by my best friend. Andy didn’t want to do it—he was very scared of guns—and he didn’t like the fact that he was the one.
AMY ACKER
I would say the positive feeling stayed until the end of the series. From being on Buffy and then going on to Angel, David might have been ready to play a different character. But not in any sense that we weren’t all crushed when it was canceled. In the last episode where I transform from the Fred form to Illyria and punch the demon through his face, that was the last day of shooting. I was just, like, crying a river everywhere. Joss wrote that scene even though I don’t think he wrote that whole episode. He didn’t direct that whole episode, but he came in to watch that scene be filmed.
JEFFREY BELL
The great thing about David is he really has the attitude of one door opens as another one closes. Joss said he took the news the same way he took the news when they said, “Oh, we’re going to create a show around you.” He was, like, “Oh, cool.”
DAVID BOREANAZ
I always prescribe to the idea that when every season is over, I consider the series over until it gets reordered and then I move on from there. So when I learned about the show not being picked up from Joss, I didn’t really have much of a reaction. For me, you take the show for as long as you can, you learn from it, you work on a character for X number of years and you build with it and you take it as part of your résumé. For me, it was almost like a relief of pressure, so to speak. To have those words come in, it really took a lot of weight off of my shoulders. It wasn’t like I was rejoicing, but at the same time it felt right.
IAN WOOLF
As the seasons go by—and this is typical—the cast gets more restless. In the first couple of seasons they’re all happy to be there, but as the seasons go by, none of the actors want to be there. They don’t want to come to work. They want to get their big salaries and they don’t want to show up. That’s typically what happens; they just get tired of it. Then when it’s all over and said and done, it’s like they don’t realize how good they had it. Because being on a long-running TV show is like winning a lottery, especially for the cast. For the crew, there’s so many more jobs out there for them. But for the cast, it’s a finite amount of jobs
for those people, especially the series regulars.
I remember Kelly Manners telling me about a year after Angel, after he was done, he was walking through the halls of Fox to go to an interview for another show, and who does he see sitting on a folding chair with some sides, waiting to go onto an audition? Alexis Denisof. He looked up at Kelly and he said, “You know, you were right. I didn’t realize how good we had it.” Because Alexis was one of the ones that complained. He really wanted out. Now he’s sitting there in a folding chair, waiting to audition for a job. He didn’t work for a long time. It’s like there’s nothing you can say to these guys, because the actors typically surround themselves with their PR people, their agents, their managers. Their egos get built up and up so they think that this is never going to end. And it does.
DAVID BOREANAZ
I actually felt stronger about leaving toward the end of season four, but when they kind of revamped the show in year five, it was a good enough thing to have happened just for the story structure and the people and the fans. Season five ended up being a thoroughly enjoyable year for me. Probably the best year of all the years since the first one. It just turned out better than I expected in terms of the characters and the story lines.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
At the same time, the Angel cast knew it was the golden time. That’s not to say that on occasion people don’t get pissy, because everybody’s human. You have a bad day; you’re there for fourteen hours—it’s going to happen. But we had such a fantastic cast and crew. Kelly Manners, our physical producer, kept everything moving and figur[ed] out a way to pay for the crazy stuff we came up with. Ross Barryman, our DP—without him the show would not have been the same. I mean, it’s not just that he designed the lighting; he helped the director design their shots and helped them come up with better ideas of how to shoot something. I would not have been able to direct the three episodes that I did without Ross by my side. It was such a huge load off to have these people where it was not about egos, it was not about what they want, but it was about what’s best for the show. It makes all the difference in the world.
DAVID BOREANAZ
In this business, things happen so quickly and so fast that I’ve always focused on getting the first episode done, then the following episode and not be so concerned about story lines and where the character is heading. I really kind of keep that unpredictable for myself, because you never know what’s going to happen. Walking around thinking it’s never going to end or that you’re invincible—that’s one of the traps of Hollywood, [so] that you have to really be cautious and aware of who you are as a person. And you have to remain strong in that foundation, which is something that I got from my parents growing up. They gave me that and it’s helped considerably to get through it all.
JOSS WHEDON
We had such a hard time getting the fifth season at all that I came into it figuring that it might be our last. What I came up with at the very beginning of the year was a season ender that would have closure for the entire show as well, but also opened up a lot of interesting avenues should we get a sixth season. I then became convinced that we would continue, because things were going so well. So while it was a horrible blow to find out that we were being canceled, I didn’t have to change what we were doing and could proceed straight ahead. What we planned to go out on was very much a statement that applies to what the show has been about since day one.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
When we knew it was ending, the story became serialized again and it became much more about destroying-the-Illuminati kind of deal and taking out the enemies. A Godfather-esque bit that we had to plan for and have be a little more extended. But that was the interesting thing: nothing really changed when we found out we had gotten canceled. It still ended the same way. Joss devised an ending that would work as a series ender or a season ender. One thing that was different was that we had squirreled away enough money to try and make it slightly bigger. Besides that, it ended exactly the same.
I looked at the Internet response when we were canceled, and by then episodes sixteen or seventeen aired and a lot of people were saying, “They obviously made that last-minute change, because they were canceled,” which of course is not true. By the time we found out we were canceled, episode seventeen, where Illyria appears, was already being edited. It had already been shot. One thing the fans often don’t realize is the lapse between when they see an episode and we actually do an episode is a month. We usually had three or four weeks of postproduction and there would be two weeks of filming and a couple of weeks to write the script. Another hard thing about TV is that you can’t adjust to the fans on a turn of a dime. If they express dislike of a characters, chances are they’re going to see that character for four or five more episodes because they’re already shot.
DAVID FURY
The finale is very much how we discussed it would be before we got word of our cancellation. The body count would probably have been different since we were going to explore the Illyria-Wesley relationship in season six, but, otherwise, launching into what looks like a no-win battle was exactly where Joss had wanted the season to end up.
BEN EDLUND
The apocalypse was exactly where Wolfram and Hart wanted things to end up. Had Angel and the other characters not taken on the firm, they would have kept doing their battles against evil and coming out on top, but they got manipulated into taking on this thing, which triggered the apocalypse they wanted in the first place. You would say basically that Wolfram and Hart did not want the status quo. Angel and our plucky champions were protecting the status quo, which was a nonapocalypse universe. Wolfram and Hart decided the best way to actually get it to work the way they wanted, was to just lay down and let the good intentions people pave the road right over you, straight to hell.
KELLY A. MANNERS
When you know a show is ending, morale definitely gets affected. You don’t have the excitement you had every other season, because normally you’re working to make sure you get the next season. When you’re on a sinking ship and the band’s still playing but you know it’s sinking, you’re not dancing.
BEN EDLUND
It was sad, but not tragic, is what I remember. But I had only done a year and a half at Mutant Enemy where others had done seven. So I had sort of blown in and had a really amazing time there and worked on one of the best sci-fi shows ever in Firefly. Then flipped over to something that was like an extraordinary toy box. That’s what Angel was, the toys were all out and no one said, “Put those toys away!” They said, “No, put them on screen, let’s go!” That was beautiful, and it was really wonderful people. And the way of working, although it was very demanding in terms of one’s time, it was really fulfilling. I was in the right place to move on. It also felt like once that lock on all those talent jobs that had been drawn together broke, there was a kind of feeding frenzy in the air. It made it feel not that bad, because you got this feeling that people were getting a crack at all these amazing writers and producers that had been locked away in this one area. It was time, in a way, to open up the door and let these remarkable television craftspeople and artists out in to the mainstream.
AMY ACKER
It just didn’t feel like it was supposed to be ending. I mean, Joss had already said he had an idea for season six, and it seemed like we still had good ratings and a great fan base and all of that. So it just felt a little bit wrong. Like, “We’ll be back next year, won’t we?” [laughs]. There was a fan movement to keep it going; billboards going around saying, “Save Angel.” You know, they were motivated to try and keep the show on the air. You kind of had a little bit of hope that that might have happened.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
I know the fans really threw their backs into getting the show picked up for a sixth season, but at the time it was definitely over at the WB, and UPN definitely passed, which was not surprising. I mean, ultimately it’s kind of a numbers game. The WB really didn’t make any money off the show and UPN
just simply couldn’t afford it. They really took a bath on Buffy, and they reason they took a bath on Buffy is that they couldn’t come up with any product to launch off of it. They had a great lead in, but they couldn’t get the material to be their next hit, and Enterprise wasn’t really helping them either. So the feeling on Angel was that it was over, and it was very bittersweet. On the one hand, we would have loved for it to come back and for us to do another season; on the other hand, we also felt like we were finishing strong. And it’s always nice to finish a show on the upswing and not when it’s limping off into the sunset.
JOSS WHEDON
While this is a good note for the end of this particular movement, I didn’t feel this particular symphony was over. Originally, I wanted to go out after five seasons of Buffy, because I was tired. It wasn’t that I didn’t think there were more stories to tell. And I’m glad I got to do those last two seasons. With Angel, the burnout level was not as high. I didn’t have to run it day to day. I had great partners on the show, and it wasn’t a drain on me. And it redefined itself so much so many times that it remained very fresh. The show had done extraordinary stuff from the very first season.
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
In the final year, we were able to do so many cool things and so many things that you just don’t see on TV. The puppet episode is a great example. You know, one week we get a puppet episode, [and] the previous week you were at the bottom of the sea in a World War II sub, because the show was constructed in such a way that you could do anything. And Joss really would go to those places—to dark, scary places. He’d go for the lighthearted puppet places as well.
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