The Failed Pilot Project Case File #2: Angel

Part of the reason for analyzing the pilots for this project in the order that I did – apart from making sure that I could deal with obvious issues of how one person's approach to pilots changes over time – was that by putting Buffy and Angel back-to-back, it opens the floor to speak about pitch pilots. Pitch pilots, as their name implies, are meant solely to pitch a show to various networks; they serve as a quick snapshot of what the show is about. Not all pilots are pitched to  a wide swath of networks; it’s also very common for a network to work with a writer/producer to develop a series, and go straight into filming a full pilot that will often work as the first episode. These pilots are often known as “put pilots”, those that come attached with a financial penalty to the network of the pilot isn’t picked up, thus almost guaranteeing a pick up. But pitch pilots, without such financial backing, have to temper their expectations. As such, pitch pilots tend to run under ten minutes in length, and they favor tone over story, a characteristic that can get shows into trouble during the early runs if nobody’s careful.

Now, technically the Buffy pilot was a pitch pilot; it was never meant to be seen by a wide audience (something that the internet managed to undermine), it only serves the basic function of explaining what the show could be like, and it’s not considered to be in canon for the show. But beyond the technicality of it all, I don’t consider the Buffy pilot to be a pitch pilot because a) it’s so long, b) it cost a good deal of money to make and c) it actually has a fully realized plot, however simple it may be. The pilot wasn’t a pitch; it was a fully-formed presentation.

The Angel pilot, on the other hand, completely falls under the realm of pitch. Running under six minutes in length, it doesn’t have time to do much, nor does it even try to do so. Created in order to pitch the spin-off to the WB, the pilot starts off with a brief monologue from Angel, highlighted by many scenes cut from his run on Buffy, before moving on to a brief mish-mash of scenes involving Angel, Cordelia, and Doyle interacting with one another. In the last 30 seconds or so, the narration kicks in, and the pilot turns into a promo for the show. It appears that The WB may have took the original pilot and spiced it up just a bit, most likely for the network upfront; if a more original version of the pilot exists, I have yet to find it. Given that the later scenes with Angel and the other characters were recycled into the first episode, it becomes difficult to ascertain what of this pilot is truly original and what was added in later, but it is my belief that Whedon and Co. filmed these random bits and put them in the pilot for example of how all the characters would work.

Perhaps the strangest thing about the Angel pilot is that it exists at all. Back in 1999, Buffy was hot property for the station – the show was their first legitimate hit – and given how many fan girls swooned over David Boreanaz, and how much of an established character he was by the end of Buffy’s third season, it seems a bit ridiculous that Whedon would even have to make such a pitch, but here it is. But, it must be said, that tonally speaking this pilot was important for the show. Whedon and co-creator David Greenwalt had set out to create a much darker show than Buffy, and the way in which Boreanaz delivers his monologue proves that. The way that the character simultaneously makes light of and mourns the death and destruction that he caused in his pre-soul days gets at the heart of the struggle that would play out during the show’s five seasons.

But as for the other notes of darkness that the show would attempt to deliver, signs of such tone are far-less defined here, as most of the dark, gritty aspects that the show would exhibit in its first season were expressed through Buffy clips, stock footage, and, as some YouTube commentators seem to believe, bits lifted straight from the Blade movies. There is no real indication of what kinds of demons Angel will face in the bad streets of LA, or how they might be different from those that turn up in Sunnydale; all we know is that he will be fighting them in order to save himself. It’s this unwillingness/inability to specify in the pilot what kind of cases Angel would take that most likely led to the early disagreements between the show and the network over just how dark episodes would be, a creative struggle that led to the abandonment of the original second episode script. I’m not saying that the network was wrong for pulling that script (it does tend a bit too much towards the melodramatic), or that the show runners were wrong for not having all of this planned out. These are the kinks that get worked out in the writing process, but I think Angel would have had a few less kinks if they had been required to make a proper pilot.

But even if some of the show’s darker aspects had yet to be defined, the pilot should still be applauded for finding a new way forward for the main character via the opening monologue. Though Angel was a known entity due to his three-season stint over on Buffy, there the role was mostly defined through his relationship with Buffy. All of his moral standings and character traits were shown based on what he would or would not do for Buffy, and by extension, her friends. There was very little talk about Angel’s attempts at redemption, and even though such thought does in character for him, it wouldn’t be until he went out on his own that we would begin to see that aspect of his personality. How does he react to strangers who need his help? How much grace and goodwill can he extend to those that he doesn’t know? Will his demonic side hold him back? All of those questions get started here, with a two and a half minute speech that does a lot to reorient the character’s path in life.  

The same unfortunately could not be said for the character of Cordelia. Though originally purposefully shallow in creation, a foil to Buffy, Cordelia would slowly begin to take steps toward a more meaningful life during the same three-season run on Buffy. But it was only once the character was transplanted to Angel that she was able to grow into a fully realized character, a feminist character in her own right, just as important in many ways as Buffy Summers. Yet such potential for growth is not present here, as she is stuck with one line about how Angel should make some money off of the people he helps. Now I understand that there most likely wasn’t time to film any sort of real scene between Angel and Cordelia, what with the limited run time and the fact that both actors were shooting this pitch during the midst of Buffy’s third season, nor am I necessarily suggesting that such a scene even needed to exist at this point. But if I was a network executive who cared about the creative standing of the shows my network might be airing, I would probably want to know just what this already-established, ancillary character would bring to this specific new show, and none of that exists in the pilot. Cordelia would become an extremely important character, both to the show and Angel himself during her four-season run, and it’s a bit jarring to see her here in such a useless, non-character specific role.

Then there’s Doyle, who comes out of the least formed of all the characters, even as he has more lines than Cordelia, and that’s to be expected given that he’s the only new character out of the three. Now, on the show proper Doyle was a demon imbued with psychic visions by the Powers The Be, a gift that he uses to help Angel help others in order to gain his redemption. He has a logical, specific purpose on the show, and even in the original first episode draft there were plans to have a similar character (Whistler, from the second season Buffy finale “Becoming”), so it seems as if Whedon and Greenwalt probably knew what the character of Doyle was going to be when they pitched this show. But within the pilot itself there is no indication of this; hell, Doyle actually comes across as another human, just some random guy who’s bugging Angel for no particular reason. Much like Cordelia, his presence (or lack thereof) in the pilot in troubling, and again returning to my hypothetical network executive scenario, I would have grilled Whedon in the meeting as to Doyle’s role/purpose.

All of the pilot’s drawbacks, it must be stated again, come from the shortened running time; a lot of things are missing because there wasn’t time to include them. I understand and respect that, especially considering how much of the tone this pilot captures in less than six minutes. But, as was made evident above with the discussion of the aborted second episode, the lack of material here seems to have left the show at a bit of a loss in the early days as to the direction it’s heading in, as if Whedon and Greenwalt were only certain of the idea of the show, and not the execution. And though the season-to-season retooling that the show went under each year in order to stay on the air was mostly a question of trying to win a bigger audience share, it seems as if the show’s continuous ability to do so stems from the fact that the original pitch was so open-ended. We could praise the show taking so many creative leaps and pulling a good deal of them off, sure, but I think it’s more important to walk away from this discussion understanding how the malleability of a pilot can lead a show to places nobody ever thought it could go, something that in the television industry can be both a boon and a bane at a the same time.

Next Week: A comparative look at the Firefly pilot “Serenity” and the second episode, “The Train Job.”