Every year it seemed like there were things I liked juxtaposed against things I really didn't.
I'd say those are my thoughts as well, it seemed like they had some really amazing emotional stakes and incredible episodes planned out for seasons 2-4 with the big arc stuff, but every season was also very inconsistent when it came to handling the filler episodes in between. I can't say that any season was an unproblematic fav for me in the say that some of my fav seasons of Buffy are, just because I can always find so much to nitpick each year. As I said above, I think that it would have really benefited from shorter seasons, just because there were certain points in every season where they didn't seem to know what to do to fill up the space. Except maybe season 4, ironically the most unpopular season, but there wasn't a run of irrelevant stuff there in the same way as they seemed very sure of where they were taking the story that year and kept building on that
And yeah I don't know about Fred, some people really loved her of course, but it always seemed like just as many people found her annoying and Mary-Sue'ish? Maybe her tragic death caused people to look back more favourably on her I guess, but she was never an obvious fan fav the way that characters like Spike and Willow were on Buffy I wouldn't have thought. If anything I thought that Cordelia was the more popular female lead, but maybe I'm not very in tune with the Ats fandom
And hmm I do remember at the time that some Angel fans didn't love season 5, and maybe my flist is a biased sample lol as there are a lot of Spike fans voting, but it worked for me. It definitely got a bit corporate that year in comparison to how Angel usually did things, but I thought they made good use of that tonal shift, emphasising how off-balance even the characters themselves were with their new arrangement. I can see what you're saying though, you can definitely read Joss's feelings on compromising himself in his dealings with the higher-ups into it, and that's arguably not very relevant to what they originally interestested in exploring with Angel. It does feel like the most Joss season of all the seasons on Ats, I remember David Fury commenting that he and Jeffrey Bell had originally planned the season out differently, but then Joss came in and rewrote it all. Still ultimately they created an interesting season out of it IMHO, and they did get back to the original mission statement of the show in the end when Angel rejects the power offered and goes back to being the hero working against ~the man~
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I'd say those are my thoughts as well, it seemed like they had some really amazing emotional stakes and incredible episodes planned out for seasons 2-4 with the big arc stuff, but every season was also very inconsistent when it came to handling the filler episodes in between. I can't say that any season was an unproblematic fav for me in the say that some of my fav seasons of Buffy are, just because I can always find so much to nitpick each year. As I said above, I think that it would have really benefited from shorter seasons, just because there were certain points in every season where they didn't seem to know what to do to fill up the space. Except maybe season 4, ironically the most unpopular season, but there wasn't a run of irrelevant stuff there in the same way as they seemed very sure of where they were taking the story that year and kept building on that
And yeah I don't know about Fred, some people really loved her of course, but it always seemed like just as many people found her annoying and Mary-Sue'ish? Maybe her tragic death caused people to look back more favourably on her I guess, but she was never an obvious fan fav the way that characters like Spike and Willow were on Buffy I wouldn't have thought. If anything I thought that Cordelia was the more popular female lead, but maybe I'm not very in tune with the Ats fandom
And hmm I do remember at the time that some Angel fans didn't love season 5, and maybe my flist is a biased sample lol as there are a lot of Spike fans voting, but it worked for me. It definitely got a bit corporate that year in comparison to how Angel usually did things, but I thought they made good use of that tonal shift, emphasising how off-balance even the characters themselves were with their new arrangement. I can see what you're saying though, you can definitely read Joss's feelings on compromising himself in his dealings with the higher-ups into it, and that's arguably not very relevant to what they originally interestested in exploring with Angel. It does feel like the most Joss season of all the seasons on Ats, I remember David Fury commenting that he and Jeffrey Bell had originally planned the season out differently, but then Joss came in and rewrote it all. Still ultimately they created an interesting season out of it IMHO, and they did get back to the original mission statement of the show in the end when Angel rejects the power offered and goes back to being the hero working against ~the man~