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ENTER THE ANGEL:
"I'm not a sniveling, whinny,
little cry-Buffy!" - Cordelia
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A few of the Buffy writers got to lend a hand in the first season of Angel last year and Jane was willing and eager to support her brother show by penning one of the favorite episodes in Rm w/ a Vu with David Greenwalt. The story idea came from David and the teleplay was written by Jane. "Normally it juplaiays written by but in this sense it was his original idea for the story, he deserved to share credit but the script writing work of it was all done by me." In a story that centered around Cordelia, a slightly different approach had to be considered when writing her as opposed to her days back at Sunnydale High. "That was episode 5 of Angel, Cordelia hadn’t changed as much as she has now. She didn’t have the visions yet, so I wrote her like the old Cordelia but a Cordelia that’s going through a big crisis and has a little bit of self-recognition. Where she talks about, ‘if something good happened to me it would mean I wasn’t a bad person,’ I love that sentiment coming from her. The story allowed her to have a little bit more maturity than we’ve normally seen but I wrote her with the same bluntness and some of the same sentiment entitlement that she’s always had." Jane also observes she didn’t think Cordelia had changed, "so much yet that she was a different person, to me she felt like the same Cordelia. I mean she just continues to get deeper and deeper." By the end of the season though, Cordelia has taken herself to another level completely in respect of the character. "Oh yeah," Jane agrees, but also worries, "I hope anyway that you don’t go ‘oh the writers are making her deeper’ I hope that what people are doing is saying ‘what she’s going through is making her deeper.’ That’s sort of how we feel about it. That the stuff, what we’re trying to do with her is exactly a result of what everything she’s gone through on the show."
The character approach is not the only thing that is different for her on Angel. The overall story approach has changed as well. "The story ‘breaking’ is pretty much the same. I just turned in an Angel script last week for this season. The story breaking is still Joss leading the story breaking but there are different people in the room because Tim Minear was there for the breaking of mine and David Greenwalt is there for the breaking of Angel’s. But the process, the way we approach the story I’d say that is different. The methodology is the same, Joss puts us in a room and we walk through the story and Joss has brilliant ideas. That’s how it always works, but the stories have a different set of requirements to be a good Angel. It has to feel like LA and it has to be about Angel. But it seems to me it’s slightly less metaphorical than the Buffy scripts are. Angel’s crises are sometimes more literal. It’s like, we’ll give him a crisis that will make him think about this aspect of his life but we don’t make the crisis a symbolic representation of that crisis in his life the way we tend to do on Buffy.
"Angel's crisis are sometimes
more literal," explains Jane.
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I think that’s fair, I don’t know. Joss and David Greenwalt have thought a lot more about what the differences are between the two shows and I may be mistaking what they are but to me that’s what it feels like."
We can look forward to seeing that Jane talent in episode 6, unfortunately if may be the only one for our Dark Avenger fans. "Yeah, I’m pretty sure, I mean it’s always possible but they have a full staff with lots of great writers. They have an incredibly strong staff and they really didn’t need me to write this one. They know exactly what they’re doing and I would not be writing an Angel this year except that I happen to come up with this idea they liked and it turned into a story so they let me write it because it was mine." One of those great writers, as Jane mentioned, is Tim Minear and we cornered Jane into saying some awful things about him! "Oh! Tim is wonderful, I love Tim. He is brilliant and funny. He did some work when we were rewriting my Angel. I rewrote big chunks of it and he rewrote big chunks of it and the work that he did on it was so brilliant, just brought the whole script up a level. I am constantly impressed by him." Slightly different than Rm w/ a Vu, this season’s contribution was a bit of a tackle for Jane. "Yes, this was a tough one. I’m not happy what I did with the first draft and I kind of had to fix it up in the second draft.
"Oh, it's exactly
like writing for a
different show,"
she laughs. "It's a
different show!"
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The process of writing the first draft was a little stressful because I wasn’t sure what I was doing but writing the second draft was delightful so I felt like ‘okay, I get it,’ and it’s fun to take a break, it’s fun to play with new characters for a while." Stupid question time, is it almost like writing for a different show? "Oh it’s exactly like writing for a different show. It’s a different show!" Jane laughs through my pain. "Yeah, it doesn’t feel like writing an episode of Law & Order or something. I apply my same instincts about when I feel it’s time for a joke that I would when I’m writing a Buffy. And it has a lot of the same verbal quirks that Buffy does and certainly we know these characters from Buffy but there’s a lot that’s different. And more and more it’s become it’s own show with it’s own feel. So you want to capture the thing that makes it an Angel. You don’t want it to feel like this is a Buffy episode with the Angel characters in it. It’s got to feel like an Angel episode. So yeah, it feels like writing a different show."
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