No, you’re not. Season 4 of Angel was my favorite season of any television show. Since that season followed S3, another outstanding season, and was followed by the mostly terrific S5, it gives Angel the nod for my favorite series.
It is, however, followed closely by Firefly. Had there been another season or two, then likly would have edged out the others to take the lead. The characters of Firefly are the best and I think given time they would have taken television to new heights of drama and humor.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Buffy, from beginning to end. Even the final season has some highlights, like Him and Converstations with Dead People. And Once More With Feeling is as much an event as a television show. Buffy, by virtue of having seven seasons, has more individual episodes that can be called memorable; but on the whole I just like the other two better.
To sum up: Angel
Firefly
Buffy
But any one of the three is better than 95% of anything else on television.
Buffy was about teens becoming adults. I feel that the real emphasis was on the “becoming”. People grew. People changed. People died. In some ways I believe that nobody is an adult. Instead, we are all always and every all in the process of becoming adults. The process only ends, if we’re doing it right, with death. None of the other series gave us the whole palatte of that process of becoming.
Angel was already an adult. The only changes we saw with him were the Angel/Angelus dichotomy, which frankly got old after a while. He never really changed. Who he was set, and due to the nature of episodic TV, we would never see him reach his goal of atonement no matter how many demons and vamps he killed. His supporting characters grew; Fred, Cordy and Wesley, but he couldn’t. I liked a lot of the episodes but I never really got the feeling that the series had any real direction. They tried a lot of different things like selling out to Wolfram & Hart and the whole Connor arc but it always felt like the show floundered looking for a direction that it never really found.
Firefly had an immense amount of potential. I liked most of what I saw but there just wasn’t enough of it for me to give it the nod over the other 2 series. I don’t have cable so all I saw was the Fox episodes. Maybe if I saw the ones on Sci-Fi I’d rate it higher. We were just learning who these people were when the show was cancelled. Another problem I had with the show is that there was no overlying theme that gave the show any direction. In some ways, for me, it wasn’t a whole lot different than Roddenbury’s original concept for Star Trek- Wagon Train in space.
I have to go with Angel. It think it’s the least consistent of the three, with the colossal Season 4 speedbump… and it doesn’t have my favorite characters (Xander, Wash) - but. I think Angel as a protagonist was more likeable and mature than Buffy, and his brooding was an endless source of riffing. None of the Angel extended cast ever got annoying like Tara or Dawn, for me, either. Not even Connor.
And Angel Season Five is the best TV I’ve ever seen.
I think taken as a whole, Buffy is my favorite, then Firefly, then Angel. Firefly just didn’t have enough history to compete with Buffy, where the growth of the characters and the way situations built on the past was part of the charm.
I really liked Firefly the best, and think it’s a real shame that he didn’t get the seasons out of it that he did on the other two. I also like Angel, but don’t really care for Buffy.
My wife is a big fan of Angel, followed by Buffy. I have yet to get her interested in Firefly.
All three are terrific shows, but I would say I am more of a Buffy fan than the other two. Partly, this is for sentimental reasons… I saw Buffy first, so I consider Angel to be an extension of it, and Firefly is just too short.
More than that, while I think that Buffy certainly has the most subpar episodes, it also has the most absolutely fantastic episodes. I like my four favorite Buffy episodes (The Body, Hush, Once More With Feeling and The Gift, predictably enough) a good margin more than any single Firely or Angel episode.
Firefly, without a doubt. It’s kind of an unfair comparison, because there were so few episodes, but it was much more consistant, both in terms of quality and theme/tone, than the other two shows. Angel is a distant second, mostly due to the strength of the last two seasons, and Buffy a close third, mostly due to the weaknesses of the last two or three seasons.
I loved it for reasons too numerous to mention. It was bloody brilliant.
I hated it because at the end of every episode, I found myself muttering, “Crap! It’s over already! And I have to wait at least a week till the next one? Damn you Whedon!”
I cannot choose. Buffy started when I was a sophmore in high school, so I pretty much grew up with those characters. (Also, Giles has a lot to do with my current pursuit of a Library Science degree.) But, Buffy 's quality fell off quite a bit in the last couple of seasons. Indeed, I ended up greatly disliking many of the characters that I had once identified with (Xander and Buffy in particular).
Angel never held my attention quite as well, though Wesley is probably my favorite character overall. I like the grittier tone, especially in the last couple of seasons. The series finale was amazing (and cruel, in that patented Whedon way).
And Firefly… I love it. Intensely. But there isn’t even a full season. It’s just this mass of unfulfilled potential and interesting, morally ambiguous characters. And shootings.
No, I cannot rank them. Suffice it to say that Joss owns my soul and have done with it.
