Can I choose option D, “all of the above”?
I can say I like Angel a bit less than both Buffy and Firefly. I can’t choose between the two, though.
BtVS was my favorite show, but I think Angel’s show overall quality held up just a tiny bit better over 5 seasons than Buffy’s did over 7. I loved Firefly but I can’t compare it to the other two because the lunkheads at Fox only aired it for half a season. So my rankings would be
- Angel
1a Buffy
Firefly - not enough at bats to qualify
Angel, by a country mile. It just always struck me as more mature than Buffy, and certainly more dark. ANd Firefly? Not even on the chart. I’m sorry y’all, but the show got cancelled for a good reason: it sucked. 
I’ve seen little of buffy, but was never able to get into it. Never watched Angel.
But I love Firefly.
Firefly, only because it didn’t have enough time for Joss to grow bored with it. Many episodes of Buffy and Angel were brilliant, but I didn’t much like the last season of either show (the first half of Angel season 5 was especially bad, in my opinion); and it’s these last episodes that give me a bad taste in my mouth. Firefly was cut down in its youth, and I remember it as Young Elvis, not Fat Elvis.
Daniel
I’ve always had mixed feelings about Joss Whedon’s work. I saw the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, back when nobody cared who this Joss dude was, and liked it as a silly movie about a silly girl. When I heard they were making it into a TV show, I thought, “Goddamn that sounds like the cheesiest crap ever.” Then Angel spun off from it, and the commercials were all like, “Buffy’s vampire boyfriend moves to LA. What will become of them? Find out on Angel on the WB.” There are not enough :rolleyes: to describe my reaction to this garbage.
And then one day, while at a friend’s house waiting for everyone to show up so we could pop in the Red Dwarf tapes, an episode of Buffy was on the tube. It was the one where Buffy and Spike were acting like a happy engaged couple, Giles was blind, and various other strange things were happening. After some other people gave an outline of what these characters were normally like, I began to see the goodness shine through, unfamiliar though I was with the show. Then I began renting the season 1 DVDs and realized, “Holy crap this is really good!” Although I tried to get into Angel, it didn’t really do it for me.
Then I heard Joss was off doing some project called Firefly, while Buffy began to suffer from his absence. The stuff I heard about Firefly sounded lame, and Buffy was really going off the rails, so I was annoyed that he was taking on too many projects at once. I never actually saw Firefly until earlier this year, after reading some threads about its alleged awesomeness.
Well, there’s nothing "alleged"about it. Firefly is without a doubt the finest science fiction ever done in a visual format. As a longtime Star Trek: TNG fan and reader of hard SF, this is not something I say lightly. If it had been allowed to continue, it could have been truly stellar - that is, if Joss didn’t get bored halfway through and start working on something else.
So now, after all my rambling, here is my ranking:
- Firefly
- Buffy, following closely
- Angel, more distantly
I’ve not yet seen Firefly but I’ve been told I have to before I go see Serenity.
I prefer Buffy to Angel, but that’s only because I’ve seen all the **Buffy ** episodes several times each - and I was not at all happy with the cencellation of **Angel ** because it forced **JW ** to hurry thru the storylines in order to reach a stopping point
My favorit **Buffy ** episode is without a doubt Once More With Feeling
I’m really looking forward to that one. Everyone I know loves it. I just finished season 5 the other night (I’m watching all of them for the first time, in order), so I know I should be coming up to it pretty soon.
it’s S6e5 (i think) also the next episode Tabula Rasa has some fun moments
Buffy/Angel/Firefly.
Firefly might have moved up the rankings had it been given more time to grow. I think its first seventeen episodes were probably consistently a little better than the equivalent eps of Buffy and Angel. The latter two shows were given the opportunity to develop that Firefly was denied. My experience may have been colored by those nasty Blake’s 7 flashbacks I kept getting, too.
Buffy beats out Angel for a number of reasons, despite being a less consistent show. There are more clunkers in BtVS, but also more outright gems.
I prefer BtVS’s darker tone. For me, darkness requires a level of emotional turmoil and difficult decisions that AtS doesn’t plumb as effectively as BtVS. There are an awful lot of parallel or nearly parallel situations on the two shows, and AtS almost always manages to soften the blow a little more than BtVS does. I don’t want to head into spoiler territory, so won’t say more than that.
BtVS was also much more likely to supply multiple layers of meaning to the events on screen. AtS was always a more straightforward action/adventure show, which isn’t at all a bad thing but to me it’s a less interesting thing than watching the metaphors unfold on BtVS. The metaphors didn’t always work, but I always appreciated the attempt.
And, there’s the gender relations issue. There’s been much discussion about the bad fathers on BtVS, but I chalk a lot of that up to the necessity of having neglectful parents of both genders for plot reasons. Attentive, two-parent households would have caught on to their children’s nocturnal activities and put a stop to them - and frankly, aside from Joyce, the mothers on that show were no better than the fathers. But overall, there were plenty of positive, heroic male characters on the female-dominated BtVS who had unique character arcs. A female character on male-dominated AtS had one of two choices:
“Evil” women:
… always committed a major act of betrayal
“Good” women:
died in childbirth or a childbirth metaphor
If you were Darla, you got to do both!