What I said 15 years ago:
In Season One, the only necessary episodes are “Welcome to the Hellmouth/The Harvest,” “Angel,” and “Prophecy Girl.” Season Two can be done by watching “School Hard,” “Halloween,” “What’s My Line” Parts One and Two," “Surprise,” “Innocence,” “Passion,” and “Becoming, Parts One and Two.” There are only one or two filler episodes in Season Three.
I bailed for a while when one of the plotlines was
an underground bunker, mad scientist, and random hunky blond guy
and then watched a few seasons after that, but never finished.
Good idea about starting Angel when he leaves Buffy. It looks like we have 14 episodes of Buffy, then go to both Buffy and Angel.
Lucky both of those series aired before the time people would have had a great battle over calling them Bangel vs. Anguffy.
You must not have been online at the time. I was. Oh, yes they were. 
I loved Angel on Buffy, but the Angel spin-off wasn’t quite as good, from what I remember. I still liked it quite a lot, but I think Angel’s character was hotter when you knew less about him.
And I’ll not lie about hotness being a partial motivation for watching these shows.
I think season 5 of Angel might be the best overall season of both shows.
I remember very little. I’m tempted to rewatch both of these, now.
The Shipper Wars were perilous times. At least we all agreed that Kennedy needed to be fed to a Skench demon.
I was reading the Buffy area on Usenet at the time and downloading UUencoded episodes from Usenet as they came out over an analog modem, taking around 10 hours to download each episode. But I don’t remember the convention of indicating relationships by creating a new name based on the first part of one person’s name and the last part of the other person’s name being a thing at the time.
I woulda said that after my first couple of watches, but after the last time around, I felt I preferred Angel overall. Don’t get me wrong - both are excellent TV. And both have numerous flaws anyone could point out. Perhaps Angel was on the ascendency when IMO Buffy was declining. (If you are asking which to skip, I could almost say the entire las season of Buffy. Just my personal taste.)
And I agree w/ Mahaloth, S5 of Angel is at least as good as any single season of Buffy.
The worst part of Angel on Buffy is the sullen pouty face and the “kept like a feral animal” plot arc. He works so much better on his own show.
I came a little late to Buffy fandom. I got into it in early 2002, and by that time there were websites that aggregated the UUencoded usenet posts for you, and I binge-watched the series that way, getting each episode down in a couple hours via DSL. I didn’t read the Buffy forums on usenet, but I was finding fanfic sites and they were making portmanteaus of every possible 'ship.
By the end of the 6th season, (spring 2002) I was able to get the episodes downloaded and assembled just in time to start watching them about 15 minutes before the episode aired in my area, thanks to fans who had snagged the UPN affiliate downlink via C-band satellites.
Yeah, I was just remembering that as I started reading your post. Back then the episodes hit usenet a day before they aired thanks to people that still had those 10 foot dishes in their yards.
I got started right around the time they switched the satellite uplink to same day of the first scheduled affiliate broadcasts, rather than a full day before. It took those dish-owning fans that same amount of time to get things uploaded and the site I was using (EasyNews, IIRC) to cache the rar and par pieces for me. So yeah I was getting them barely in time to watch them before everybody else. Except that one time they uplinked the episode “Seeing Red” (the one where Tara died) a full week early by accident. I was a big hit at my local sci-fi club meeting when I showed up with a VCD (remember those? Some DVD players could play them) a few days before it was scheduled to air.
I met my late wife on a Buffy board. I was a Spuffy, she was a Spangel.
Mixed marriages are hard, y’all!
Did you have Wanders and Dandrews and Gaggys?
What’s a Spangel? Spike and Angel?
Yep.
Spike: “Me and Angel were never intimate. Except that one time….”
Angel was much better off with Nina.
Maybe even with new and improved(and quietly aged up) Cordelia.
I point out she must be aged up because at the end of season 1, they are all drinking Steel Reserve beer(?) and she would be 18 maximum.
This and Cordelia began acting more like the age of the actress.