The Spin-Off Begins

Hi, friends. Hi, east coast. Thanks for joining me here on the new blog. Please make yourselves comfortable. Salted almond? Ginger ale? Coat room's down the hall.

I've started the new blog for a few reasons:

-I lost the keys to Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Checked under the mat and everything. Embarrassing. Luckily, you can still go there to read "The New Adventures of Horatio" and all my other old posts.
-I'm moving to Los Angeles at the end of the month in hopes of infiltrating the TV industry. Now you can follow along at home as I navigate LA and write about the city, screenwriting, television and pop culture!

I'm going to live nowhere near these exciting buildings.

The new blog's title comes from my man Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, who embodies much of what I love about television. Wes (played by Alexis Denisof, who you can still catch as a Cosmic Foreshadowing Demon in The Avengers), started out as a deliberately irritating minor character on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He was Buffy's replacement Watcher, which is to say his job was ostensibly to offer training and guidance while Buffy, the titular character and the once-in-a-generation chosen one, did her titular vampire slaying.

Shut up, Wesley.

The problem with this was that Buffy's original Watcher (Giles, played by Anthony Stewart Head) was still hanging around and had already been established as a beloved character and father figure over two and a half seasons. Basically, Wesley's whole purpose on the show was to NOT HAVE A PURPOSE, or at least to show us how annoying a simpering, self-important, by-the-book young Watcher was when compared to Giles, who wasn't afraid to break the rules or wail on demons with a flaming baseball bat.

He also played a mean "Freebird", ladies!

This state of affairs transmogrified from annoying to great when another supporting character, Angel, Buffy's 200-year-old, emotionally underdeveloped and occasionally evil vampire boyfriend, broke up with Buffy and left to establish his own eponymous spin-off series. Having weathered some long term relationships, I can assure you that this is exactly how those typically end.

Angel's spin-off, Angel, takes place in Los Angeles and follows Angel's adventures as a vampire detective. If this already sounds fantastic to you, you are correct, and that's before we even get to the show's weirdly effective takes on adult themes like apartment hunting (only it's haaaaaaunted apartment hunting!) and singles bars (only there's a spooning demon on the prowl!).

But. Midway through season one, guess who shows up:

I'll have that supporting role now, you pasty ponce.

After failing to Watch not one but two vampire slayers, Wes has been fired by the British people who apparently call the shots on all things pertaining to slayerdom, and has spent most of the past year riding around on a motorcycle, wearing a leather jacket, and describing himself as a "rogue demon hunter", which in this instance is a euphemism for "unemployed". And, I shit you not, he shows up on Angel's doorstep, has an adventure with him and the rest of the cast, and then refuses to leave until they give him a job. This is identical to my plan for finding work in LA, so I feel an emotional bond with the man already.

Resume? Do you not see the crossbow? EMPLOY ME.

This all actually works in TV terms, though, for two reasons:
-Unlike the cast of Buffy, which was already overcrowded when Wesley arrived midway through season three, the cast of Angel is still pretty small at this early moment in the life of the series. If Wesley was deliberately designed to be a third wheel on Buffy, he's now well-placed as a scholarly, comic foil to Angel's brooding man of action.
-More importantly, Wes is already changing as a character. Sure, the changes are largely cosmetic; despite the biker gear and the crossbow, he's still goofy, self-important, and clumsy enough with weapons to get his hand axe privileges revoked within the office. But he's also started growing up. He's no longer afraid to get his hands dirty, and the motorcycle and the rest of his quarter-life-crisis gear are all indicators that, even if he won't admit it aloud, he knows he wasn't cut out to be a Watcher and is ready to do something new.

Wesley goes on to take over leadership of Angel's detective agency, found his own agency, shoot a barrel of liquid nitrogen out of the air, conduct an Agatha Christie parlor scene in a fabulous suit, grow a layer of Punisher-worthy angry stubble, and have hate sex over the phone while simultaneously drinking scotch and doing detective stuff.

Have my eyes finished making violent love to you?
Then good day, madam! I'm off to kill a demon bear with my teeth.

And that right there is what I love about television. Characters have room to grow and change- they often have to, if a long-running show is going to stay interesting. Sometimes they'll evolve dramatically, like Wes, or they'll learn variations on the same lesson over and over, like Jeff Winger on Community, gradually refining their personality in an attempt to be a better person. For all the unhealthy lessons we can take out of television (sexual tension trumps platonic friendship; every criminal Batman flings off a building will land in water and be okay), I agree with the simple idea that people can and should change over time, trying over weeks and years to become the best version of themselves.