Doomed to be dateless

By FIONA RAE

"LA's got it all: the glamour and the grit, the big breaks and the heartaches, the sweet young lovers and the nasty, ugly, hairy fiends that suck out your brain through your face."

As an opening line, it's pretty good. LA's a dog-eat-dog town isn't it?

Except that the green, red-eyed, horned demon who said it wasn't being metaphorical.

He was introducing the world of Angel (TV4, 8.30pm) in last night's opening episode of season two, which kept its tongue firmly in its cheek, even as it was cleverly introducing all the characters and their reasons for being there.

Yep, Buffy's boyfriend is back, although these days, after a year fighting crime in LA - and critical success at home in the US, where the show's fourth season is firing - Angel is looking less like a spinoff and more like its own demon-slaying, apocalypse-averting, redemption-seeking thing.

To recap: Angel is a vampire aged 240 (or thereabouts) who was cursed with a soul by gypsies and thereafter doomed to walk the Earth feeling pretty angsty about all that neck action he had in the past.

He and Buffy fell in love, but unknown to them, one moment of pure happiness (you-know-what with you-know-who) and he was back to his evil ways.

How he got his soul back and moved to LA is another story, but there he is, still doomed forever to never have a date, but trying to redeem himself by helping mere mortals in peril from the demon world, aided by his sidekicks Cordelia, Wesley and Gunn.

The green, karaoke-singing, psychic demon who introduced the episode is also set to become a regular.

He can conveniently see people's souls when they sing, which, of course, was a set-up to have Angel (David Boreanaz) sing Barry Manilow's Mandy in exchange for information. The horror, the horror.

TV4 is showing two episodes weekly, and tonight's Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? (8.30) is one that creator Joss Whedon says he is most proud of.

The series has always had noir overtones (how could it not, since most of the action has to be at night because of Angel's fryability in the sun), and this episode segues cleverly between the 1950s and the present, as the team at Angel Investigations looks into past queer goings-on at a hotel.

As with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the story comes from a dramatic source rather than a monster-of-the-week scenario.

Hence there is even a reference to 50s McCarthyism, as the residents of the hotel collectively turn on one of their number.

The fact that Cordelia has head-splitting visions of whatever demon the team will be fighting next is a contrivance that saves them from actually going out and finding trouble, or having someone turn up at the office every week with a fresh tale of horror.

But there will always be great lines, like last night's "There are three things I don't do: tan, date and sing in public".

There's quite a bit of humour at Angel's expense, and storylines that continually push the characters to new and interesting places.