An Angel With The Devil's Desire

It's a dilemma, after all, having a show rely on a sexy hunk who, should he ever do the deed -- experience 'true happiness,' in Buffy-speak -- will have the Devil to pay.

Back on Buffy, romantic consummation between the vampire fighter and her vampire boyfriend led to Angel's losing his soul, her killing him with a sword through the heart to save the world and him heading to Hell for hundreds of years of torture and insanity.

Yikes. Suddenly celibacy didn't seem like such a bad thing.

Except perhaps to viewers of the upcoming Angel who will be stuck wondering whether all of his intense smouldering has any hope of ignition.

"Yeah, eventually it's like (Frasier's) Niles and Daphne. 'Just do something already!' " agrees Joss Whedon, creator and executive producer of both shows. "Obviously it's going to be an issue but right now, you know, no loopholes. Not for a while."

Angel finds David Boreanaz's character relocated in L.A. where he'll further try to redeem his bloodsucking past by helping people who have lost their souls, both literally and figuratively. But don't expect it to play out all soft and sentimental like some sort of Touched By An Angel.

Whedon says Angel will have a darker, more adult tone than Buffy and Boreanaz warns that his brooding boy won't be lightening up to any happy-go-lucky level anytime soon.

"He has a tortured soul and a guilty conscience," Boreanaz explains.

"In the beginning, he sure is going to feel a lot of pain and he'll be suffering. But it will be humorous pain."

One humorous pain along with Angel in L.A. is Buffy's snarky ice princess Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter), who has left Sunnydale to try to become an actress. New character Doyle (Roseanne's Glenn Quinn, finally getting to use his own Irish accent) is a half-demon, half-human whose visions guide Angel to where he's needed.

The show will follow Buffy Tuesday nights on WB stations this fall and has also been bought by Barrie's VR, the station that reigns as a hero in Buffydom for going ahead and airing this spring's season finale despite WB's lame, Columbine-linked delay.

Expect Buffy to visit the show she spawned sometime in November. Seth Green's Oz will cross over earlier. Angel has a 13-episode order and is shooting Monday to Friday. Buffy has a full-season order and is shooting Tuesday to Saturday. Which means what's shooting through Whedon is adrenalin and anxiety.

"We're terrified pretty much 24/7," he says. "We just keep working and working."

Meanwhile, back at Buffy, Sarah Michelle Gellar declined to make a movie during this year's production hiatus and took her first vacation longer than 10 days in the past three years. Sort of work-play, actually, including travelling to Europe and the U.K. to promote her movie Cruel Intentions there, taking a pile of friends to VH-1's Divas concert in New York to celebrate her 22nd birthday, and building houses in the Dominican Republic for a week for the charity Habitat For Humanity.

"I've learned how to lay floor. I've mixed a ton of cement. I've never had calluses like that on my hands," she says.