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Angel discovers that there's a whole infrastructure of vampires running L.A. in cahoots with -- big surprise -- a high-powered law firm. Angel also unexpectedly meets up with snotty Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter) from Buffy's circle at Sunnydale High. It seems that Cordelia was unable to go on to college with the rest of the gang because of Daddy's little problem with the IRS. Now, she's a starving would-be actress. Cordelia puts up a typically sparkly front (she tells Angel she's doing great and living in a beachfront condo), but Whedon lets us in on her secret, to establish sympathy for Little Miss High and Mighty. It works; the sight of the once imperious Cordy meditating in her flophouse room ("People will be drawn to me by my positive energy") is strangely heart-tugging. By the end of the pilot, Cordelia has talked Angel and Doyle into putting out their people-helping shingle and giving her a job as office manager; her hilariously blunt wit undimmed, Cordelia explains to Angel why he has to charge a fee for his services: "You're not exactly rolling in it, Mr. I Was Alive for 200 Years and Never Developed an Investment Portfolio!" On "Buffy," Boreanaz had a tendency to drift off into an impersonation of a large oak tree when he was in his Good Angel mode -- the whispering monotone, the love-pained stare. (The same stillness turned lethally charismatic, however, when Angel was bad.) So it was, dare I say, a genius move on Whedon's part to remove Angel to a setting where Boreanaz's underplaying seems even more alien than it did among the yakking, super-sarcastic teens of "Buffy." His lack of guile in a town lousy with it is completely endearing. "Why would a woman I've never met talk to me?" he asks Doyle, who is urging him to strike up a conversation with the bedeviled waitress. Replies Doyle incredulously, "Have you looked in the mirror lately? No, I guess you wouldn't." Clad, as always, in fashionable black at his first Hollywood cocktail party, Angel turns heads (a gay talent agent even hits on him) because he looks so much like he belongs, like he's playing the game. But Angel's got a secret, and it isn’t that he's undead -- it's that he's unhip. I mean, his hair always looks like he slept on it wet, he's a lousy conversationalist and his ultra-deadpan wit arises not from quiet self-confidence (the way Sunnydale werewolf-rocker Oz's does), but from shyness and uncertainty -- his jokes are offered tentatively, as if he's not sure the humans will get them. And let's not forget how, on "Buffy," Angel got endless grief from his old vamp rival, the punky Spike, for being so square -- imagine, a black-hearted bastard like Angel falling in love with a little all-American schoolgirl! Angel has an almost childlike need to do good, to be forgiven, to be accepted. If Whedon infuses the show with a little more bite, Angel could fulfill his destiny as one of pop culture's most intriguing dark innocents. But that Romeo and Juliet problem remains. There's a lot of unfinished business between Angel and Buffy; their obstacle-strewn romance is just too hot to drop. Until the day when these lovers meet again (crossover, anyone?), WB is shrewdly filling the lovers-from-different-worlds void with "Roswell," an engaging "Buffy" meets "The X-Files" meets "My So-Called Life" drama about a human girl and an extraterrestrial boy who fall in love in Roswell, N.M.
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