The Angel Episode Rejected For Being “Too Grim”

Like their titular characters, Angel was Buffy’s older counterpart (not quite 241 years older, but definitely no longer at high school). The spin-off, which turns 25 this year, took its parent show’s supernatural lore out of a school setting and into the big, bad city. While bright, cheery Sunnydale provided an ironic contrast to the demonic action in its shadows, Los Angeles was its shadows. As Angel’s running joke goes, the city was a sordid hotbed of evil and monstrous behaviour even before the Satanic cults and vampires got a look-in.  

There is, however, a line, and in its second ever episode, Angel crossed it. 

After the pilot introduced the vision-afflicted Doyle, re-introduced Buffy character Cordelia, and set up Angel Investigations’ “We Help the Helpless” premise, it was time to set the show’s adult tone and shake off Buffy’s residual cheerleader vibes. How better to do that than with an episode about crack addiction and sex work?

“Corrupt” was submitted as a potential second episode in Angel’s first season, but rejected before it was produced. Written by screenwriter-executive producer David Fury, it introduced Detective Kate Lockley (Elisabeth Röhm), a new returning character who might have gone on to be Angel’s next love interest/murderous enemy, had Röhm not left the show for roles in Bull and Law & Order.

In the rejected episode (read the script here), Angel met Det. Lockley when she was working undercover for the LAPD as a sex worker. Except, Kate had gone so far undercover that she’d started to actually sell sex, become addicted to crack cocaine, and was planning to murder the cult she was investigating. As told to Fandom by Angel producer Tim Minear back in 2000, “that was originally the introduction of Kate. Obviously we were still trying to figure out what the show was at that point. This was the first episode after the pilot, and it was written before the new staff arrived.

“David Fury, who wrote this episode, had written a script called ‘Corrupt’ in which Kate was a police officer working undercover as a prostitute who was actually becoming a prostitute and was addicted to crack.”

The episode – later retooled into the slightly friendlier story “Lonely Hearts” in which a murderous parasite infects singles on the LA dating scene – was deemed too bleak by the show’s staff and The WB, Fury told Fandom‘s Edward Gross in 2000. 

“They just went incredibly dark with this thing and decided at the end of the day that it was a little bit too hopeless, a little too grim. After that episode was written it was actually being prepped when the network, too, had some concerns about it.”

However, Fury specified in the archive interview, rumours that The WB shut down production in Angel’s early days weren’t accurate: “It’s not like alarms went off and we had to pull plugs on everything. I’ve read on the Internet where people were saying the network freaked, and they told us to shut down, and that’s not true at all. We were still creating what the idea of the show was going to be, and basically we decided to rethink that first episode.”

It sounds like it was for the best, don’t you think? 

Angel seasons one to five are streaming on Hulu in the US and on Disney+ in the UK.