Angel - Season 3

You can really see Angel come into its own and out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's shadow in the third season. With a whopping six people working or staying at the hotel, they finally figured out that a strong supporting cast is the key to making Angel work as a protagonist. Really, it's a hard formula to get wrong - a variety of interesting people working together makes for a more compelling long-term viewing experience than just one or only a few. Joss Whedon obviously had this down to a science when Firefly premiered the next year with a main cast on the ship of nine. Dollhouse got better once the focus shifted from Echo to the workings of the whole facility, and Buffy was better once it expanded beyond the main four too. Everyone bouncing off each other plays particularly nicely with Whedon's style of snappy dialogue, so it's no wonder the shows improved as they went along and the cast grew.

Not standing idly by while Buffy's tone grew steadily darker as it entered the new millenium, Angel follows suit with a pretty somber plot for a lot of the way. Darla first appeared way back in the pilot episode of Buffy, and she'd been bouncing around on Angel for a while with no clear direction. Not that she wasn't an interesting character or played fairly well by Julie Benz, but I was waiting for it to go somewhere. It did that in season three, delivering something to the show that became the focus point for the last two thirds. Along with the arrival of a foe from deep in Angel's past and Cordelia's continued ascension from high school drama queen to something much more, it makes for a pretty engrossing story. And you don't have to look any further than Wesley's arc in the second half to see that this show doesn't play around. The return of a character at the very end carried with it some pretty lame and dated looking computer-aided action bits, but it was still a generally well-executed payoff to the whole thing. The ending was a pure cliff-hanger begging me to keep watching, and it won't be long before I pick it back up.