The fact that Buffy sort of “accepts” tonal variety is also why I think it has so much more formal experimentation than Angel. At least as far as I’m aware of (truthfully I still haven’t seen about 70% of Angel). There’s something artsy about Buffy that I can’t quite pin down. It’s not that Angel isn’t artistic in its own way, since I’m sure it is; it’s that it doesn’t seem to have the same meta relationship to storytelling. It tells its story more “straight”, and this limits the tonal places it makes sense for the show to go.

As for what you said about AtS, I sort of agree and disagree. Now, I’m going to preface this by admitting that I’ve only seen Angel once, so this is based on my somewhat fuzzy memory of the show, but I think Angel, like a lot of spinoff shows, does have a meta relationship with its storytelling, it’s just that this relationship just happens to be with the show it’s spinning off from. Spinoffs have to differentiate themselves from their originators, because if they didn’t people would see it as a less good version of the original. And the writers do this very consciously with Angel, right down to the decision making regarding the premise: the tone will be darker than Buffy, the writing will be more adult-oriented and focus less on teen issues, the framing of the world will be more morally ambiguous, the structure of the seasons will be less rigid than Buffy’s Big Bad formula, etc. etc.

Now there are decisions that are probably less conscious in the way that Angel differentiates itself from Buffy, and these decisions can be a little troubling. For instance, more serious and adult apparently equals less women, and a lot of fridging of the female characters we do have, because that’s edgy. That’s not to say Buffy doesn’t have its own problems, I mean say what you will about the depiction of Gunn (and there is a lot to be said) but at least Angel does have a person of color in the main cast, which never happened on Buffy. And there’s no denying that Buffy also fridged some of its female characters, and it killed off one of its then two canonically queer characters. But even still, I do think it’s worth noting that part of my personal problem with Angel is that, as @isthisapenismetaphor points out in this post, there is a definite connection drawn between between the idea that AtS is more adult, darker, and edgier, and the fact that it is a show that is mostly about men. With the uncomfortable implication being that women’s issues are somehow, lighter, fluffier, and more juvenile. Also, I’m not going to really get into this one, but Buffy is a much gayer show, both in tone and in that it has actual canonically queer characters, beyond just coding (I mean there’s Lorne, but that’s a topic for another day). And again, there’s this troubling framing wherein if Angel is the more adult show for grown-ups, does that mean queer issues are somehow more silly and juvenile? 

Anyway, I may have gotten a little off topic here, but the point I’m trying to make is that I do think that Angel, as a show, is both consciously and subconsciously meta-textual, it just so happens that a lot of the meta-text is specifically in relation to Buffy, and if you, like me, happen to like a lot of the things that it’s differentiating itself from, for instance, the evolving and inconsistent tone, the many female characters, the overall gayness, the format breaking episodes (I mean Angel has Smile Time, but like, I don’t remember many other episodes like that. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.), even the teen issues (I am after all, technically still a teen for another six months or so, and I’m certainly more in the target audience for Buffy than I am for Angel), etc., then there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy Angel less, and of course the opposite is true as well.

In terms of artsiness, idk. I guess it depends on how you define “artsy”. Like, on the one hand, I do agree that Buffy is definitely more experimental, and imo takes more narrative risks on an episode to episode basis, in addition to the aforementioned changes to tone between seasons. Like I said in the original post, Angel is more samey, and for me at least, that makes for a less interesting viewing experience. On the other hand, you could make the case that because Angel has a far less rigid structure for its seasons, it’s not as confined by longer narratives as Buffy, and maybe that allows for more complex storytelling. I think you could also make the case that Angel is the more philosophical show of two (although tbh, I think Angel sometimes bit off a little bit more than it could chew in that regard, and could come off as a little pretentious, but that may be a result of some anti-intellectual bias of mine).

And, just going off of season 5, which is what I’m most familiar with, Angel definitely does things that Buffy doesn’t that I really really enjoy. It has a kind of plot complexity/unusualness on an episode-to-episode basis that Buffy often lacks, maybe because Buffy can be constrained by its “metaphor of the week” format or what kinds of stories are relevant to the younger age. It also has an incredible deadpan humor. I’m not sure where that humor comes from, but it’s great.

Still, I want to clarify what I meant by the difference between “artistic” and “artsy.” To me, “artistic” just means…whether something is “trying to do stuff.” Does it have ideas, themes, attitudes? Does it execute them with any kind of coherence?

Whereas “artsy” to me means something like “plays with form” or “has awareness of form.” So when I say that Buffy has a meta relationship to storytelling, I don’t really mean that it’s meta-textual in general. Although it is. I mean that it has a relationship to storytelling devices. Formal devices. Buffy doesn’t just “break format”, it uses form in more ways. The Body is good and interesting not because it’s different from what Buffy normally does, but because its formal choices like silence or handheld all do something.

I’d actually argue that Smile Time really isn’t a format-break for Angel. Yes, it’s unusual for a story to use muppets, and yes it makes fun of the muppet/children’s TV idiom a bit. But the episode doesn’t really use different formal devices than usual. It just has muppets as subject matter. Whereas Once More With Feeling does change the whole format of the show, even to the extent of using a different aspect ratio. Moreover, all of those formal decisions are doing really specific thematic work. And Buffy has this kind of formal awareness even outside of its most famous format-breaking episodes. I was watching Beneath You last night and that church scene for example uses a ridiculous number of formal techniques, such as the way Spike moves in and out of shadow or is highlighted differently depending on what he’s saying. Or you can go back to something like Passion, which uses Angelus’s framing narration to convey his predatory, voyeuristic, manipulative nature. The way he frames stories to his liking. The crescendoing operatic music conveys the perverse sense of drama and artistry of Angelus’s outlook, etc.

I have asked this myself in the past and never gotten an answer.

It became pretty standard jargon, as I understand, to disambiguate when writing to other humans. First phys!Steve vs the Steve right next to you, just like you were taking to the machine, then getting looser (as jargon does) to reference, say, bearded!Steve vs bald!Steve.