Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Buffy and Angel were the ultimate star crossed lovers. After all, when you’re a Vampire Slayer, it hardly seems like the appropriate person to fall for would be a Vampire. But fall for Angel Buffy did, setting up one of the most involving and tragic love stories we can remember on TV. After all, it’s pretty rare for one half of a great couple to go from gentle and caring to sadistic and murderous in the course of a single night... and spurred on by having sex with the girl he loves no less.

It’s hard to maintain drama and excitement with a TV couple once they actually get together, but leave it to Buffy to find a way around that. Buffy and Angel had essentially been a couple since the middle of season one, but their romance was heating up in season two, and though Buffy was a virginal high school girl, their passions were leading up to the night that she and Angel would consummate their feelings for each other. But wouldn’t you know it, the moment of "perfect happiness" Angel felt with Buffy set off a pesky element of the curse that had given him his soul back, and returned him to his fully evil, soulless incarnation, Angelous. An amazing amount of pathos and sadness (not to mention murder and mayhem) would follow, before Angel got his soul back and became good again.

But things could never be the same again, and the pain and frustration inherent in the circumstances they found themselves in solidified Buffy and Angel as a great TV couple. After all, here were two people who wanted to be with each other so very much, but now knew that to do so could lead to the end of the world... literally. Great drama comes from great pain, and Joss Whedon knew exactly how to make that work in the confines of his vampire filled world. We rooted for Buffy and Angel, but we knew it just couldn’t work... Unless our boy Angel was able to somehow "Shanshu" and become human that is. But that was a story for another day, and a spinoff series.