Joan of Arcadia

Joan of Arcadia is an American fantasy family drama television series telling the story of teenager Joan Girardi (Amber Tamblyn), who sees and speaks with God and performs tasks she is given. The series originally aired on Fridays on CBS for two seasons, from September 26, 2003, to April 22, 2005.
The show was praised by critics and won the Humanitas Prize and the People's Choice Award. It was also nominated for an Emmy Award in its first season for Outstanding Drama Series. The title alludes to Joan of Arc and the show takes place in a fictionalized version of the town Arcadia, Maryland.
Joan Girardi is a 16-year-old teenager living in the town of Arcadia in Maryland. She is the middle child of her family which includes elder brother Kevin, a former jock who has been left a paraplegic after a car accident, and younger brother Luke, a brainy nerd. Joan's father Will is the town's police chief. In the pilot episode, God appears to Joan and reminds her that she promised to do anything he wanted if he would let Kevin survive the car crash. He appears to Joan in the form of various people including small children, teenage boys, elderly ladies, transients, or passersby. Joan is asked by God to perform tasks that often appear to be trivial or inconsequential—such as enrolling in an AP Chemistry class or building a boat—but always end up positively improving a larger situation.
These plot lines are interwoven with more realistic matters, such as the relationships within the Girardi family. Various storylines that spanned multiple episodes dealt with the consequences of Kevin's accident, Will's job as a police officer, mother Helen's career as an art teacher, and Luke's aspirations to be a scientist.
God is portrayed with a very human personality, and does not appear to favor any one particular religion, saying there are "different ways to share the same truth." He quotes Bob Dylan, Emily Dickinson and the Beatles rather than any scripture or verses. The series examines God from a more metaphysical standpoint instead of a religious perspective.
God is also depicted as having a sharp sense of humor. In the episode "Touch Move", He tells Joan that He has to send her "down there". When Joan is worried He means Hell, He laughs and clarifies He meant the school basement. In another instance, She appears in the form of a woman exercising and says, "Why do people always try and discern my deeper meanings? This is the kind of thinking that starts wars."
The many incarnations included:
The opening credits roll with the song "One of Us" written by Eric Bazilian and performed by Joan Osborne. It was a hit single for Osborne in the United States from her 1995 album Relish:
Osborne re-recorded the song specifically for the show. To fit the lyrics of the song, Joan first meets God as a teenage boy riding to school on the bus with her (although they don't actually speak to each other at the time).
The idea for Joan of Arcadia took shape during Barbara Hall’s time as a producer on Chicago Hope in the mid-1990s and evolved while she was an executive producer on CBS drama Judging Amy. Hall said "the concept meshed her fascination with Joan of Arc...her longtime interest in physics and metaphysics, and her desire to use drama and comedy to explore the existence of God in a 'scary, not benign universe.'" Hall added, "I started thinking, what would it look like if God tried to contact a teenager today? I made the decision that God would have to come to a teenage girl visually. Joan of Arc heard voices, but kids today aren’t going to hear voices because you’d have to get the iPods off their heads.”
When Hall pitched the series to CBS, she and executives agreed they were not looking to make another Touched by an Angel. Among the differences between the former show and Joan is that the character of Joan is not religious and "the show’s tone is grittier.”
CBS greenlit the show in 2002 "when public discourse about spirituality seemed more gentle: post-9/11 prayer services rather than heated debates over 'The Passion of the Christ.'" The acquisition was made as part of an effort by the network, which was known for its adult-skewing shows, to appeal to younger viewers. Hall developed the series with Hart Hanson and Jim Hayman, her Judging Amy production associates.
As a guideline for the series’ writing staff, Hall wrote a list of "Ten Commandments of Joan of Arcadia", which enumerated what God can and cannot do in the show. These guidelines included points like, "God can never identify one religion as being right," "The job of every human being is to fulfill his or her true nature," "God's purpose for talking to Joan, and to everyone, is to get her (us) to recognize the interconnectedness of all things," and "the exact nature of God is a mystery, and the mystery can never be solved."
Though Arcadia itself is set in Maryland, the series was mostly filmed at various Los Angeles locations. Establishing shots of Arcadia's skyline and other outdoor scenes were filmed in the city of Wilmington, Delaware. Scenes at the fictional Arcadia High School were filmed at El Segundo High School in California.
Joan of Arcadia received widespread acclaim from critics. On review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes, the first season has a rating of 92% based on 25 critics’ reviews, while Season 2 has a rating of 100% based on 5 reviews.
Greg Braxton of the Los Angeles Times said "the series is a veritable squeezebox of genres...[including] a family drama, a coming-of-age saga of a teenager, a high school drama and a gritty police show, all tossed together with a mix of fantasy and religion.” Robert Lloyd, also of the LA Times, said "the real miracle here is how deftly the show avoids the soggy cliches of redemption so many of its forerunners have embraced." Rob Owen of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called it "the best new broadcast series of the season," and the Associated Press said the show has an "intelligent quirkiness."
James Poniewozik of Time wrote, "[The series'] marriage of the sacred and the mundane has made Arcadia the rare TV show about spirituality to win over both audiences and critics. Whereas its predecessors have been either panned but popular marshmallow halos (Highway to Heaven) or controversial, swiftly canceled critical darlings (Nothing Sacred), Arcadia has avoided, Goldilocks-style, going too soft or too hard.” He also noted that “by separating God from religion, Arcadia takes away what makes faith divisive—a reasonable goal for a major-network series that needs to draw a broad audience to thrive."
Melanie McFarland of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer said, "Only a few episodes into its season, 'Joan' has proved deserving of its growing reputation. It's alive with everything television so desperately lacks: genuine heart, wit devoid of crassness, dramatic situations mirroring so many of our realities that the Girardis sometimes feel more like neighbors than a television family.” Nancy Franklin of The New Yorker opined the show is "both thought through and open-ended, and it should prove especially rewarding for those who think that belief has more to do with asking questions than with getting answers."
Criticism of the series focused on the police procedural plots involving Will Girardi, which many said did not tonally fit with the show. Devin Gordon of Newsweek said that the series' cop drama and its fantasy elements felt like “two shows stitched awkwardly together." Tom Shales of The Washington Post said "the premiere suggests viewers are being asked to wade heart-deep into a drearily portentous muddle.”
Though critics were divided about the show's tone and plot elements, there was across the board praise for Amber Tamblyn. Poniewozik wrote, "If God, however, is simply asking Joan to do what all teens have to do—develop an identity—Arcadia works because Tamblyn reminds us so well how tough that job is. Joan may talk to God, but she has to do the work her own, mortal self, from accepting life's unfairness to finding her niche at school...Unlike most prime-time teens, Joan is neither a babe nor a brain, neither a Goody Two-Shoes nor a sarcastic rebel. She's the most extraordinarily average teen to crop up on a TV show in years—yet after a few episodes, you realize you would watch her story even if God stopped showing up.” Praise was also given for Mary Steenburgen and Jason Ritter, the latter of whom Robert Bianco of USA Today wrote, "Indeed, the often painfully realistic treatment of the familial anguish that swirls around Kevin (Ritter), who lost the use of his legs in an auto accident, is one of the show's greatest achievements.”
Critics have written retrospectively about the series. In 2015, Margaret Lyons of Vulture wrote, "Somehow Joan of Arcadia is one of vanishingly few shows to bring up two extremely common questions that shape the human condition: 'Is there a God?' and 'Am I a good person?' The answer to both is, it depends whom you ask. And you can only ask so many people in two seasons.”
Writing for IndieWire, Alison Willmore said "the show balanced [Joan's] missions with the mistakes a well-meaning but impulsive high school girl might make, allowing the show to also be a very fine portrait of life at a certain age."
Joan of Arcadia debuted on the heels of Touched by an Angel, which had ended its nine-year run in April 2003. An estimated 12 million viewers tuned into the series premiere in September 2003. Though Joan was broadcast in the 8 p.m. time slot on Friday nights, a traditionally quiet night for TV, it became a modest hit for CBS and averaged 10.1 million viewers during its first season. The show regularly drew in young adult viewers for its time slot, which led to NBC changing the schedule for the competing comedy-drama series, Miss Match.
The following year, "viewership sank to 8 million, according to Nielsen Media Research," despite continued critical acclaim which included three Emmy nominations. Partly at the request of the network, Barbara Hall introduced the character of Ryan, a menacing figure and amoral "tempter" (with The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" as his musical motif) seemingly destined to cause a significant amount of conflict for the show's characters.
While Joan of Arcadia was one of the highest-rated new shows of the 2003–2004 television season, its ratings declined in the second season and it was cancelled by CBS on May 18, 2005. Fan campaigns were created in response in an effort to have the show reinstated. A promotional campaign by CBS sent street teams into cities to do good deeds, such as buying a cold person a cup of coffee. Only two episodes from the second season, "No Future" and "The Rise and Fall of Joan Girardi", were repeated by CBS, with remaining reruns pulled from the schedule. The cancellation meant the show ended on a cliffhanger, with the Ryan character potentially facing off against Joan. Ghost Whisperer took over the show's Friday time slot in September 2005.
After the show's cancellation, props such as pieces of Adam's artwork and Joan's signature messenger bag and costume pieces belonging to cast members were sold on eBay.
CBS Home Entertainment (distributed by Paramount) released both seasons on DVD in Region 1 in 2005 and 2006.
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment released all seasons in Region 2.
On June 6, 2017, CBS Home Entertainment (distributed by Paramount) released Joan of Arcadia: The Complete Series on DVD in Region 1.
Note: each disc in the season, except the last, contains 4 episodes.