Premise
Joan of Arcadia is about a teenage girl, Joan Girardi (played by Amber Tamblyn), who sees and speaks with God in the form of various people such as small children, teenage boys, elderly ladies, transients, passers by, etc. Joan is asked by God to perform tasks that often appear to be trivial or contrary, but the end result of which is always positive towards a larger situation.
An example is when Joan is asked to take a reclusive bully to the school dance. While both her mother and the assistant principal object, Joan follows through with God's task. At the dance it is revealed the bully has a bottle of alcohol with him but Joan convinces him not to open it. Despite this the assistant principal later reaches into his jacket and, finding the alcohol, expels him. Joan later finds out from God that while this turn of events seems rather bleak, it was the lesser of two evils: in an alternate timeline where he went alone to the dance, he got drunk and shot over a dozen students and teachers with a handgun he had also taken, before turning the gun on himself.
In other episodes, the effects of Joan's actions are not as obvious.
The opening credits roll with the song "One Of Us" by Joan Osborne, a hit single in the United States off her 1995 album Relish:
What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make his way home
This was not the original version of the song. It was re-recorded by Osborne (with a noticeably less rough quality) specifically for this television 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).
It starred actors Joe Mantegna and Mary Steenburgen as Joan's parents, Jason Ritter (son of John Ritter) as her paraplegic older brother, and Michael Welch as her younger brother.
While the show was one of the highest rated new shows of the 2003-2004 TV season, its ratings declined in its sophomore year in spite of continued critical acclaim. The show was cancelled by CBS on May 18, 2005. Only two episodes from the second season were repeated by CBS: "No Future" and "The Rise and Fall of Joan Girardi." The network pulled any remaining reruns from its schedule.
Several online fan sites were created in response, in an effort to have the show reinstated. While in its first season it had a wide variety of fans demographically, its controversial cancellation, along with other similar moves in the media, such as cancellations of Third Watch, American Dreams, and Judging Amy, produced an outcry from many older Americans who feel that their entertainment tastes and demands were being completely ignored. Many fans believe that the network meddled with the show in the second season in an attempt to attract younger viewers, but only succeeded in alienating some of its audience. They also question the decision to air it on Friday evenings when the desired demographic segment is smaller than on other nights. Despite their efforts, Ghost Whisperer took over the show's Friday time slot in September 2005.
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