Word: arcadias
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...real saints around these days, but they've been turning up pretty regularly in the media: CBS's surprise hit Joan of Arcadia, David Guterson's Our Lady of the Forest, not to mention Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. You can see the appeal of these stories: there's something a touch American about people who transcend ordinary mortal failings to become saints. They're like the spiritual equivalent of Horatio Alger...
...programs. Bad, at least, if you want to attract young men. Testosterone-friendly shows from last season like Fox's Firefly and the WB's Birds of Prey are gone, and most of the shows that have had modest success this year (such as The O.C. and Joan of Arcadia) skew toward women. That leaves a big opening for cable. Channels like FX and ESPN are up in young male viewers. (See page...
Throughout religious history, getting spoken to by God has not been a sign of fun times ahead. Abraham had to agree to kill his son. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. On CBS's Joan of Arcadia (Fridays, 8 p.m. E.T.), God appears to a teenage girl and commands her ... to take AP chemistry...
This 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. Joan (Amber Tamblyn) is an average, nonreligious teen with whom the Lord decides to strike up a friendship, manifesting himself (and herself) in persons from a TV anchorman to a cafeteria lunch lady. Joan has a heart-wrenching family situation--a brother...
...above all, Arcadia has managed to skate between preachiness and blasphemy by taking the religion out of God, literally. The show's creator, Barbara Hall, gave the writers a list of 10 "commandments" ("God cannot directly intervene"; "Everyone is allowed to say no to God, including Joan"). The third dictum is "God can never identify one religion as being right." This is probably an impossible rule to follow--some people believe in a God who is quite particular about which religion is right, and by the fourth episode God alludes to having told Noah to build the Ark. But mostly...