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 who's been partially paralyzed in a car accident--but the show leavens the emotional moments with a light touch. Its God has a wry, chop-busting wit: "In me you trust," muses the Almighty, examining a dollar bill. "Not exactly true." And Joan's father (Joe Mantegna) is Arcadia's chief of police, for those viewers who wouldn't find the manifestation of the Almighty dramatic enough without the occasional kidnapping to spice things up.
But 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 Arcadia espouses the little-c catholicism captured in its credits, which juxtapose images of the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela and Bob Dylan: as long as you believe there's an answer blowin' in the wind, you're on the side of the angels.
Conveniently, Joan, like many a teen, has too many preoccupations to ask God whether Muhammad is his Prophet or if God so loved the world that he gave up his only son. God also avoids the big picture: no talk of worship or salvation or Thou Shalt Nots. "The way we approach what God says is, Less is more," says Hall. Instead, God asks Joan to stop underachieving, to learn chess, to get a part-time job--the Lord as almighty guidance counselor. God explains that by bettering herself, Joan sets off chain reactions that help others: in chem class, for instance, she befriends a school misfit who knows where her brother can get a car outfitted for paraplegics.