Joan of Arcadia Season 1

Joan of Arcadia is a bit of a weird show, since while it is a teen drama, its titular teen receives third billing. The top billed actor is Joe Mantegna, who plays her dad Will. Every episode features Joan (Amber Tamblyn, great) on some mission from God. But there’s usually a sup-plot in which her father solves some problem at work, where he is a police officer.

I was initially wary of those storylines. Who wants a cop show in your teen drama? But I was drawn in. At its best, Joan of Arcadia is profoundly, and sincerely interested in what it means to be a good person. In the universe of the show, we never know if we’re doing the right thing, and the impact of our best deeds is often unknowable to us. And it was fascinating to see the show bring that worldview to a police procedural. Will was brought in to reform a corrupt department. But he discovers he was hired to play along. Will is trying to do the right thing, and the victims and criminals are usually better off for him being chief of police. But in every episode, he discovers that the larger problems remain, and he wonders if he’s making any difference at all. There is a storyline about police beating a Black man. A storyline in which the higher-ups are ready to go after the teen mother who abandoned her baby with everything they have, only to suddenly reverse course (it turns out the mom’s boyfriend was the child of a city councilman). An arson investigation reveals that a local developer started the fire to clear the way for new housing and that the fire department was in on it. It’s not The Wire, but it’s more nuanced than I ever expected from a CBS show. All this uncertainty mirrors Joan’s storylines, in which she’s given missions from actual God but still feels like an ordinary lost teenage girl, unsure of who she is or if she’s doing the right thing. It mirrors the storylines in Joan’s family, as they struggle to move on after the golden child, eldest boy Kevin (Jason Ritter) was paralyzed in a drunk driving accident.

Then, in the middle of the season, Will turns the whole city government into the FBI after he discovers how deep the corruption goes. He demotes himself to a police detective, and after this, his cases become a lot more feel-good, a lot more cut and dried. He helps a woman give birth in an elevator! He helps a boy come out of the closet! And then at the end of the episode, everything is hunky dunky. This level of moral certainty infects the rest of the show. Without that sense of moral and existential uncertainty that drove the show and made it special, things get a lot soapier. People kiss and break up and get back together. Secrets are revealed and then never followed up on. Everyone yells at each other a lot, but it often feels unearned, like in a bad indie movie. Sometimes the show will find some of that old magic, especially in storylines featuring Joan or her Mother (Mary Steenburgen, excellent). But I’m hoping that season 2 can challenge its characters a little more, pull back on the police storylines, and switch up the formula a little bit. Most of Joan’s missions from God involved her trying some new class club or after-school activity. It got old by the end of the season, and there are only so many electives and extracurriculars available to suburban teens.