A Powerful Joan of Arcadia Episode Saw Joan Trying to Save Her Friend Adam

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Today, we look at how a powerful Joan of Arcadia episode saw Joan trying to save her friend Adam.

This is a delayed Year of Great TV Episodes, where every day from March 2nd on this year (plus January 1st-March 1st of 2024), we’ll take a look at great TV episodes. Note that I’m not talking about “Very Special Episodes” or episodes built around gimmicks, but just “normal” episodes of TV shows that are notable only because of how good they are.

All this month, I’ll be spotlighting great female-centric TV episodes.

Joan of Arcadia was a short-lived fantasy drama created by Barbara Hall that starred Amber Tamblyn as Joan Girardi, a 16-year-old girl who recently moved to the small town of Arcadia with her family, where her father, Will (Joe Mantegna) became the Chief of Police. Joan’s mother (Mary Steenburgen) works at Joan’s school, while Joan’s older brother, Kevin (Jason Ritter), is dealing with life as a paraplegic following a car accident (another reason for the family moving and starting fresh). Her other brother, Luke (Michael Welch) is a science genius.

In the first episode, Joan is approached by God, who appears to her as different people. In every episode, he gives her a seemingly gives her a seemingly normal “suggestion” (that God hints that she really SHOULD follow, but she doesn’t HAVE to), and said suggestion (like “join the debate team,” “get a job at the local bookstore,” etc.) naturally has a ripple effect on other people for the better (including her own family, like how her getting a job is the jolt that her older brother needed to stop feeling sorry for himself and get a job himself).

Adam (Christopher Marquette) is Joan’s artsy friend (who she might have a crush on) who is super emo. A few episodes before the episode in question, “Jump,” God tasked Joan with keeping Adam’s recent piece of art out of an art show (because once it sold, Adam was going to drop out of school). She couldn’t figure out how to do it, so she just ended up destroying it. He, naturally, thinks that she did it for some bad reason (jealousy, perhaps?), and won’t talk to her.

Well, in “Jump,” a little boy that Joan had babysat earlier in the season (who had a fatal disease) dies, and he comes to Joan in her dreams, and then she sees Adam. She believes that Adam is going to die by suicide (his artist mother died by suicide).

God later explains whether Adam was going to ACTUALLY die or not, the point is that SOMEthing inside of him was going to die unless Joan saved him. In the end, she convinces him (through her mother, an artist herself, who Adam really admires and likes, and convinces him to listen to Joan) to read the note his mother left him before she died, and it is a really sweet letter that makes him feel so much better (as he, naturally, thought that the letter was going to be her telling him that he was the reason she chose to die by suicide).

It’s a beautiful message of the ripple effects of Joan’s powers. Amber Tamblyn was nominated for an Emmy for Best Actress in a Drama for Season 1 (she submitted the pilot, but I don’t think the pilot really works, as well, as a spotlight, as she spends most of the episode trying to figure out if she is going insane).

This was a great series, and it is a shame that it only lasted two seasons, but hey, two was more than I thought we were going to get when it debuted, so that’s something!