Trivia for
"Joan of Arcadia" (2003) More at IMDbPro »

• Show creator Barbara Hall wrote a list of guidelines for the writers, which she called "The Ten Commandments of Joan of Arcadia". These "commandments" are: - 1. God cannot directly intervene. - 2. Good and evil exist. - 3. God can never identify one religion as being right. - 4. The job of every human being is to fulfill his or her true nature. - 5. Everyone is allowed to say "no" to God, including Joan. - 6. God is not bound by time. This is a human concept. - 7. God is not a person and does not possess a human personality. - 8. God talks to everyone all the time in different ways. - 9. God's plan is what is good for us, not what is good for him. - 10. God's purpose for talking to Joan, and everyone, is to get her (us) to recognize the interconnectedness of all things - i.e., you cannot hurt a person without hurting yourself; all of your actions have consequences; God can be found in the smallest actions; God expects us to learn and grow from all our experiences. However, the exact nature of God is a mystery, and the mystery can never be solved.
  
  
• In the writer's draft version of the pilot script, the Girardi family was called the Delaney family.
  
  
• Will Girardi always drinks from a cup with a picture of Joan, Luke and Kevin on it.
  
  
• The character 'Will Girardi' was ranked #40 in TV Guide's list of the "50 Greatest TV Dads of All Time" (20 June 2004 issue).
  
  
• In the first season, scenes involving Joan's part-time job at a local bookstore were filmed at Skylight Books, an independent bookstore in Los Angeles, chosen in part for its "distinct visual personality". Recognizing that continued filming on location at Skylight Books would cause further disruption to the store and its neighborhood, a set was converted into a bookstore for the second season. Design elements were used in the making of the bookstore set that are more commonly found on the East Coast.
  
  
• The Girardis live at 2320 Euclid.
  
  
• Friedman's first name was never revealed.
  
  
• Although Chris Marquette (Adam Rove) and Becky Wahlstrom (Grace Polk) did not become regular cast members until the second season, they both appeared in every episode of the series except for the first.
  
  
• In her DVD commentary for the first season episode "Jump," show creator Barbara Hall explains why Adam usually calls Joan "Jane." Hall says that in Adam's first appearance (in the episode "The Fire and the Wood"), he was still pretending to be a stoner to distance himself from others and protect himself emotionally in the aftermath of his mother's suicide. In service to that ruse, Adam would often pretend to be "out of it" - unable to focus or get simple facts quite correct. Hence, although he knew perfectly well that her name was Joan, he started calling her "Jane" to seem spacey - and it stuck as a joking term of endearment between them. Hall says that one can always tell when Adam is angry at Joan by noting when he uses her real name. Hall also says that this topic is one of the questions about the show she gets asked the most.
  
  
• The double windows at the top of the school staircase set, which are often visible in scenes taking place in the school's hallways, are double semi-circles on top and squared on the bottom - the traditional shape of the ten commandments.
  
  
• While shooting the first kiss and the start of the relationship between Luke ('Michael Welch') and Grace (Becky Wahlstrom), Welch was 16 and Wahlstrom was 28 - an age difference that in real life would make a relationship illegal in many U.S. states.
  
  

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