‘Joan of Arcadia’ Turns 20: 9 Other TV Shows With God as a Character
“What if God was one of us?” wasn’t just the refrain of Joan of Arcadia’s theme song; it was also a narrative prompt for that TV series and many others.
The supreme being of monotheistic belief has been seen (and heard) on TV countless times over the years, in comedies and dramas alike. These heavenly appearances are often one-offs, as seen in a show-within-a-show on 30 Rock and a celebrity cameo in The X-Files. And in the world of St. Elsewhere, the heavenly character is revealed to be none other than a curly-haired Howie Mandel.
Joan of Arcadia, on the other hand, had God as a regular presence, played by a rotating cast of guest stars. Now that we’re hitting Joan’s 20th anniversary on September 26, read on for more details on those depictions of God and several others from the small screen.
30 Rock
In the Season 7 premiere of this NBC comedy, network head Jack Donaghy (Alex Baldwin) casts himself in a new procedural called God Cop — playing a version of God who solves crimes alongside a New York detective — all to turn NBC into a “money-losing embarrassment” as part of a career-advancing scheme.
Good Omens
Frances McDormand, pictured here, narrated the first season of this Prime Video series, lending her voice to the offscreen character of God. “We knew God had to be a woman,” executive producer Neil Gaiman explained to Comic-Con attendees in 2018, per The Hollywood Reporter. “We were talking about great American actresses because we knew [we wanted it] to be an American voice.”
Herman’s Head
In this Fox comedy — specifically the Season 2 episode “Gods, Girls and Herman” — God appears to the title character (William Ragsdale) in the guise of Leslie Nielsen. “Why not me? I’ve got white hair, a deep voice,” Nielsen’s God contends. “I mean, I didn’t just do all those Naked Gun pictures, you know — I’m also a very fine dramatic actor.”
Joan of Arcadia
Sonya Eddy, Zachary Quinto, Will.i.am, and many other stars played human embodiments of God giving teenager Joan Girardi (Amber Tamblyn) altruistic assignments in this CBS drama. “To have these big questions like death and why bad things happen being tackled is amazing,” costar Jason Ritter told Entertainment Weekly in 2004. “With God in the show, we have an opportunity to say to him, ‘Why are you making all this happen?’”
Lucifer
When it was time for this Netflix supernatural drama to give God corporeal form — for a family reunion with sons Lucifer (Tom Ellis) and Amenadiel (D.B. Woodside) — producers cast Dennis Haysbert in the part. “We did, like, the big crazy list of [possible actors for the part], and [Haysbert] was my top choice,” co-showrunner Joe Henderson revealed to EW. “We were lucky. It was our first and only offer.”
Miracle Workers
In the first season of this TBS comedy — based on creator Simon Rich’s novel What in God’s Name — Steve Buscemi plays an exasperated God ready to give up on the flailing Earth. “I just feel like packing it all in and moving on to the next thing,” the character says at one point.
Preacher
Mark Harelik played an actor named Mark Harelik who turns out to be a disguise for God in this AMC series. “The impact of what it’s like to play God was a slowly unfolding rose that was just one delight after another,” the actor said in a 2019 Q&A on the AMC blog. “But it was a great mystery to set up that God is pretending to be an actor named Mark Harelik. And so, rather than me pretending to be God, it was God pretending to be me, which, how cool is that?”
St. Elsewhere
In “After Life,” a fifth-season installment of this NBC medical drama, Dr. Wayne Fiscus (Mandel) is shot in the hospital and has a vision of heaven, where he meets a God who looks exactly like him. (“I created you in my image, didn’t I?” God says. “Then you could have done a lot better on the nose and hairline,” Fiscus quips.)
Supernatural
It took years for the Winchester brothers of this CW series to discover that Chuck Shurley (Rob Benedict), introduced as a book author in Season 4, was actually God. “We knew Chuck was God in Season 5, but it didn’t come out until Season 11,” executive producer Andrew Dabb explained to TV Guide Magazine in 2020. “It was established that Chuck was a writer and [creator] Eric [Kripke] asked, ‘Are we going to be the jerks that make a writer God?’ And we were like, ‘Yeah, we’re gonna do that.'”
The X-Files
Chris Carter, the creator of this sci-fi Fox series, wrote and directed the Season 9 episode “Improbable” and cast Burt Reynolds, a fan of the show, as a God who creates “beautiful moments in life,” as he told Yahoo TV in 2016. (“The first day on set, [the actor] said, ‘So how would you like me to play this character?’” Carter recalled. “And I said, ‘As Burt Reynolds!’”)
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