Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Amber Tamblyn (center) stars as the title teen who gets heavenly hints. Joe Mantegna and Mary Steenburgen play her parents.

CULVER CITY, Calif. - Jim Hayman could use a little divine intervention. The Girardis’ microwave is acting up.

Actually, it’s working just the way microwaves should, humming happily as the tray spins, shining its little light so Michael Girardi can see his Hot Pocket heating up.

For Hayman, a director and executive producer of CBS’s surprise success Joan of Arcadia, the light is good: It reflects off the yellow tiles in the kitchen of the Girardis’ house in Arcadia, U.S.A., and shows viewers that the oven is at work. But the hum is bad: It’s drowning out science geek Luke Girardi’s reflection on the nature of microwaves.

The show is rated 34th of 126 network series this season, and it blew cinema sweetheart Alicia Silverstone’s new NBC series, Miss Match, out of the time slot. Its popularity is a surprise because Joan, which airs at 8 p.m. Fridays, is the fall’s best new TV show. It’s subtle, witty, intelligent and nonviolent - qualities that usually send a program quickly to a cold, dark TV grave.

But Joan has God on its side.

He talks to the lead character, a wonderfully otherwise-normal adolescent in the sea of half-dressed sylphs and Adonises that are TV’s teens. God can be a big help. The top series by far on the youthful WB, packed with witches, vampires and sexpots, is the gentle 7th Heaven, about a minister’s family.

The presence of the Lord has attracted to Joan viewers who are seeking a little spirituality. They haven’t found religion, but don’t mind what they have found: a soulful family drama crafted with meticulous artistry by a creator with a punctilious vision, a crew that sweats the details, and actors whose real relationships border on the familial feelings they portray.

"Joe and Mary are very close to my actual parents," says Amber Tamblyn, 20, referring to the adult leads, Joe Mantegna and Mary Steenburgen, and not to that better-known couple who had dealings with the deity 2,000 years ago.

As Tamblyn, who plays Joan Girardi, speaks near the side of the set on a summer afternoon at Sony Studios, Steenburgen’s husband, Ted Danson, waits for a word with his wife. He and Steenburgen are familiar to the young man who plays Kevin, Joan’s disabled brother. He’s Jason Ritter.

"He has been in my kitchen," says Steenburgen, 50, who won a supporting-actress Oscar for Melvin and Howard (1980). "My two oldest daughters [stepdaughter Kate, 23, and Lily, 22] graduated with him. And we did a play together at the Atlantic Theater in New York. We were actually just trying to remember all our lines. I remember none of mine. He remembers all of mine and his, too."

Ritter, son of recently deceased actor John Ritter, does not want to speak publicly about his father, but says he has found solace and distraction in his work family on the Joan set.

And for Tony-winner Mantegna (Glengarry Glen Ross, 1984), the entire experience has the feel of familial togetherness. Best-known as a member of writer/director David Mamet’s "Chicago Mafia," Mantegna has turned to TV partially to stay close to home and his wife, Arlene, and daughters Mia, 16, who’s autistic, and Gina, 13.

He says, "I didn’t want to be one of those fathers who, when my kids are adults and they’re being asked, ’What was it like to have a father who was a professional actor?’ say, ’...We didn’t see him much, and we’re not that close to him, but we do love Mom.’ "

Mantegna, 56, remembers Tamblyn’s father, Russ, who played Riff 42 years ago in West Side Story, the classic film musical set in the world of youth gangs.

"I got started in this business because of my attraction to West Side Story," Mantegna says. "I grew up like that, on the West Side of Chicago - Cicero, Ill... . I saw that movie 11 times, and now it’s almost like a circle that’s completing itself."

One of Mantegna’s films with Mamet, the dark, R-rated House of Games (1987), is on Amber Tamblyn’s all-time Top 10 list.

"It’s one of my favorite movies ever... . I came up to him and said, ’I really love House of Games,’ and he said, ’You’re too young to have seen that movie.’ "

Tamblyn has been acting for 12 years, eight of them professionally, playing Emily Quartermaine on General Hospital, following in the footsteps of another soapster who proved she could carry her own prime-time show, Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Slouchy, pudgy-faced and uncoordinated, and dressed in the most unremarkable duds, Joan Girardi is a far cry from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but Tamblyn’s acting is scintillating. Just her facial expressions add volumes to the sometimes dense, often funny, screen content. ("I wouldn’t want to do an hour drama that was... never funny," Steenburgen says. "That would bore me.")

The show rests squarely on Tamblyn’s shoulders, but she says she doesn’t worry about that.

"Nobody really applies pressure on me. I just have fun with everybody. As long as you get along with everybody, and it’s a family environment, you don’t have to think in those terms, and I think it’s better not to."

It helps that her material is first-rate. Creator Barbara Hall (Judging Amy) is obsessed with putting Joan on a higher plane than most TV. She gave the show’s writers a reading list on physics and metaphysics (samples: Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, God at the Speed of Light by T. Lee Baumann, and E = MC2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis).

And she has provided 10 commandments for Joan’s God, such as "God cannot directly intervene," "Everyone is allowed to say no to God, including Joan," and "God can never identify one religion as being right."

Though a recent show quoted Kübler-Ross and Kierkegaard, the result is not some stultifying philosophical death march. It’s a drama the whole family - especially the adults - can relate to, one in which the deus ex machina is actually God Himself, plopped with no trace of mystical fanfare into the scenery in a variety of human forms, from a little girl at the playground, to a crush-worthy boy, to the fat guy restocking the vending machine.

"Be not afraid," says the bum who appears behind the Dumpster.

"Be not afraid?" questions Joan, who is usually more aggravated than enthralled by God, and, like any self-respecting adolescent, always ready to talk back.

"Sometimes, I like to use the old-timey stuff."

He tells her to build a boat in the garage, or join the cheerleading squad, or take advanced-placement chemistry, not in the service of The Church, but to reach her potential as a human being and to propel relationships with family and television’s most affecting assortment of high schoolers since My So-Called Life.

There is no God on the set today, however, just an electrician who disables the microwave motor, leaving the lighting intact.

A prop person finds another box of Hot Pockets. Shooting resumes, and quickly stops.

"Is everybody hearing all that crinkling of the cellophane on the Hot Pockets?" Hayman bellows. Well, at least some people are.

So Luke, played by Michael Welch, starts again, with the un-cellophaned box, expounding on how microwaves actually energize food, while his sister Joan races to turn on the kitchen TV because God is anchoring the 6 o’clock news.