The United States of Tara

Diablo Cody, the Oscar-winning writer of Juno, has created a new show for Showtime called "The United States of Tara." Produced by Steven Spielberg and starring Toni Collette (famous for a variety of stellar performances in Little Miss Sunshine, The Sixth Sense, and the unforgettably uncomfortable Muriel's Wedding) and John Corbett (famous mostly for playing Aidan on "Sex and the City," but older television viewers might remember him on "Northern Exposure"), "The United States of Tara" has quite an unusual premise for a half-hour dramedy.

Tara, a cynical interior designer, is married to Max, an unflappable landscaper. They have two kids. Kate is an incredibly self-conscious and outspoken 15-year-old with a tendency to date loser Japanijunkies. Marshall is her faggedy cinephile little brother. He drinks chai, listens to classic jazz and sleeps on zebra-print pillows. Diablo Cody probably could've constructed a comedy full of overstylized, zippy one-liners about a dysfunctional middle class family...and the show would've retained my interest for about 10 minutes.

Instead, that wacky ex-stripper had a stroke of genius: Tara also suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder. She has multiple personalities, and they are all hilarious. Much more fascinating than Tara herself. T is a 15-year-old who is tacky, wildly inappropriate, and the polar opposite of Alice, a 1950's type-A housewife who gets unbearable urges to iron Max's dungarees ("Don't put creases in my jeans, Alice!") and bakes an elaborate, kind of racist cake for a school bake sale benefiting Brazilian starving children or something. Alice is Donna Reed with a ticking time-bomb in the background.

The best by far, however, is Buck: a gun-loving, chainsmoking, homophobic hillbilly. Buck loves teasing Marshall and hitting on every female in sight, swaggering around in a cut-off flannel shirt and filthy baseball cap. While Toni Collette has already proven to us that she is a quality actress who really absorbs a role, she has blown me away with Buck. Collette plays these four characters so convincingly that one can watch Tara transitioning from one personality to another solely through body language, before Collette even changes costume. It's marvelous to watch.

In fact, the almost commonplace treatment of Tara's DID is what makes "The United States of Tara" such a remarkable show. The subject matter is really off-the-wall, but it's treated as logically as any other problem one might find in a "normal" middle class American family, be it an alcoholic mother or a depressive father or a host of other problems. The show, while containing this element of crazy, instead focuses on how it affects the family on a quotidian level, and finds very refreshing, very unusual humor there. For example, which alter-identity is her daughter's favorite? Her husband's? Her son's? What are we to make of the possibility that these alter-identities, even while wreaking havoc on her children's reputations in school, are actually helping Tara mother her children when she feels most unable?

The show raises so many interesting questions, and is so much less stylized and irritating than Juno (don't get me wrong, I loved Juno, but to me it did not hit at the kind of realism and emotional immediacy that makes me want to continue watching a family dramedy). Having only watched three episodes, I am completely hooked. Highly recommended.