Created by Steven Spielberg

Showtime, Sundays at 10 PM

Showtime is working hard at capturing the hearts (and minds!) of American Premium Channel subscribers, and ‘United States of Tara’ is the last in a short line of incredible shows. This time they have tapped Toni Collette (Oscar and Golden Globe Nominated, you’ll remember her from the Sixth Sense and Little Miss Sunshine) as Tara, a mother with a complicated medical diagnosis and an unconventional approach.The show is written by Diablo Cody (Oscar winning writer of ‘Juno’), and so far, I’m captivated. When I first saw the previews, I wondered mightily about the premise. If it had been on another network, I probably would have passed it by. But after Weeds and Dexter, I trusted Showtime enough to check it out.

Tara Gregson is a housewife and mother of two, living in Kansas. She suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID, sometimes also referred to as Multiple Personality Disorder). As we discover over the first two episodes, Tara’s condition has previously been controlled by medications, but that they gave her a flat affect, and took away her ability to connect with others. She makes the decision, along with her husband Max, and her teenage children Kate and Marshall, to stop taking her medications. They undertake this as an experiment, knowing that Tara’s other personalities (or ‘Alters’ as they are called on the show) would inevitably emerge. The desire of the family is to find out what Tara gets out of her relationships with her Alters. Presumably, they will try to reintegrate Tara’s personalities – a legitimate treatment for the disorder. Living with a mother and three of her other personalities is quite a challenge for the family, as you might imagine. Marshall (Tara’s teenage son, who will clearly be playing the role of conscience in the show) summed it up adroitly in the Pilot episode when he claimed that at least the family gets to ‘be interesting’. This theory is not shared by Tara’s sister Charmaine, who seems to think that Tara is just ‘acting’….

Let me tell you. If Tara is acting, she should win next year’s Emmy for Best Female Performance. Because I’m pretty sure that Toni Collette is a slam dunk for the award. So far I’ve met three of the Alters, and each time I am fully convinced of them as actual alternative personalities. Hm… let me try that another way: I know that Toni is acting. She is obviously flawless in her characterization of the three Alters. But somehow she manages to shade the performance so delicately that Tara is still something else entirely. The Altars don’t feel like Tara acting. It’s the darnedest thing.

The first Alter we meet is ‘T’, an obnoxious, promiscuous, party-loving 15 year old girl. She and teenage daughter Kate get along famously, and T provides Kate with birth control pills and shopping sprees. T’s hyper-sexuality in combination with Tara’s husband Max (John Corbett – Aidan from Sex and The City) provides us with our first glimpse of the inevitable moral questions raised by Showtime programming. Even more disturbing, the behavior of daughter Kate in the early episodes made me faintly queasy. This kid is a sexual animal, and I’m not sure I’m looking forward to finding out why.

Next up is Buck, the only male Alter so far. He is a trucker-type, who claims his penis was shot off in Vietnam. He is loud, abraisive, generally drunk, and creepy with the ladies. Interestingly, Buck is left handed – flawlessly so, as we see him doing very well at the gun range with Max and Marshall.

Finally, everyone’s least favorite Alter is Alice. A June Cleaveresque nightmare, she is hopelessly out of touch with anything outside of the kitchen. Unless another human happens to be in the kitchen. Then she’s hopelessly out of touch with everything. She drinks martinis and sneaks cooking sherry while making perfectly created scrapbooks. Honestly, Alice scares me a bit more than either of the others. I’m not sure why yet, but mark my words!

Although these are the first three Alters, I doubt they are the only ones we’ll meet this season. I am already completely hooked – I can’t wait for the great roller coaster I know is ahead. If you haven’t tuned into ‘United States of Tara’ yet, don’t worry. You’ve only missed the first three episodes. If you can’t get them in re-runs or On Demand, you can at least catch up here at the official website. Swing over to Showtime after the Superbowl tonight and catch Sunday night’s newest guilty pleasure!

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