This is a dissociative identity disorder story for the post-Freudian era: Tara’s therapist is rarely seen, and seemingly not much of a factor in her life. The film “The Three Faces of Eve” and the television movie “Sybil” focused on the dynamic between patient and psychiatrist and their joint struggle to solve the mystery. Cody begins Tara’s story where most multiple-personality movies end: after a diagnosis has been made, and the patient has resumed a somewhat normal life. He is well read, listens to Thelonious Monk, bakes cupcakes (“It’s Paula Deen’s recipe, tweaked slightly”) and is gay, and not afraid of letting his family know it.
“Why can’t she just be manic-depressive like all the other moms?” she laments. She accepts her mother’s condition, except when she resents it. Kate is pretty, slightly but not consistently rebellious, and interested in clothes, boys and having fun. Both are urbane, smart-mouthed and kindhearted. “Tara” was created and written by Diablo Cody, who wrote “Juno.” Not surprisingly, Tara’s two children, 15-year-old Kate (Brie Larson) and 14-year-old Marshall (Keir Gilchrist), stand out instantly: they are Junoesque characters, funny and touching in very different ways. Her understanding husband, Max (John Corbett), is such a trouper that he agrees not to have sex with any of what she calls her “alters,” even after T offers him a “Lolita moment” on the couch. By letting her repressed selves free, she figures, she may also finally get to the root of the childhood trauma that caused her personality to split and multiply.
When she is not T, a rowdy, sex-crazed teenage girl or Buck, a beer-swilling, gun-loving redneck or Alice, a cake-baking, ’50s-style homemaker, Tara has a career as an artist, painting decorative murals for rich women.Įarly on, the show establishes that Tara only recently stopped taking medication that suppressed her other identities because the drugs were deadening her artistic inspiration and her sex drive. Tara is depicted neither as a freak nor as a victim but as a valuable, lovable woman who happens to be burdened with more than her fair share of mood swings. Or, as is the case with Tara, identities.
These kinds of series mix the comedy of the protagonist’s battle to blend in with the quasi-tragic struggle to protect and preserve his or her true identity.
Premium cable networks have rejiggered the formula, taking instead a rare and alarming abnormality polygamy on HBO’s “Big Love,” serial killing on “Dexter” on Showtime and mainstreaming that unthinkable way of life into PTA meetings, office picnics and suburban cul-de-sacs. And that is why Showtime’s new half-hour series labels itself a “dark comedy.” A “light comedy” is a sitcom that finds its cultural collision by plopping an alien or a magical creature into the middle of suburban, middle-class America, like “Mork & Mindy” or “Bewitched.” The show’s comic conceit is that Tara’s loved ones treat her illness as an unenviable but livable condition like diabetes and humor her multiple personalities as old family friends or pesky neighbors. In Showtime’s “United States of Tara,” Toni Collette (“Muriel’s Wedding,” “Little Miss Sunshine”) plays a woman with dissociative identity disorder, which was once known as multiple personality disorder. Even “Diary of a Mad Housewife” never had an entry like this one: the heroine has a husband, two children and four personalities.