The United States of Tara

You know, I really should be sitting around rewatching all of season 4 of Lost (AGAIN) or blogging endlessly about that mindblowing premiere of BSG, but The Movie Network and HBO Canada have been keeping me far too busy by having a LOT of good shows premiering this weekend. The latest begins tonight.

A new series from Showtime (who brought us the excellence of Dexter), The United States of Tara is about a housewife (Toni Collette) who has suffered from a severe multiple personality disorder her entire life. Her husband (John Corbett, of Northern Exposure and Sex and the City fame) has dealt with it for 17 years, and their two children have just learned to live with it. The episode opens with Tara having a fit into a camcorder because she's just found evidence of her daughter's sexual activities in her daughter's backpack, and we later discover that moments of high stress bring out the other personalities. And with that, she turns into T, the teenager who everyone in the family actually really likes, even if she's crass and has a tendency to fly into fits. But hey, she's got mom's credit card and none of her moral centre, so the daughter is happy.

In fact, everyone is happy, except Tara, who has to deal with whatever her "alters" did while she was trapped inside, unable to emerge. She knows T will say and do terrible things that will humiliate her, and even though her family doesn't look at the alters as being Tara in any way, she is upset by the lack of control. Just when she has it together again, she sees something that stresses her out once again, and boom, here comes Buck, the rude, racist, sexist, horrible, chain-smokin', truck-drivin' son of a bitch who calls the son gay and grabs the asses of her daughter's female friends. But Buck has his advantages, and by the end of this character my husband and I were howling with laughter. By the second episode, however, you start to see the effect the alters are having on the children. Especially when prim, proper Alice shows up, a 1950s take-no-shit housewife.

I think Toni Collette is genius, and she shines in this show. Once she moves into one of the alters, you really don't see Tara anymore, but the other personality that has invaded. I didn't see Buck as a man trapped in a woman's body, or as Toni Collette playing him, but as the beer-swilling asshole that he really was. That's talent. John Corbett is great as the husband who has learned to live with the personalities and the rules that come with them, and his problem is trying to fend off the other people outside of the family who haven't come to grips with her condition. The show is created and written by Diablo Cody, who wrote Juno (and writes a monthly column in Entertainment Weekly that is always entertaining) and the dialogue is crisp and fresh, just like in Juno. The music is all by the Eels, which is awesome, so fans of E should be tuning in.

One thing that's always irritated me with HBO series is they're always so brilliant, but the pilots are usually terrible (the exception is Big Love, which was awesome from the get-go). But Showtime always manages to pull us in right from the beginning, the The United States of Tara (get it?) is a show that will become a weekly must-see in our house. The show premieres tonight on The Movie Network at 9pm EST.