Four entertaining personalities unite in Showtime's new 'Tara'

    Only creative masterminds like Steven Spielberg and Diablo Cody could come up with Showtime's newest program, "United States of Tara." The show portrays a middle-class woman's struggle with dissociative identity disorder, which causes her to morph into different alter egos when she is stressed or upset. The odd premise actually works since Cody's writing lends a certain humor and tenderness to an extremely serious condition.
    Tara Gregson (played by Toni Collette) has decided to go off her medication in order to live a more involved life with her husband and two children. The drawback is that her medication was the only thing suppressing her "alters:" T, Buck and Alice.
    Tara's supportive husband Max (John Corbett) does his best to hold together his family when Tara's alters wreak havoc. He must fend off the sexual advances of T, a fun 15-year-old girl who, in the pilot, comes out when Tara discovers that her daughter Kate (Brie Larson) has a prescription for morning-after pills. He also must protect his gay son Marshall (Keir Gilchrist) from the homophobic Buck, Tara's male alterego. When Tara sees Kate being physically abused by her boyfriend, Buck comes out and starts a fistfight in front of the entire school.
    The series follows Tara's struggle to control and understand her alter egos while dealing with the everyday stresses of being a working wife and mother.
    In the hands of a lesser actress, Tara Gregson and her three alter egos could seem silly, making "United States of Tara" just another bizarre television show without any internal drama. Collette, however, has perfected the role of an emotionally fragile mother in movies like "The Sixth Sense" (1999) and "Little Miss Sunshine" (2006).
    Here, not only is she playing her choice role, but she also gets to have fun with the alters, and her acting is never unbelievable or over-the-top. Collette easily changes from Tara to T to Buck with nothing more than a deep breath; she changes her facial expressions, her voice, her walk and her mannerisms to give life to each character separately.
    The show's supporting cast holds its own next to Collette, especially Gilchrist as Tara's son. Gilchrist takes on one of the more difficult roles in the show since he is playing an adolescent boy embracing his homosexuality. Larson as the hormonal teenage daughter is funny to watch, and she can carry an emotional scene, while Corbett falls into the nice-guy role he played in "Sex and the City" quite easily.
    Rosemarie DeWitt, who received critical acclaim after starring in "Rachel Getting Married" (2008) with Anne Hathaway, makes an appearance as Charmaine, Tara's skeptical sister. She is clearly the voice for skeptics who do not believe Tara's disease is real, but Cody portrays her as whiny and selfish, clearly establishing her views on nonbelievers.
    Cody's writing shines and can be considered the other star of the show. The woman can make an audience laugh and cry, all the while creating a modern vocabulary to suck in younger viewers. Sometimes, however, Cody's writing can seem too cool, forcing the viewer to question if the world Cody lives in really exists for the rest of us.
    She deals with a lot of dark, intense issues in just the pilot episode of "United States of Tara": abuse, mental disease, teenage sex and birth control and adolescent homosexuality. Cody seems to live in a world where family members take all of these problems in stride with only minor arguments and tantrums. If the audience somehow doesn't get the family love message, Marshall's line, "We're lucky, Mom. Because of you, we get to be interesting," hammers it home.
    Cody does create many tender moments, such as a family bowling outing during which Buck teaches Marshall how to bowl and then wrestles him into a headlock. She also manages to make the audience laugh with T's sexual antics with Max, Buck's distaste for Marshall's baking, and Marshall tagging in for Buck to beat up Kate's abusive boyfriend.
    The show combines all the right elements; the fresh concept of "United States of Tara" is intriguing, and the cast members create a group of simultaneously moving and entertaining characters.