The United States of Tara - Showtime series

Television
The Four (at Least) Faces of Tara

By JEANNE DORIN McDOWELL
Published: January 9, 2009
LOS ANGELES


TWO years ago, when the Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody (“Juno”) began working on “United States of Tara,” Showtime’s new series about a woman with dissociative identity disorder (commonly known as multiple personality disorder), she knew she was tiptoeing onto a creative minefield.

Though “United States of Tara,” which begins next Sunday, was conceived as a comedic look at how a family copes under extraordinary circumstances, it also had to acknowledge the heartbreak of Tara Gregson (Toni Collette), a wife and mother, as she deals with a disorder that wreaks havoc on her life
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“I was nervous at the outset,” Ms. Cody said. “The pilot couldn’t be ‘sitcomy’ but, at the same time, it had to be funny. It was a big challenge to find the humor in everyday life and not poke fun at the disorder. And I wanted to be as sensitive as possible.”

“Sensitive” is not exactly a prescription for great comedy. Humorous takes on subjects like split personality are few and far between, and when they show up — for example, in the Farrelly brothers’ “Me, Myself & Irene,” starring Jim Carrey — they tend toward outrageous antics. Typically dissociative identity disorder is given a more sober treatment, as in the 1976 television movie “Sybil” starring Sally Field or the 1957 melodrama “The Three Faces of Eve” with Joanne Woodward. Or it just veers into the land of the ludicrous, like soap operas. (Erika Slezak, playing Viki Lord Davidson on “All My Children,” wrestled with a bout of multiple personality disorder in the 1980s.)

But the show’s creators, and executives at Showtime, who have embraced deeply flawed characters and pathology-driven series like “Dexter” (about a serial killer) and “Californication” (about a sex addict), said they thought they had found a middle ground, a way for this combustible mix of humor, morbid fascination and empathy to find an audience. “We’re not trying to make a broad slapstick comedy; there’s nothing funny about” the disorder, said Robert Greenblatt, the president of Showtime Entertainment. “People who know nothing about dissociative identity disorder have to be able to watch and believe it could be real. We’re hoping to find funny repercussions as this family deals with Tara’s different personalities.”

Those personalities, or alters as they’re called, provide much of the color, conflict and dark comedy. Ms. Cody said thinking up Tara’s alters was the “magical part.” There’s T, a rebellious, hypersexual, thong-baring 16-year-old who steals Tara’s credit cards and smokes pot with her daughter Kate (Brie Larson); Alice, an aproned 1950s-type homemaker (like June Cleaver with O.C.D.); and Buck, a surly Vietnam vet with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth, a collection of porn tapes under the bed — which he watches with Tara’s husband Max (John Corbett) — and a shotgun he calls Persephone.

The series’s writers, who have worked on shows including “30 Rock” and “Six Feet Under,” were mindful of how easy it would be to depend too much on the alters’ antics. “We don’t want to fall into some kind of parody of ‘alter of the week,’ ” said the executive producer Alexa Junge, a veteran television writer (“Friends”) who was brought on to help Ms. Cody, a television novice. “We’ve taken great pains to make the alters very real. All the members of the family have relationships with them. If we just played it for comic relief, it would be a much more shallow show.”

The personalities — funny, tragic, disruptive, even protective — do feel like members of the Gregson family. When Tara’s son, Marshall (Keir Gilchrist), provokes his English teacher, a fierce Alice takes up his fight. Wearing a dated shirtwaist dress, white gloves and flaming orange lipstick, she eviscerates the teacher and, in the process, gets Marshall a chance to improve his grade. Later Marshall marvels at Alice’s aplomb. “Oh, piffle,” she chirps.
But the alters are also an expression of Tara’s deepest, and still not understood, anguish. They wear clothes that Tara wouldn’t be caught dead in, try to seduce her husband (Tara and Max have agreed he won’t have sex with them) and steal chunks of her memory. They emerge and recede, and Tara has no idea where she has been or what she has done. When Max reminds her that they knew the gang would come out when she went off her meds, she snaps, “Yeah, it’s a regular multiple personality reunion tour.”

“They’re all a reflection of what’s going on internally with Tara,” Ms. Collette said. “The humor is inherent in the material, but there’s always the ache under there somewhere and a yearning to understand what’s caused this.” The writers constantly ask themselves where the comedy is. “It never comes from making fun of a woman who can’t control herself,” Ms. Junge said. “It’s in getting the right tone for the show. The flip side of that is how funny do we make it? How much funny is too funny?”

That said, “United States of Tara” is bound to ruffle a few feathers among mental health professionals as well as those with the disorder. Dissociative identity disorder is a contentious diagnosis: some professionals say the disorder is overdiagnosed; others say it doesn’t even exist. The writers have given that point of view a place on the show. Tara’s sister, Charmaine (Rosemarie DeWitt), is the voice of skepticism, saying that Tara is “pretending” for the attention.
But the series’s writers and producers have done their research. Richard Kluft, a professor at the Temple University School of Medicine who is an expert on the disorder, reviews scripts and steers the show away from inaccuracies.
Ultimately the creators and Showtime executives hope that the obvious metaphor in “United States of Tara” — that we all struggle with our fragmented selves — will be easy for viewers to relate to. (The show’s genesis was a conversation between Steven Spielberg, an executive producer on the show, and his wife, the actress Kate Capshaw, about the ways in which we compartmentalize our lives.)
At its heart is a close-knit family with good kids who love their mother (most of the time), a staple of the family comedy from television’s beginnings. “We’re lucky, mom,” Marshall tells Tara. “Because of you we get to be interesting.” You get the feeling that these people are in it together — even if Mommy did turn into a man and beat the tar out of Kate’s boyfriend in front of the school.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 1, 2009 An article on Jan. 11 about the television show “United States of Tara,” whose protagonist has dissociative identity disorder (once known as multiple personality disorder), misidentified a soap opera character who has the illness and the actress who portrays her. Viki Lord Davidson, a character on ABC’s “One Life to Live” played by Erika Slezak, has the disorder — not Erica Kane, a character on ABC’s “All My Children” portrayed by Susan Lucci.