Altered states

United States of Tara starring Toni Collette. Photo / Supplied

Television is really embracing its dark side or, in the case of United States Of Tara, its many different dark sides. This new TV3 show is the latest incarnation in the freak-out-of-water genre. Used to be you plopped an alien or a magical creature into the middle of suburban middle-class America, like that Orkan from Mork & Mindy or that nose-twitcher in Bewitched, and watched them struggle with PTA meetings and suburban cul-de-sacs. But the updated formula replaces the alien with someone with a freakish abnormality.

The New York Times says 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. Or, as is the case with Tara, identities." The United States Of Tara has a new dysfunction to add to the already chronicled middle-class criminals, Vicodin-addicts, polygamists, gypsies and serial killers. This time it features a lead character with dissociative personality disorder.

Toni Collette plays Tara Gregson, a suburban wife and mother who periodically adopts different personas, including T, a rowdy sex-crazed teenage girl; Buck, a beer-swilling redneck, and Alice, a cake-baking housewife. No surprise she won an Emmy for this role, given multiple-personality characters are catnip to actresses - think Sally Field in Sybil - but I'm not sure Collette deserved it. She's a fine actress, capable of reflecting nuances of emotion, so it's disappointing that for all its contrived quirkiness that suggests subtlety is at work, United States Of Tara is downright hammy. Is this the beginning of the end for the dark comedy genre? If television's post-American Beauty nausea with middle America has not yet jumped the shark, I sense it is swimming around with an ominous cello soundtrack. Tara is apparently meant to be depicted as a lovable woman who is struggling with a disabling condition, but why did the series' creator Diablo Cody have to make her alter-egos such moronic caricatures? In this Tuesday's first episode, the show makes it clear Tara only recently stopped taking medication because the drugs were suppressing her artistic inspiration and sex drive. She figures that by letting her repressed selves free, she may also finally get to the root of the childhood trauma that caused her personality to split and multiply. I hope this plot development turns out to be suspenseful, because a whole series of Tara's ghastly alter egos embarrassing her children will be excruciating, even with the redeeming features of the supporting cast.

Tara's husband, Max, (John Corbett from Sex and the City), is superhumanly tolerant of his wife's vagaries, but the couple's two children are the best-drawn characters. Fifteen-year-old Kate (Brie Larson) and 14-year-old Marshall (Keir Gilchrist) are Juno-esque characters - stroppy and rebellious but also vulnerable and kind-hearted. "Why can't mum be manic depressive like all the other mums?" Kate rails. Her sweetness and her gay brother's cupcake baking and passion for Thelonious Monk prove that "dark comedies" are simply tedious unless there is also some light.

* The United States Of Tara debuts on TV3, Tuesday at 9.30pm.