United States of Tara

Conference in the center of the mind.

Tara Gregson (Toni Collette) is a mid-30s mother of two with Dissociative Identity Disorder. After Tara takes a break from her meds to discover the cause, three of her alters resurface: Buck, a male alter who likes the firing range and claims to have lost his member in 'Nam; Alice, a 1950s housewife who claims to have attended Radcliffe at Harvard; and T, a pot-smoking, flirty teenager who likes maxing out Tara's credit cards. Additional alters surface during the course of the series: Gimme, a Wild Child seemingly incapable of speech; Shoshana Schoenbaum, a therapist whose book Tara read, and who is a dead ringer for the real deal; Chicken, Tara's personality when she was a child; and Bryce Craine, an alter based on Tara's half-brother.

United States of Tara is an American Dramedy that explores the effect DID can have on a family. That family in this case includes her husband, Max; her daughter, Kate, and son, Marshall, all three of whom have problems of their own. Max has more patience than Job, Kate's going through that awkward time known as the teenage years and Marshall has to deal with being an openly gay 14-year-old (and Buck being the manliest of men).

The series was created by Steven Spielberg and written by Diablo Cody. It began running on Showtime in January of 2009 and ran for three seasons.

Tropes used in United States of Tara include:
  • All Girls Want Bad Boys: Kate's first shown boyfriend (Ben, I think) is a Goth and an abusive douchebag.
  • Arc Words: Youwillnotwin.
  • Attractive Bent Gender: Depending on the person, Buck. Depending on even stranger people, Bryce.
  • Ax Crazy: Tara's new alter, Bryce Craine, based off her half-brother who abused her.
  • Bittersweet Ending: The series finale "The Good Parts". Tara makes amends with the whole family; Max is able to finally vent out all his frustrations healthily; Marshall is beginning to take tiny steps in accepting Lionel's death and decides not to shut Tara out of his life; Charmaine has finally matured and asks Neil to marry her; and Kate for once in her life is in a healthy relationship that she isn't rushing. Bryce seems to be out of the picture, but Tara decided to lock herself in "the loony bin" in Boston to be regularly seen by one of the leading therapists that specializes in DID. One of the final scenes shows that Alice, T, and Buck are still around so it's not a 100% guarantee that Bryce is gone for good, or if the other alters are alive.
  • Bury Your Gays: Lionel.
  • Calling the Old Man Out: Tara confronts her mother and demands to know why they were sent to a foster home. A definite Crowning Moment of Awesome.
  • Camp Gay: Lionel, the queen of the 'Gayble'.
  • Cannot Spit It Out: Tara to her family, particularly Max, about how she's transitioning to Buck again. And had apparently sparked a relationship with a female bartender.
  • Cerebus Syndrome: The Bryce Craine storyline.
  • Character Development: Everyone. The most obvious examples would be Kate and Charmaine's transformations over the series.
  • Closer to Earth: Gender Flipped. Max is "a member of that strange breed of TV husband that exhibits infinite patience", to quote the New Yorker. To be fair, though, Tara does have a pretty good justification for not always being level-headed.
    • Subverted as of Season 2. Max in a fit of rage beats the hell out of the contractor who didn't show up to fix up the new house he bought. On his kid's birthday.
  • Club Kid: Lionel likes parties, drugs, and anonymous sex.
  • Conference in the Center of the Mind: When Tara declares the beginning of her "dictatorship" but makes arrangements with each of the alters.
  • Country Matters: Tara gets into trouble for this.
  • Darkest Hour: The entirety of "Crunchy Ice".
  • Darker and Edgier: Boy, Diablo Cody is a lot darker than we originally thought.
  • Driven to Suicide: The Gregsons' neighbor in the Season 2 premiere. Attempted by Tara Gregson in "Crunchy Ice".
  • Effeminate Misogynistic Guy: Lionel Trane was so misogynistic that he made other, more mature and secure gay characters uncomfortable.
  • Epunymous Title
  • Failure Is the Only Option: At the beginning of Season 2, Tara has been alter-free for three months. Guess what happens at the end of the episode.
  • Fille Fatale: T has elements of this, what with her aggressively hitting on Max and later on Jason.
  • Freudian Excuse: A rather heartbreaking one: Tara was sexually abused year nine at her boarding school. To make matters worse, it's revealed that her being raped wasn't the trauma that caused her to dissociate, since T was already active.
    • It's revealed in the Season 2 finale that when Tara was five-years-old, her and Charmaine's parents took in her father's son from a previous marriage, who was "troubled" and was implied to have repeatedly sexually abused her. Tara and Charmaine were moved to a foster home for a while; the woman who took them in inspired one of Tara's alters, Alice.
  • Ghost in the Machine: Probably not in the actual series proper, but the title sequence stylistically represents the three alters living in a house that turns into Tara's head. It won an Emmy.
  • I Call It Vera: Buck has a gun called Persephone.
  • If You Ever Do Anything to Hurt Her...: Despite the actual words never being said, since he was already hurting Kate, Buck and Marshall just decide to skip straight to making good on the threat.
  • "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: Excruciatingly subverted in "Crunchy Ice".
  • Important Haircut: "Don't you know? Tara's never coming back."
  • Infant Immortality: Averted. When Bryce starts violently killing the alters, sweet and innocent 5 year old Chicken is the first to be murdered.
  • Informed Attribute: While the flashbacks to Mimi clearly showed her as having Alice's exact personality, when Tara tracked her down in the present everyone was still reacting as if she was much more Alice-like than she appeared to be. While prim and proper, she was very much Alice-lite.
  • Invisible to Gaydar: Marshall and Noah.
  • Jerkass: For the first six and a half episodes, Charmaine was pretty consistently a massive bitch about her sister's mental illness. She gets better, thankfully.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Buck has his moments of sensitivity.
  • Kirk Summation: In the second episode, Alice rips Marshall's English teacher to shreds over his bad high school experiences. Needless to say, he reconsiders his treatment of Marshall.
    • Shoshanna for many of the main characters after her introduction, particularly Tara. She is a therapist after all.
    • Grandma Sandi has an epic, and unexpected, one for Bryce Craine.
  • Knight of Cerebus: Bryce Craine.
  • Laughably Evil: Say what you want about Bryce, he's entertaining.
  • Mama Bear: Alice with a whole heap of Tranquil Fury and a side of Kirk Summation. Aside from her family Alice believes she's one for Tara herself because, in her words, Tara is weak.
  • Mood Whiplash: After Pammy the bartender declared her love for Buck at the ice rink, Max angrily stormed off which left Tara alone and depressed. Then Kate picks up the thread of a conversation she and Marshall were having earlier, explaining a perverse sexual position -- "the dogs in the bathtub" -- to him.

Kate: So the dogs are your balls and the bathtub is her--

    • "Crunchy Ice" is the darkest episode of the series, but of course its chock full of Black Comedy. It's even lampshaded by Marshall.

Marshall: It's laugh or cry time here at the musée d'arte. I choose laugh.

Grandma Sandi: Everything that's happened to your family, your kids, your husband, everything they are, everything they could've been but aren't, it's all your fault. And if you touch my tree, I'll break your fucking fingers.

  • Occidental Otaku: Kate's first shown boyfriend is a Goth and, to be blunt, Wapanese.
  • Papa Wolf: Buck will kick your ass if you mess with his loved ones. Ask Kate's ex-boyfriend. And like Alice, he is also defensive of Tara as seen in the Season 1 finale when he tried to jump one of the guys who raped Tara/T in high school.
  • Romantic False Lead: Charmaine's new boyfriend, "Fake Uncle" Nick, is a Nice RFL with regards to the relationship between her and Neil, until the wedding.
  • Shout-Out: Tara has an Ax Crazy Split Personality that mimics a family member who she had an abusive relationship with. Sound familiar? Extra points for being named Bryce Craine, akin to the Decoy Protagonist Marion Crane.
  • Slasher Smile: This is how you know Bryce has come out to play.
  • Soap Punishment: Alice, one of Tara's alters who is a 1950s housewife, invokes this trope after Kate gives her Ethical Slut rant. Alice follows through on the threat, driving Kate to get a job so she can move out (which becomes a major subplot for the next two seasons).
  • Split Personality: Of course!
  • Split Personality Merge: As with Truth in Television, the ultimate goal of Tara's therapy is for her to integrate.
  • Split Personality Takeover: Alice seems at times like she wants to do this, what with her "I'll be around all the time" speech to Marshall in the second episode and her deriding Tara for being weak in the season finale.
    • This also seems to be Bryce's plan. He "killed" Chicken and asked to be taken to Tara so he can do the same to her. Later on he killed Shoshana and then Gimme. On "Crunchy Ice" he killed Buck, T. and Alice as well.
  • Stalker with a Crush: Gene gets really creepy over Kate. As does Courtney over Marshall, though to a lesser degree.
  • Stepford Smiler: Alice. Trapped in an eternal Eisenhower era housewife personality, said to secretly get drunk off cooking wine and initially seems hellbent on staying in control of Tara's body. Though over time her own psychosis lessens as she learns to work with Tara.
  • Talking to Themself: In Season 1, Alice was the only one that was able to communicate with the other alters and claimed that she had no idea where Tara would go to when she took over the body; in Season 2, Tara was able to have an argument with Buck and have therapy with Shoshana; in Season 3, Tara is able to fully communicate with them all and even summoned them for a conference.
    • In Season 3, some alters were having conversations with each other while Tara was Locked Out of the Loop. But she was still able to see and hear them.
  • The Three Faces of Eve: Pretty solidly averted. T is a pretty easy fit into the Seductress, but that's complicated by her being the literal Child of the three. Alice seems to be the Mother, but she's also highly sexual while still being naïve enough to believe that Tara's IUD won't work because she doesn't "believe in them". Tara's just complicated, as people tend to be.
    • Tara's additional alters further complicate things. Chicken is obviously the child so that clears that portion up, but it's hard to deny that T can fit in the archetype as well; T, Alice, and Shoshana have shades of the seductress but the latter two also have many traits of the mother.
  • Title Drop: In "Wheels".

Tara: I'm dissolving the United States of Tara and declaring myself king.

  • The Twink: Lionel, and to an extent, Marshall.
  • Unexplained Recovery: Alice, T. and Buck as of the finale.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: Gene and Jason from the first season both vanished without mention by Season 2. Possibly justified since a fair amount of time is implied to have passed between the two seasons so any manner of things could have happened to the two characters to prevent them showing up again.
    • Jason is mentioned a couple of times in the second season.
    • Also the case with T, who doesn't appear at all in the second season and is only talked about once.
      • Actually, she does appear in the penultimate episode of the second season, if only briefly. She comes out before Chicken at the Parmeters' house, to accuse Mimi's husband Dwayne of abusing Tara.
  • Wild Child: God only knows if Gimme is a child or even HUMAN, but its 'poncho-goblin' aesthetic certainly makes Tara look feral when it comes out to play.
    • In "Wheels", during the conference in Tara's mind T refers to Gimme by saying they should "drown the dog." Gimme responds by biting her, then barking.
  • Wild Teen Party: Marshall throws one with Kate's help when his parents are gone in the hopes that the boy he likes will come. Charmaine immediately thinks Kate is to blame.
  • Woman Scorned: Marshall's reaction to his crush making out with T is to set her shed on fire and watch as it burns. It's very Medea.
  • You Have Got to Be Kidding Me!
  • You Keep Using That Word: "Multiple personalities is DID, and schizophrenia is hearing voices."
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