The sitcom, dismantled and rebuilt
Chuck was good last night, but before I think a lot about how this episode is working, I’m going to wait and see how the writers transition through this mid-season climax (the result of an original order for thirteen episodes) and into the end of the season (the subsequent result of NBC upping the order from thirteen to nineteen).
I do want to talk a little bit about The United States of Tara, which returned last night on Showtime for its second season. The first season was a bit bumpy, but made for some compelling watching, and I’ve been looking forward to seeing where the story would move. Part of its appeal is that the show doesn’t fit easily into any of the familiar TV genre molds, and even its duration makes it a bit of an oddball. The show runs half an hour (a full premium cable half-hour, that is, not the twenty-two minute network version), and is a wacky, tightly-wound play on the familiar half-hour sitcom format – the family story, where comedy and awwww-inducing melodrama build a regular, infinitely repeatable structure into each episode, Full-House-style. In this family story, there’s a dad and two adorably quirky kids, and they live in a lovely house and occasionally the crazy aunt comes to visit. And also, the mom has several multiple personalities, who range from a biker dude named Buck to a rebellious teenager named T, and they appear and disappear at frightening, unpredictable moments.
I wrote a bit about title sequences last week, and want to include The United States of Tara here, because they also do some impressive heavy lifting in building the mythology and tone of the show. (I find the music sort of annoying and unnecessarily repetitive, but the pop-up book aesthetic is pretty awesome.) The first images are of an American flag and a two-story middle-American home, which call back to the show’s sitcom ancestry and make a nice tie-in to the show’s title. The titles then shift into changing pop-ups of Tara’s three primary alternate personalities, and resolve with a close-up image of Tara’s face.
The show has a number of qualities that make it distinct from the simpler sitcom format, but the most significant one has to be the tone, which is largely shaped by irreverent Diablo Cody dialogue and trying emotional situations that constantly threaten to overturn the family into chaos and dissolution. The stakes are much higher here than on Full House, where there was never any question that Danny Tanner might pose a serious physical danger to his kids, and the show does a nice job of calling into question the premise of the usual, risk-free family sitcom fodder. And it’s not just that the stakes are higher – they’re really high, so that the entire family enterprise is perpetually skating around the enormous, terrifying reality of Tara as an entirely unknown quantity, deeply frightening and overwhelming. The show is packed with hazards and red flags.
Tara and her family
When it’s not working, The United States of Tara suffers slightly from Big Love-ism, where the circumstances are so messy and bizarre that they overtake any of the believable “we’re also a real American family!” underpinnings. The shows have essentially the same structure, in fact: let’s watch a family who live with some alien, upsetting but fascinating thing (polygamy, multiple personality disorder) try to be normal! But The United States of Tara on the whole does a much better job of balancing the diverging trends, and has the immensely helpful benefit of keeping the unusual and the normal stuck in the same house together, while Big Love shoves most of its crazy onto a giant compound out in the country.
That said, it looks like the second season of Tara is extending its reach slightly, with Tara and her husband considering purchasing a neighbor’s house, even while it becomes immediately clear that he house is a powerful trigger for Tara’s transitions. While it seems like that should make me worried that the show will develop Compound Complex, I’m actually pretty confident that it’ll be an interesting and productive shift. The neighbor’s house, after all, is right next door, and it has the potential to become a powerful metaphor for Tara’s mental state without spreading the show too thin.