United States of Tara, "Torando": Beautiful disaster

A review of tonight's "United States of Tara" coming up just as soon as my anger is a very pretty costume...

"Group time. Who wants to begin?" -Shoshana

We're at the midway point of season two, so why not lock most of the regulars into the Hubbard basement for some bonding and uncomfortable truths?

"Torando" - named for the misspelling on the TV weather report that so unnerves Marshall - ultimately didn't go as full "Breakfast Club" as I was expecting once the Gregsons, Charmaine and Ted and Hanny(*) went into the basement together - but, of course, it couldn't. Still lots of season to go, lots more to be revealed about Tara's psyche, the childhood secret that she and Charmaine share (that fractured Tara's mind and made Charmaine afraid of basements), and the state of Tara and Max's marriage.

(*) But not, interestingly, Courtney, whom I would have pegged for a berth in the basement just so she could weird out Marshall and his new grown-up gay role models with her plan to be a "celibate power couple." Down the road, I guess.

But "Torando" still offered us plenty of revelations, including a lot more detail about Shoshana and Tara's relationship with her. I wondered all through last week's episode whether Shoshana knew she was an alter, and it becomes clear here that she does, and that this fact doesn't seem to matter to either her or Tara when it comes to their "therapy." (And it was also interesting to see Ted acknowledge how much she resembles the real Shoshana, other than the slight lisp - and then funny to see Max and Charmaine simultaneously tell him not to tell Tara that, lest the lisp become part of the character.) I don't know if there's an actual case of an alter being used as a healing tool like this, but as a dramatic device, it works, particularly in an episode like this where the other characters were all trapped with Shoshana and forced to listen to her psycho-analyze them. (And because Shoshana is an alter, with a slightly over-the-top Noo Yawk accent from Toni Collette, we can laugh a bit at her rather than feel uncomfortable that the show is using Shoshana to tell us things about the characters we should be able to figure out in less obvious ways.)

And in addition to Shoshana, we got rapid-fire appearances by Buck, and Alice, and even Gimme, as Collette got to prove once and for all how unnecessary last year's alter costumes were. She's good enough to tell you exactly who she's playing without the pumps and the ponchos and the hunting vests, isn't she?

And for all of Max's despair about the flickering light at the end of the tunnel, and Marshall's unease about what the "Torando" misspelling says about society, and everyone's fear of the storm's damage, in the end the Gregsons do what they usually do in these circumstances: they took pain (or, in this case, fear), and they (literally) danced around it. And in the final moments of the episode, Tara stepped out of the Hubbard house and into the wreckage of their neighborhood (in a sequence gorgeously shot by Craig Gillespie). Tara's as much a mess as that tornado-ravaged street, but in the end she and her family will have to pick up and start trying to patch things up again.

Finally, in case you missed the news earlier today, I'll be moving to HitFix.com in a week's time. While I've tried to get these "Tara" reviews up by the time the show finishes airing on Monday nights, I suspect the next week is going to be chaotic enough that my review of episode 7 will be one of the first things I post to the HitFix version of the blog on Tuesday, rather than one of the last things I post here on Monday. So I look forward to discussing "Department of (Bleeped)-Up Family Services" with you at HitFix next week.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

United States of Tara, "Doin' Time": Patient, heal thyself

A review of tonight's "United States of Tara" coming up just as soon as I totally subvert the hero archetype...

"She said that you need me to be sick! Because it's the only f--king thing holding us together!" -Tara

If season one of "Tara" was in part about showing how a marriage could hold together in spite of ridiculous stumbling blocks, season two has shown us that there are some things that even the most laid-back husband will not stand for (even if he's played by the guy who kept taking back Carrie Bradshaw after she screwed him over again and again and again). Between Buck's affair, Tara keeping it a secret and now the emergence of another alter - whom Tara is treating not as another symptom, but as a possible cure - Max is about at his breaking point. And Tara taking her sweet time to bail him out of jail while she had a roadside therapy session with Shoshana sure didn't help.

But is Tara right with what she says above? Does their marriage succeed in spite of the DID, or because of it?

Diablo Cody gave an interview to New York Magazine's Vulture blog a couple of weeks where she confessed to dissatisfaction with the show's first season, and specifically with how she and the writing staff serviced Tara herself:

Ironically, I felt that Tara was one of the least interesting characters on the show last season — the audience responded to her various alters, but not to her. So in season two, we’ll get acquainted with Tara, the core identity of the character, and get some insight into her weirdness and her pain and what drives her forward through this endless storm of transition and treatment.

Looking back at my reviews of the first season, I can see where she's coming from, as I tended to respond more to the alters, or Max, or Marshall or the rest of the family, with Tara sort of along for the ride.

And if Tara's behavior earlier in this season in letting Buck and Pammy's affair go on, or here in letting Max stew in jail so she can talk to Shoshana (and possibly avoid being committed by Max) seems more selfish than before, then at least it's Tara making choices, as opposed to being dragged through life by her alters. It's showing us the imperfections of Tara, and of her marriage to Max, and it's making me more interested in what happens to her, even if I don't always like what it is she's doing.

And the idea of Tara having co-consciousness with her alters allows for Tara's seemingly insane idea of using Shoshana as an actual therapist to make a weird kind of sense. On one level, it's just an excuse for Toni Collette to act opposite a green-screened version of herself, but she so far is doing that well. And if this series is going to be about this war going on inside Tara's psyche, there have to be times when it's just Tara with another version of herself. And the show's portrayal of the co-consciousness gave us that great visual at the end where a fed up Max accepted Shoshana's existence and chose to talk to her under the veil of "doctor"/patient confidentiality, with Tara having to sit out in the hallway of her own mind while her husband shares his innermost thoughts (about her) with one of her alters.

A few other thoughts:

• Because Pammy is a waitress at Max's favorite bar, he has to be frequently reminded of how his wife snuck around on him. And I loved the way Pammy described Tara to Max to remind him of how intimate she was with his wife: "She tastes like rain. Sometimes kiwi fruit. And once, she tasted like a penny." Between that and Marshall and Kate's discussion about Uncle Jemima and Mr. Butterworth, Sheila Callaghan's script had some of the sharpest dialogue of the season so far.

• As I suspected, Charmaine's baby turns out to be Neil's, and that revelation forces her to admit her true, conflicted feelings about the two men in her life: "I want my wedding pictures with Nick, but I want my wedding night with Neil."

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

United States of Tara, "You Becoming You": The talking cure

A review of tonight's "United States of Tara" coming up just as soon as I crack the spine...

"Is Joel Gretsch going to be back as Tara's therapist next season?" -Me, August '09
"No, Tara will have a new therapist." -Diablo Cody
"Oh? Who'd you cast?" -Me
"I can't tell you yet. I promise I'll tell you when I can." -Cody

"Back in the summer, you said you couldn't tell me yet who will play Tara's therapist this season." -Me, January '10
"I still can't tell you." -Cody
"Seriously?" -Me
"Nope. I'll tell you when I can." -Cody

For a while, I assumed the mystery surrounding the new therapist was one of those Clooney-returns-to-"ER" deals, where the actor had enough clout (and enough disinterest in hype) to insist his or her casting not be announced in advance. Then I came to the end of "You Becoming You," and I understood exactly why Cody wanted/needed to keep this particular secret: because the "new therapist" was actually Tara's newest alter, Shoshana, modeled on gay neighbor Ted's real therapist Shoshana in New York.

Of course, sometime between January and now, either Cody or someone at Showtime who outranks her decided to not keep it entirely a secret. Shoshana has been in a lot of the promotional art, and after I watched this episode a few weeks back I saw a couple of interviews with other "Tara" producers that gave away some details about the character, but not necessarily that Tara's psyche created her in lieu of finding an actual therapist. Still, I'm glad I got to be fully surprised. I assumed Tara was lying to Max about talking to the real Shoshana, but only to get him off her back after the Pammy fiasco, so I was nicely dumbfounded when Max walked in on the reality of the situation.

But because Shoshana only appears briefly (while I've seen several more episodes), I'm going to set her aside and focus on some other parts of "You Becoming You," other than to say my eyebrows raised very high when I got a good look at the very Alice-like dress and red heels being worn by the woman in Tara's flashback.

Marshall's storyline continues to maybe the show's strongest blend of comedy and angst, and always wonderfully played by Keir Gilchrist. The Gregsons have always treated Marshall's sexuality as something that's understood but never really addressed head-on, and therefore it felt right that he should finally come out of the closet to his dad in the wake of his failed attempt to prove his heterosexuality with Courtney. Max's completely unruffled response to the announcement - "Good. So, you want anything?" - was a very John Corbett moment at a point in the season where Max is becoming less Corbett-like, and it turned out to be exactly the reaction Marshall needed. He needs to be accepted, but he doesn't really want to talk about it, and certainly not with his parents.

Charmaine, meanwhile, is pregnant, and after she and Tara started talking about the date of conception, my first thought was, "So, it's Neil's baby, right?" Whether it is or it isn't, I hope this story leads to more Patton Oswalt. And Kate's car trouble leads to the first of what should (if the writers were paying attention to how good Viola Davis is with what's so far a tiny part) be many meetings between Lynda and Tara.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

United States of Tara, "The Truth Hurts": Chasing Pammy

A review of tonight's "United States of Tara" - plus some guest commentary from Diablo Cody herself - coming up just as soon as my heterosexuality stresses me out...

"What you don't get is, people can have a hard time, and then they turn it around. People can change." -Max
"Yeah, people change. And then they change right back." -Neil

Okay, I have to admit that this one kind of troubled me at first - both that Tara would let Buck's relationship with Pammy run for as long as it did before trying to either stop it or tell Pammy the truth, and that she would then go over to Pammy's apartment in what seemed, based on the earlier scene with Charmaine and Ted talking about gay experiences, like an attempt by Tara to see how the other half lives.

I wrote last week about how I understood Tara's reluctance to tell Max (which predictably blew up in her face here when Pammy made a spectacle of herself at the ice rink), and even to an extent that she wouldn't be able to tell Pammy the whole truth upon finding out. (Pammy understands that Buck's not a man, but not that Buck isn't real.) But to let two weeks go by with Buck in the life of that woman and her daughters, and then to apparently take advantage of Pammy's ignorance to satisfy Tara's own curiosity? To me, when I first watched "The Truth Hurts," that bothered me a lot. Tara's not a perfect person, even when she's herself, but she never struck me as someone who would let others be hurt in this way.

So, since it was bugging me, I decided to go straight to the source and ask "Tara" creator/producer Diablo Cody for her take on the Buck/Pammy/Tara triangle. Here's what she had to say:

The story of Pammy and Buck is meant to illustrate that Tara is becoming increasingly co-conscious with the alters. Last season Tara had to piece together video and stories to figure out what the alters were doing. This season, she's more aware, as illustrated by the way she "fights" with Buck over who gets the body, etc. We thought about how it feels, physiologically, to have an affair with someone. You feel more attractive overall. You feel energized. You feel excited. Even though Tara isn't technically having the affair, she shares a body with Buck, who is. So she's feeling a lot of those warm fuzzies too. And though she knows it's wrong once she realizes what's going on, she's addicted to Pammy in a strange, peripheral way.

A DID patient told us about a time she'd impersonated one of her alters in order to gain more information about what the alter had been doing. So we just thought it would be interesting, dramatically, for Tara to break up with Pammy as Buck as a way of both protecting Pammy and gaining for insight for Tara. Plus, it's really funny when Pammy wails, "I never get the guy!" In this case, it's literal - she wants the guy, and what she gets is a suburban mom in drag.

Pammy is of course, always aware that Tara is biologically female. But Pammy is so damaged and insecure that even a transgendered *representation* of a "strong man" is the most comforting thing she's ever experienced. Real men have never come through for her the way Buck does. If wounded women like Pammy are willing to date ex-cons and abusers (and they are), I'm willing to believe that they would even date a man who wasn't a man at all. Pammy's in as much of a fantasy as Buck is.

As I've said in the past, my understanding of DID comes primarily from this show and a string of "Incredible Hulk" comics circa 1991, so the co-consciousness thing is something I'm learning as I go - and maybe something the show should have been willing to spell out a bit more now that it's starting to drive Tara's actions.

But seen in that context (and understanding that Tara's primary goal in going there dressed as Buck was to break up with Pammy), most of my problems with the episode go away - and, in fact, I start to become intrigued by the possibilities. If Tara starts to become more aware of what the alters are up to, and starts to feel some of what they feel, does that make her more complicit when they do bad things? Or is the opposite the case - that even when Tara is Tara, she's not wholly responsible for her own actions? And how is Max - who's already furious with the return of the alters and with Tara's deception(*) - going to react if the line starts to blur between his wife and the weirdos who regularly hijack her body?

(*) But how does he feel about the affair itself? There was talk last season about Buck having caught crabs from a woman at the bowling alley, and there was an open question as to whether this was just another part of Buck's fantasy life, along with his time in Vietnam. But his success with Pammy suggests that Buck certainly could have had a sex life before now. In which case, was Max - who got mighty peeved when it looked like T might hook up with some random guy - okay with that? Or can he handle it so long as his wife's body is only fooling around with other women?

Max's anger (and his subsequent beat-down of Sully) was a good moment for John Corbett, particularly after the earlier scene where Max tries to convince himself and Neil that everything's all better with Tara. Raised expectations lead to increased disappointment when the reality doesn't match your dreams, but it feels right to see that Max isn't just some smiling, ever-patient saint. He has his limits, and the Pammy thing has pushed beyond them.

Early on, before the spit hits the fan, Tara jokes that Marshall dating a girl makes sense on opposite day, and there's a lot of upside-down behavior in this one (Kate, for once, is the most normal, even if she spends half the episode baked). The Gregsons just want an uncomplicated life, but Tara's condition and the world around them aren't making it easy.

Some other thoughts:

• Even by the standards of both pay cable and this show, "The Truth Hurts" felt very sexually frank. Kate calls Tara "doable" and later explains "dogs in a bathtub" to Marshall (my advice: don't Google it for a fuller explanation). Marshall and Courtney experiment with each other in the rafters (Marshall, nervous and not particularly aroused, tells her, "You're very skilled.") And Tara, Charmaine and the gay neighbors try to coin a new name for the vagina ("cou-ton?").

• Patton Oswalt makes a welcome return as Neil and does a nice job delivering a twist on a familiar joke when he tells Max, "I don't want a terrific woman; I want Charmaine."

• Kate's friendship with Lynda still isn't really going anywhere (though I'm sure some viewers weren't displeased to see Kate dressed as Princess Valhalla Hawkwind), but it does add another interesting actor to the recurring ensemble with Joshua Leonard (from "Humpday" and also HBO's "Hung") as Lynda's trustafarian pal/pot connection Ricky. (Incidentally, who coined "trustafarian"? I first heard it on the short-lived ABC sitcom "It's Like, You Know..." in the late '90s, but I always assumed Peter Mehlman got the term from someplace else.)

• Sorry, Lionel, but I, for one, would rather see a play about a slutty dental hygenist than one about a doctor from olden times.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

United States of Tara, "Trouble Junction": Wake-up call

A review of tonight's "United States of Tara" coming up just as soon as I literally have my mind blown...

"I'm trouble. I am trouble." -Tara

Oh, indeed you are, Tara. And at the moment, you're the only one who knows it.

Last week, we found out that Buck was back in the picture, and this week Tara finds out, too, repeatedly - first regaining control of her body in a strange neighborhood while wearing Max's clothes(*), then being confronted by Pammy in the supermarket parking lot, and then waking up naked(**) in Pammy's bed after another night of wild passion between Pammy and Buck.

(*) Because they threw out everything of Buck's - except, for some reason, the glasses. As I said in my preview of the season, ditching the alters' costumes is a nice touch - Toni Collette's too good to need the crutch, and on a character logic level, it feels like having that stuff around just enables the alters to feel like they should be in charge. So why keep Buck's specs?

(**) Toni Collette's a fearless enough actress that I'm sure she's been nude on-screen before, but it was still a jolt to see her topless here, even on pay cable. I guess the idea is to emphasize Tara's femininity after she's woken up from another Buck episode?

And because Tara and her family have just been through such a golden, alter-free period - as exemplified by that splendid duet of "All Out of Love" she and Max perform at the Hubberd house (before a cover of the song plays over Buck and Pammy's foreplay) - and because she's still fairly ashamed of her condition and the things her body does when the alters are in charge, she doesn't tell anyone. Not Max, not Pammy (who could have used a much sterner, more explicit warning than the one I quoted above), not Charmaine nor anyone else. And that should be bad for Tara and a lot of people around her, shouldn't it? Sometimes, the cover-up's worse than the crime.

It's clear Tara's relationship with the alters - or, at least, the show's approach to depicting them - is different this year than before. Not only are the costumes gone, but we see Tara and Buck interacting even while Tara's in charge, in a mental state that's known as co-consciousness. And Collette's terrific not only at playing against herself (or, rather, at giving two separate performances in a vacuum that can be spliced together), but also at Tara's dawning horror and shame at discovering that she's not better - that she's stuck with Buck and the rest of them. I'd forgotten that a number of episodes last year featured Tara keeping video diaries of her blackouts, but the "Blair Witch"-style flip-phone confessional after she talks to Pammy in the parking lot was a great moment. Watch her be that scared and angry and ashamed, and you understand exactly why Tara would keep this mess to herself for as long as she can.

As Max starts pondering the idea of buying, renovating and flipping the Hubberd house, his plumber buddy offers to "Sully-rig" the pipes, coming up with a fix that won't be permanent but will last long enough to push the problem onto the next owners. By not fessing up to everyone that the DID is back in effect, Tara's trying to Sully-rig her own life.

Some other thoughts:

• While Tara's body is being used against her will to have sex with a woman, Marshall backs off from his big political statement last week and lets himself become Courtney's gay boyfriend. Everyone on this show knows Marshall's gay, Marshall included, but he's a teenager, and he's freaked out - and intimidated by Lionel, who's unapologetic and confrontational about his own sexuality - and he's experimenting.

• The debt collection office is still too broad (particularly when Kate's male coworker slobbers over the pictures of Princess Valhalla Hawkwind), but the job sort of turns into a means to an end, which is introducing Kate to Lynda P. Frazier, played by the wonderful character actress Viola Davis. Lynda, like Tara, is an artist, and she also has something of a more manageable alter ego in Princess Valhalla Hawkwind ("I will always be her... a little"), so she could prove to be a kindred spirit to either Kate (who'd love to be around someone similar to her mom but less crazy) or Tara herself.

• Charmaine's re-virginization plan suggestions a Bridezilla-in-the-making, but moving her into Max and Tara's house should be good for the character (and for people like me who are fans of Rosemarie DeWitt).

• Fynder-Spyder is usually the fake search engine name of choice for movies and TV shows that don't want to give Google free advertising. Here, Kate uses "Sirchbot," which I haven't seen before.

• Between "Breaking Bad" last night and Courtney and Marshall's make-out session tonight, it's been a good week for ouija boards on cable, hasn't it?

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

United States of Tara," Yes": Everytime I think I'm out...

I wrote about "United States of Tara" as part of today's column. A review of the season premiere coming up just as soon as I dance to "Jai Ho"...

"I bet everyone thought I'd be the one to off myself. Guess what, Oak Avenue? The lady with the multipe personalities is not the most messed-up one on the block." -Tara
"You are now." -Kate

"Tara" didn't end on a cliffhanger, but a big development happened to Tara over the hiatus: due, no doubt, to all the problems that the alters caused last season, Tara has gone back on her meds (and found a cocktail that doesn't seem to have as many debilitating side effects), the alters have gone away, and the Gregsons have gone through a kind of golden period. Kate graduated high school early, Marshall's made new friends, Charmaine and Nick are shopping for a bed together, and everyone seems calm and happy.

Then a shot rings out on Oak Avenue, and the suicide of Mr. Hubberd starts to unravel that sense of peace that Tara and company have been enjoying. Given temporary custody of the home of a man who worked very long and hard at killing himself, Tara starts losing her grip on her body and mind, and Buck (always the one to take over first when Tara feels afraid) slips out and starts making a move on Pammy, the bartender played by Joey Lauren Adams(*).

(*) Adams has played plenty of roles in her career other than Alyssa Jones in "Chasing Amy," but as soon as Buck started flirting with Pammy, I said, "Of course! Who else would you cast in this part?"

Back at press tour, I interviewed Diablo Cody after having seen the season's first few episodes. Because my schedule's brutal right now, and because we ultimately wound up talking about a lot of things that would spoil upcoming shows, I'm going to dip into parts of the interview when I can, and when it's relevant. The interesting part for our purposes in this episode is that Cody and the writers viewed the Hubberd house as "kind of an alter for the Gregson's house." Same street, same neighborhood, but everything's off (the dated decor, the weird dusk-like quality of the light), and it's not hard to imagine how spending a little time in that place might let Tara's demons loose.

Still, it was nice to see everybody doing well for a while, and to see Max trying to keep things that way, as he kept trying to change the subject away from suicide at the dinner party. We saw last season in the episode with Tara's parents that Max has spent a lot of time coming up with strategies to keep Tara-as-Tara, but there was a sense of desperation this time. Having his wife be his wife while also not being fogged-out by meds is something that has to be really intoxicating after so many years of headaches, and you can understand why Max would want to wrap his arms so tightly around this version of the family's reality, and also why he'd be so freaked to see the apron out and assume Alice is the one wearing it.

"Yes" is mainly a table-setter of an episode, introducing the Hubberd house, gay neighbors Ted and Hanny (Ted played by the always-wonderful Michael Hitchcock, Marshall's involvement with the more openly-gay kids at school, Kate's new job(**), Pammy, etc.

(**) As I said in the column, Kate's storyline is again the obvious weak spot. I like Brie Larson, but it feels like putting her in another goofy workplace storyline isn't the way to go. Cody said they wanted to do it because Larson comes across like "such an old soul" that the writers never enjoyed putting her in typical teenager situations, but they've managed the old-soul-in-high-school issue just fine with Marshall.

Buck's out, and now the trouble starts. I look forward to talking about all of it with you.

Some other thoughts:

• The song playing over the montage of happiness at the beginning was "Care of Cell" by The zombies.

• Last season, Marshall's school didn't seem to be that filled with openly-gay students like Lionel: Cody's argument is that Marshall was still struggling to accept his own gayness (even while chasing after Jason), and he therefore steered clear of the kids sitting at the Gayble.

• I liked that Max and Tara are out enjoying a date at the bar and suggesting that Charmaine would be the one in the family most likely to kill herself at the exact moment Charmaine is getting an engagement ring from Nick. And also that Charaine felt compelled to tell Nick at the dinner party that Tara's condition is in no way hereditary.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

'Nurse Jackie' & 'United States of Tara' reviews: Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I review the new seasons of "Nurse Jackie" and "United States of Tara." As you can tell by reading it, I was more of a fan of "Tara" season two than "Jackie," and given what a hellacious spring this is for me as a guy who writes about TV, my plan for now is to give "Tara" the episode-by-episode treatment while either skipping over "Jackie" altogether or touching on it from time to time if I have thoughts on a specific episode.

So, back tonight at 11 with a separate "Tara" premiere review, and if you want to talk about the "Jackie" premiere, feel free to do it here. Click here to read the full post

United States of Tara, "Miracle": There's a T in Trip

Spoilers for the "United States of Tara" season one finale coming up just as soon as I bake some cookies...

"I'm not looking for a miracle... I just, I want to get better. Not knowing has gotta be worse than anything that can happen in that room, right?" -Tara

And so season one of "Tara" comes to an end, more or less as most of us were expecting, but not in an unsatisfying way.

Even if you don't know about the realities of DID, or the practicalities of trying to maintain a high-concept TV show for more than one season, you had to assume that the face-to-face with Trip wasn't going to be a cure, or anything close to it. Tara's problem isn't that simple, no matter how much she or Max might wish otherwise. But I really liked the way the encounter played out -- not just the revelation that Trip and his roommate had actually abused T, and not Tara (which means the DID existed long before the incident), but the fact that Diablo Cody's script deliberately went out of the room when it was time for Trip to spell out the gory details. Even for a show as blunt about sex as this, I think having to listen to Trip describe what happened -- especially since it turned out what happened isn't at all relevant to the root of Tara's condition -- would have been too much, and I appreciated the restraint.

I'm assuming the arc of season two will feature Max and/or Tara back at square one with the investigation, but I'd almost rather they table the search for a while. You have to assume that Tara's never going to be "cured" (assuming that the problem can ever really go away, when the Robin Weigert character last week implied otherwise) until close to the end of the series, and I'd like to see some more of how the alters relate to one another, and to her. As the revelation of T's involvement with Trip jumbled up Tara's psyche and started putting different personalities in charge at a rapid clip, we got to see just how scary the condition can be. With the exception of Gimme, Tara's been portrayed with a relatively comedy-friendly form of the condition: the alters may not always come out when it's convenient, but there's no question of who's in charge and why, and they usually go away before too much damage gets done. But to see them all flitting in and out (with that eerie submarine sound effect each time), and to hear Alice again dismissively treat Tara as a lesser personality, or just another alter, is still extremely creepy. If I had to choose between season two being a rehash of season one's detective story or being about a battle for control among the different personas, I'd definitely pick the latter.

And because I suspected where Tara's story was going to go, if not the exact details, the strongest parts of "Miracle" involved Marshall and Aunt Charmaine. I still don't entirely buy the idea that T seducing Jason was the best thing for Marshall -- if he's going to get his heart broken either way, isn't it better if it's the way that doesn't involve his first boyfriend making out with his mom? -- but Marshall driving 200 miles to mend fences with Tara was a very nice moment, and Charmaine and Marshall's bonding was a lovely payoff to Marshall's concern that she didn't like him back in the episode with her birthday party.

I also really liked Charmaine being torn between the guy who's perfect on paper (Nick), and who also seems like a really good guy (see his conversation with Marshall about the Jason break-up), and the guy who's a joke on paper (Neil), but who has a much deeper connection to her. It's a messy story, and an interesting one, and also one that will hopefully give us lots of Patton Oswalt next season. After being the most extraneous character in the first few episodes, Charmaine's now one of my favorites, and a great role for Rosemarie De Witt.

The Marshall/Charmaine scenes also featured the finale's most heavily-concentrated dose of Diablo Cody-isms, including:

• Marshall explains Charmaine's dilemma as, "To use literary tropes, Neil is a Holy Fool, and Nick -- Nick is like deus ex machina."

• Charmaine responding to an offer of help with, "No, my sister's meeting with her rapist, so we're just hanging out," followed by Marshall dismissing the guy because "He looked like a retarded Mark Harmon."

• Marshall complaining, "I don't want to hear about anyone's vagina. Especially not a coupon-clipping mom vagina."

Oddly, though, I found the most Cody-esque touch of the episode to not be in the dialogue, but in Nick introducing the kids to the joys of the miracle fruit, which, when consumed, temporarily changes your tastebuds so that you taste sour things as sweet. That seemed like a cool metaphor for not only Tara's condition, but for the way the Gregson's deal with it, and how sometimes the sourness of DID provides sweet effects for the family.

When the show comes back next season, I'd like to see a better storyline for Kate. (Nate Corddry was funny at times, but that's the one arc where it always went exactly where you thought it would, and rarely to interesting comic or dramatic effect.) But overall, this turned out to be a very strong first season for a show I needed a few episodes to completely warm to.

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United States of Tara, "Snow": In treatment

Spoilers for the penultimate episode of "United States of Tara" season one coming up just as soon as I make someone my special lady...

"But it's doable, right? We can fix this?" -Max
"It's not like a 10-minute dry cleaner's, Max." -Tara

We're one episode away from the finish line of season one, and if I can beat my Bruce Banner metaphor into the ground a little more, I seriously doubt that a trip to find Trip is going to fix much, if anything, for Tara and her family, in the same way that Banner's attempts to make the Hulk go away never quite worked.

Part of the set up for this season was that Tara had only recently gone off her meds -- that she decided she'd rather risk letting her alters back out into the world than go through life in a permanent haze. But after T came out and broke Marshall's heart last week by seducing Jason(*), it's time for drastic steps to be taken. Marshall suggests a return to the medication, but instead Tara and Max pursue a stay at a psychiatric facility, under the care of Dr. Holden (Joel Gretsch from "The 4400").

(*) Kate's theory that T did it to protect Marshall seemed unusually generous from her -- and probably too generous for the situation. Maybe Jason hurts Marshall down the road when he decides to get back on the hetero train full time, but I can't imagine that stinging nearly as badly as the way things actually went down. Yes, Jason's break-up -- "Remember me when you win your Oscar, okay?" -- was probably gentler than what might have happened if the relationship had traveled its natural course, but I still see the shed incident as far more scarring -- and also not something that's going to help Marshall take care of himself the next time he gets a crush on an unavailable boy.

After seeing the underqualified Dr. Ocean struggle to stay afloat in Tara's wake, it was really interesting to watch a specialist work with Tara, even though his methods didn't seem to be working. Tara got to deal with people she didn't have to explain her condition to (including Robin Weigert from "Deadwood"), Max got to be around spouses of DID patients -- and none of it made them feel better. How is confronting Trip going to improve things?

I intend to do a much longer examination of the season finale, so I want to move to the bullet points now so I can go and watch it:

• When did Patton Oswalt turn out to be such the smoothie? First he out-slicked Agent Ballard on last week's "Dollhouse," and here he makes Charmaine weak in the knees with Neil's speech about how their relationship was more than just sex. Between these two episodes, his voice work in "Ratatouille," what I hear is a great lead performance in "Big Fan" (friends who saw it at Sundance loved him in it), and the fact that he's in the next Steven Soderbergh movie, I wonder if he's going to become one of those guys who winds up being an even better dramatic actor than he is a comedian.

• This was the last episode to be written by Alexa Junge, who ran the writers' room this season but who won't be back next year. I have no idea what went on behind-the-scenes to lead to her departure, or how the show might be affected by her absence next season, but Diablo Cody raved about Junge when we spoke before the season premiere, while adding that she had no interest in running the writers' room herself. So either she's grown a lot after a year on the job, or she'll have to find a new trusted lieutenant.

• One of the things Cody mentioned in that interview was that, towards the end of the season,"we were really able to play with the idea of, 'Would Tara ever masquerade as one of the alters to get away with something?'" I haven't noticed that before now, but in this episode, we see Tara briefly pretend to be Buck to get that guy to stop hogging the pay phone. One of the few benefits to the condition, I suppose.

• I think Nate Corddry has done an admirable job of making Gene seem like an obvious creep and yet also like someone who'd be a survivor in this job despite his creepiness, but I'm hoping next week brings an end to Kate's time in the Barnabay's family, and that next season the character gets to do something else.

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United States of Tara, "Betrayal": The burning shed

Quick spoilers for last night's "United States of Tara" coming up just as soon as I navigate my company's human resources voicemail...

I wish I could spend more time on "Betrayal," which was so tragic for poor Marshall and so rife with material about the alters and the way they interact with each other. But as I've already said a few times today, I'm slammed with other assignments, so I'm just going to hit a few bullet points and open it up for discussion:

• Poor, poor, poor Marshall. I loved that the show went the unexpected route of having Jason be totally cool with kissing Marshall, even in the sober light of day. (His desire to keep it on the down-low made it seem realistic enough.) So, of course, the writers had to punish Marshall in a more unpredictable way, by having T -- who, in her last appearance, had attempted to make amends with Tara's son -- decide to screw with him by seducing Jason. So painful to watch, and so beautifully played by Keir Gilchrist.

• Last week, we had some debate about whether Tara could switch from alter to alter without first reverting to her own persona. Here, we get confirmation, as she goes straight from Gimme (whose appearance is provoked by a deep tissue massage) to T (the alter least likely to feel ashamed of how people would respond to Gimme's public outburst). So that means there's still a possibility that we could see, say, Alice turn into Buck under the right circumstances.

• Toni Collette has the flashiest part, but I'm really developing a new appreciation of John Corbett while watching this show. He more or less always plays characters who live in the same strike zone, but he makes Max seem different from, and richer than, previous Corbett types like Aiden or even Chris from "Northern Exposure." What makes Max special -- and the ideal kind of man to be in this marriage -- is the gift he has for empathizing with his loved ones problems. Last week, we saw him really get on Marshall's wavelength when he realized the depth of his son's crush on Jason, and here we had the very sweet way he responded to Tara telling him about Dr. Ocean "breaking up with" her. He doesn't get mad, or shrug it off, but instead finds a way to put himself on her level and react the way she was. Very nicely-done, by actor and character.

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United States of Tara, "Possibility": Tattoo you

Spoilers for last night's "United States of Tara" coming up just as soon as I go out and wrangle...

"I just wish I could get away like you do." -Kate

There are episodes of "Tara" where I feel completely engaged by the characters and their interactions with one another. Then there are episodes like "Possibility" that feel a little listless -- possibly because so much time was spent on Kate, the character I find least interesting -- and as I watch them, my inner comic book geek takes over my body and starts trying to quantify exactly what makes Tara Hulk out, and what turns her back into Bruce Banner.

The common thread for the appearance of the alters is stress, but it tends to be a specific kind of stress relating to loss of control. Last week, for instance, she became Alice after she found out Max and Dr. Ocean were having meetings without her. Here, she transforms (briefly) into T when Kate makes it clear that they're not going to have the fun mother-daughter bonding trip Tara had in mind, and that Kate's not going to listen to Tara about stepping away from the pharmaceutical salesman(*). Kate's rebelliousness in particular seems to be the trigger for T's emergence, as T tries to act out all the things (flirting with the salesman, getting a tattoo) that Kate has been talking about with Tara.

(*) I don't know what the production schedule on this episode was, but I have to assume it was done after the new "90210" came on the air, given Diablo Cody's unabashed "90210" fangirl status and the casting of Ryan Eggold as Kate's pharma object of desire. I only wish Ken Marino had gotten more to do as the other salesman, but at least his Starz! show "Party Down" premieres on Friday.

Meanwhile, this is the second time we've witnessed the transformation from alter back to Tara. The first time, it came during a moment of complete calm, as Charmaine told a story from Tara's childhood, which definitely fit the Hulk/Banner mold. This time, though, the extreme pain of the tattoo needle wakes her up, when you would think that pain would instead trigger the reverse change -- or, possibly, trigger a transformation from one of the female alters into Buck. But instead, Tara comes back, and even gets through a more innocuous tattoo session -- which fulfills Tara's hope of a mother-daughter bonding moment, after all -- without the alters surfacing again.

Outside of the Gregson women's road trip, we finally get some movement on the Marshall/Jason story, as Marshall takes the honorable path of getting Jason drunk so he can seduce him -- and apparently finding success. We don't know yet whether this was just drunken experimentation -- Jason sure looked uncomfortable saying goodbye to Max later -- or a sign that Marshall wasn't just wishcasting the idea of Jason playing for his team, but we did see Jason wake up and actively kiss Marshall back. So there's that.

Meanwhile, after getting chewed out by Tara, then encouraged by Neil(**), Max tries to go forward on his quest to find the mysterious Trip, only to be foiled when he finds himself face to face with one of Trip's brothers. This is a story that could use some forward movement soon, if only so Max can realize that finding this guy and getting to the bottom of what happened isn't going to come close to "fixing" Tara.

(**) That scene, with the wrangle line and the appearance of The B.S. Lady, is the first of two really good Patton Oswalt scenes on TV this week; Friday's "Dollhouse" will have the other.

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United States of Tara, "Abundance": Gimme Gimme!

Spoilers for "United States of Tara" coming up just as soon as I fix my general lack of glee...

"It's driving me freaking nuts. It's like I know too much but I don't know enough. I just want to fix it." -Max
"You're funny." -Charmaine
"What?" -Max
"That you think you can fix it." -Charmaine

Why would any man, even as laid-back and decent a man as Max Gregson, sign himself up for a lifetime with Tara and all the complications she brings? Yes, obviously he loves her, and there's a part of him that gets a kick out of the alters, but the more we watch the show, the more clear it becomes that Max is a fixer. He thinks that if he loves Tara enough, digs deeply into the cause of her condition, he might be able to make it go away so he can have his wife and only his wife 24/7.

With Tara absent from all but the first few minutes of "Abundance," we get to watch Max play fixer for one of the alters. Alice can be a manipulator, but Max has already shown that she can't manipulate him, and so here he actually humors her delusions of pregnancy, and comforts her at the end when Tara's period arrives to spoil Alice's fantasy. Even though Max would like the alters out of his life, he does have affection for all of them -- Buck is the drinking buddy he doesn't usually have, T is more outgoing than Tara lets herself be, and even Alice is mostly harmless (and more attractive to him than he likes to let on) -- and so he takes care of them during their times of crisis just as much as he does for Tara herself.

Alice's long stint also lets Max find out the poncho goblin alter's name -- the appropriately creepy-sounding Gimme -- and to park her in front of Dr. Ocean, who is wildly out of her depth with this patient. (Valerie Mahaffey's exhalation after Max and Alice left was hilarious.) To me, though, the most interesting part was when Alice more or less tells Charmaine (while painting the crib) that she considers herself the dominant personality and puts Tara on the same level as Buck and T. Maybe Buck and T think the same way of themselves, but Alice is the only one of the three whom we've heard express a desire to be in charge all the time. I could see, maybe sometime next season, a story arc where Tara and Alice are locked in a battle for control of the body, Banner vs. Hulk style.

The non-Max/Alice portions of "Abundance" didn't do a whole lot for me. Amusing as it was to see that Marshall and Jason got assigned to play a leather-clad S&M couple at the Hell House, I'm still waiting for that storyline to go somewhere. And while Kate's situation with Gene might be realistic (I doubt a girl her age would want or have the ability to threaten a sexual harassment suit), it feels both predictable and uncomfortable. The one part of that story that worked was when it tied back into the main plot and Alice gave Kate tips on how to stroke Gene's ego and get her job back.

I believe we have four episodes to go, and while this isn't a plot-driven show, I'd like to see some significant movement on all these stories between now and the finale.

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United States of Tara, "Alterations": Oooh, you're my breast friend

Spoilers for tonight's "United States of Tara" coming up just as soon as I rent a few chick flicks...

"That's not my booby buddy." -Charmaine

"Alterations" is the first episode in almost a month to be written by "Tara" creator Diablo Cody, and it's not hard to tell even if you didn't pay attention to the credits. The other writers seem fine at echoing Cody's voice when it comes to the dialogue, but "Alterations" is at times almost non-stop Cody patter:

• Max describes the fourth alter from last week as "a weird poncho goblin."

• The nurse tells Charmaine that "Dr. Pete's updating his video blog."

• Kate tells Marshall, "I think he's a homo, 'cause he has a bad case of gay face."

• Charmaine laments the way that she's only able to attract men "whose names are action verbs."

• Kate sees Kate wearing one of Charmaine's track suits and asks, "Where does she shop? Forever 36?"

And, of course, there was all the talk about booby buddies, breast friends, etc.

But while the patter's always fun, the real strength of "Alterations" comes from the character work, from our first extended glimpse of Charmaine dealing with one of the alters.

They established in the first episode that Charmaine believes Tara is faking the multiple personalities to get attention. If she's as close to Tara (geographically as well as socially) as she seems, how is this possible? It'd be one thing if they saw each other rarely after Tara's disorder first manifested itself, but she's around so much that it didn't seem to speak well of Charmaine that she chose to view the situation through such an unkind lens.

But watching her deal with Buck through this episode -- and, especially, being in the room when Buck transitions back into Tara(*) -- you see her finally softening to the idea. She begins referring to Tara as a separate person as her hair salon slumber party with Buck continues, and the look on her face in the tub as Tara's hacking up the remains of Buck's cigarettes suggests that maybe this is the first time she's been there for the exact moment of change, and that maybe that's what she needed to see a long time ago. (Either that, or the Percocet put her in a more forgiving mood than she usually is.)

(*) Tara's re-emergence, as Charmaine talks about fun times they had as kids, only affirms my Incredible Hulk comparison from last week, as she needed a moment of absolute calm, and/or the reminder of a happy childhood memory, to turn back into Bruce Banner.

Rosemarie DeWitt and the writers have done a nice job of gradually deepening a character who came off like a twit in the first few episodes, and this episode was a nice comic and dramatic showcase for her. Because the alters are so broadly-drawn and so unchanging, Toni Collette's going to give you more or less the same thing as those characters each week, so it's most interesting to watch how the other regulars deal with them. A couple of weeks ago, it was Max with T; tonight, it's Charmaine with Buck.

(It's also interesting how sometimes the DID manifests the exact right alter for the situation, like Alice coming in to deal with Marshall's teacher, while other times it sends the exact wrong one. Alice or T would have been splendid booby buddies from the jump -- assuming T could even have been bothered to show up.)

The other parts of the episode were less compelling for me. Marshall playing it cool and aloof with Jason was amusing to a point (especially with Kate referring to "The Rules" as "an old book" -- which, to her, it is), but at this point I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop on whether Jason is gay or just very friendly.

Similarly, Max's investigations into Tara's secret origin is necessary from a plot and character standpoint, but right now it feels a little obligatory. Still, I liked the final shot of Max putting the laptop, with the results of the investigation so far, under the bed next to the red poncho.

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United States of Tara, "Transition": Party games

Spoilers for tonight's "United States of Tara" coming up just as soon as I get my truck customized...

"My kids are safe. Maybe you should have spent more time looking after yours." -Max

"Transition" reminded me, oddly, of certain issues of the Incredible Hulk comic, where Bruce Banner desperately needed to not turn into the Hulk, and tried one method after another (meditation, tranquilizers, booze) to remain calm enough to stay human. It would always fail in the end -- a Hulk issue without the big green (or grey) guy isn't quite as much fun -- but dammit, he tried.

Tara's DID in many ways feels like Banner's situation. It's not quite a super-power, but the alters do give her abilities she doesn't ordinarily display, and they in theory provide protection for her in moments when her brain thinks she needs it. But as with Banner's temper, the bar for summoning one of Tara's alters feels uncomfortably low, making the whole situation far more curse than blessing.

And when Tara's judgmental, passive-aggressive parents (played by the always-reliable Fred Ward and Pamela Reed) show up, hoping to take Kate and Marshall away from their parents, Max realizes that he has to pull out all the stops to keep Tara as Tara. The scene where he pulls her around the backyard in a frantic circle, making her too tired/amused/distracted to transition, may be my favorite of this young series. It was so filled with sweetness and comedy but also the awareness that the Gregsons got a raw deal with this situation.

And we find out near the end of the episode that Max wasn't as successful as he thought -- that one of the alters has been peeing on Grandma and Grandpa's sofa bed in the middle of the night. But which one? Ever since Tiffany's condo got vandalized, there's been some speculation that there might be a fourth major alter (and Diablo Cody said in our interview that we'd be meeting other alters down the line. This particular move seems too vulgar for Alice, and too stealthy for Buck or T, who'd want everyone to know what they had done, and so I have to assume the bed-wetting (possibly inspired by Marshall?) and the vandalism were the efforts of this still-to-be-revealed entity.

"Transition" also gives us more clues about the trauma that created the DID. Last week when Charmaine and Max talked about boarding school, I had assumed that their parents sent Tara there to get her away from the person who hurt her (or to separate themselves from the guilty feelings about not protecting her), but Charmaine makes it sound here as if the rape (or whatever it was) happened at boarding school.

And that, in turn, really changes my view of Charmaine. She admits at the end of the episode that she wishes she had Tara's life, and her desire to have gone to the same boarding school where Tara was assaulted suggests that she even envies the DID a little. And from her perspective, why not? It makes Tara seem more interesting, and gives her a license to get away with all kinds of things that Charmaine can't.

(We also find out, in a hilarious bit involving either great makeup or an unfortunate body double -- or both -- that Charmaine's ex-husband made her get a lopsided boob job, and that in turn leads to the incredibly funny, incredibly mean moment when Max makes Tara laugh by miming being a guy playing with those breasts.)

There was one part of the episode I didn't like, and that was the business with Kate and Gene. I was relieved last week that Kate apparently saw through all of Gene's sad attempts to be the cool older guy and was able to stay in charge of their interactions, but in this episode he withholds from her just a little and she's putty in his hands? Bleh. In particular, I find it hard to believe that she'd be so desperate to make out with him after his unplugged performance of Cheap Trick's "Dream Police." I'll never complain about an opportunity to hear the real thing (which also popped up a few weeks ago on "Lost"), but this story seems all over the map. (It's also starting to come uncomfortably close to Juno and Jason Bateman's friendship in "Juno.")

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United States of Tara, "Revolution": Dancing drama queen

Spoilers for tonight's "United States of Tara" coming up just as soon as I enjoy some peppermint schnapps...

"My bitch is fresh." -Max

After last week's fairly dark, alter-minimal episode, "Revolution" gives us a heavy dose of T and an equal dose of comedy, highlighted by John Corbett's very funny delivery of the above line.

But amidst all the wacky hijinx -- including T kicking ass at Dance Dance Revolution (geez, Toni Collette is limber), Marshall participating in a student recreation of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, a raging schnapps party at the Gregson house, and Kate and Marshall (and the writers, no doubt) having fun brainstorming increasingly profane nicknames for the new girlfriend of Kate's ex-boyfriend -- are the usual reminders of what a lousy situation this is for the family, and even a hint that T isn't a Satan-spawn all the time.

When Marshall accuses T of depriving him time with his mother -- "I want my real mother, and only my mother, and none of you freaks!" -- it's a jarring turn compared to the tone of the rest of the episode, but it fits, particularly with this alter. Buck and Alice can be disruptive, but not to the degree that T is, and they have some redeeming caretaker qualities that T hasn't displayed before the end of this episode. She does what she wants, screws (and screws over) who she wants(*), and generally doesn't seem to care how the family feels about her.

(*) Though I had a hard time with everybody at the arcade -- the security guard in particular -- believing T was actually a teenager (Toni Collette's in great shape, but come on) -- I found her barely-foiled attempt to have sex with a boy shed even more light on Max and Tara's sexual problems. If you assume that Buck really did catch crabs from the woman at the bowling alley, and that T is out there trying to get laid (and may sometimes be successful), while Max isn't allowed to sleep with T or Alice... well, you can understand his frustration (and his need for Gentleman's Time). And it gave an added charge to Max's interrogation-by-seduction technique, because he seemed angry and frustrated enough to actually break his vow and sleep with T, just to shut her up.

I thought this "Revolution" also did a much better job with the Nate Corddry character than previous episodes. Here, it's clear that Kate isn't in any way attracted to him, and can see right through his game, but she's going to take advantage of his crush when she desperately needs to get away from her real life.

(As a Barenaked Ladies fan, should I be ashamed that a loser like Gene was listening to what sounded like several cuts from "Barenaked Ladies Are Men"?)

Only a couple of real false notes, one of them relatively minor: Toni Collette's American accent has no idea how to say "Kutcher," and so it comes out as some Canadian/Australian hybrid of "Ashton Kootcher." Also, I have a hard time with the idea that the alters -- all of them reluctant to play along with the family rules, and at least two of them (T and Alice) unhappy with their lack of time in the real world -- are also willing to record video diaries. Seemed like an excuse for a few cheap jokes (like Buck lighting his own farts) as the kids tried to figure out who vandalized Tiffany's condo.

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United States of Tara, "Inspiration": V is for vandalism

Spoilers for last night's "United States of Tara" coming up just as soon as I leave the iron on...

"How can you spend a lifetime of memories with someone when the person you're spending it with isn't there?" -Tara

"Inspiration" is the first episode of the series to not be written by Diablo Cody, and it's also the least overtly comic episode so far. Is that just a coincidence, or a sign of a direction the series may take going forward?

I'm inclined to think it's the former, but we'll see. We know from some of the confusion in my Cody interview that this episode's author, Alexa Junge, contributed some of the more Cody-sounding bits of dialogue from the earlier episodes, so it's not as if she can't make with the hipster banter. I just think that, given the show's premise, they need to do episodes that are slightly darker in tone now and then -- and to show how the alters dominate Tara's life even in an episode where they barely appear. It may not be as much fun as watching Buck lay the smack down on Kate's boyfriend or Alice putting Marshall's teacher in his place, but for Tara, none of this is fun, is it?

The previous episodes made it clear that the alters know what happens when they're not in control, while Tara has no clue, and this episode starts to explain why. DID generally manifests itself as a defense mechanism for some major trauma, and in her session with Dr. Ocean, we find out that Tara suffered a trauma, though we don't know what (and maybe Tara doesn't, either). And while the mental blackouts no doubt helped her survive whatever happened to her as a child, they're a raw deal now, not when the alters can be summoned by something as minor as a stressful encounter with bitchy PTA moms, or even by (as she tells Tiffany) the smell of instant coffee.

"Inspiration" continues the tension about Tara and Max's sex life, as she walks in on him while he's having his "gentleman's time," and it sets up something of a locked room mystery: which alter vandalized Tiffany's mural? Or is Tara being blamed for something that her body had nothing to do with?

Again, this was a less lively episode than the previous three, but I'm still enjoying it, and welcomed spending a half-hour primarily with Tara herself.

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United States of Tara, "Work": Cereal drama

Spoilers for tonight's "United States of Tara" coming up just as soon as I put on my mandatory 15 pieces of flair...

"The weird thing is, is I kind of feel like everyone has it. I mean, over the course of a day, how many different women do we have to be? Work Tiffany, or sexy Tiffany, or dog owner Tiffany. It's hard, right?" -Tiffany St. John

I want to start off this review with one exchange that I left out of the original transcript of my interview with Diablo Cody, because it refers specifically to a scene in this episode I wasn't too happy with: Kate's new boss Gene (Nate Corddry) seemingly impressing her with an ash-covered visor from the Barnaby's restaurant that was at Ground Zero -- even though, as Gene admits, he wasn't actually there on 9/11. It seemed like the exact kind of cheap-shotting I was talking about being afraid of in last week's review; what's an easier target than the manager of a chain restaurant in Kansas?

Here's our exchange from the middle of the interview:

When Nate Corddry does the 9/11 thing, that was maybe the one part in the four episodes where I said to myself, "That's a little bit easy." I mentioned this to a friend and he said, "You're just sensitive to it because you're from there. Maybe somebody from Kansas would be impressed by him taking out the hat, even though he wasn't there."

I don't know if Kate was necessarily impressed. Brie plays it very well, because we were always worried about that. We said to Brie, "Kate is, obviously, very intelligent, so we have to think about why would she be attracted to this guy, who is clearly very dense, and very provincial. So we have to think about ways to make him seem a little dangerous and a little attractive." So he pulls out the cigarettes, and he says, "I work hard, and I play hard," and he implies that, behind the scenes at Barnaby's, it's kind of a party. I think that's more what she was drawn to -- the idea that there was a world outside of her house. She's trying to escape.

I don't know that she was necessarily impressed by the visor. I wrote that moment -- that, along with him showing off his office, which is obviously not impressive, either -- I wanted to show how limited he was in his worldview. And if he becomes a part of Kate's life, how is someone like this going to react to something as truly as shocking as Tara?

So we're not just supposed to take him as this oblivious clown?

Not necessarily. I always think of him as Kate's escape hatch. He is her outside world, weird as it may be.

I obviously haven't seen where this character and his story is going (I've only seen one episode past this one), but I'm not totally convinced. Again, it seems like an easy toss at an inviting target, and if the concern about Cody is that the show is going to disappear down the hipster-than-thou drain -- or, worse, start reflecting some of Alan Ball's more irritating qualities -- then this could be our first warning.

Then again, this episode also introduces us to Tara's new best friend -- only friend, really -- Tiffany St. John, the overly chipper VitaSelf saleswoman (and boss of Tara's sister Charmaine) who just can't wait for Tara to paint a mural in her condo. Tiffany, with that name, that hair, those two yappy dogs, and all the power of positive thinking slogans she tosses around, could very easily be another caricature and another easy target. But instead, she turns out to be kind of cool. She may have too many affectations, and her attempt to compare her life to Tara's may be terribly reductive, but she's making an effort, she seems to genuinely like Tara, and Tara likes her. When the character was introduced, I braced myself for what was coming, and was pleasantly surprised.

And I've spent so much time on these two outside characters, in the middle of discussing an episode that's largely about Max and Tara's sex life, because it's so obvious by this point how badly Tara, and Kate, and everyone in the family needs to make some outside connections to cope with what Tara's condition is putting them through.

Kate needs a place to go where she doesn't have to guess which personality her co-workers will be displaying on any given day. Max needs his buddy Neil to vent about the problem of being attracted to two of your wife's alter egos. And while he's not attracted to Buck, you can see that even their interactions are something of a relief. He gets along with Buck, and the lack of attraction from either party means Max never has to worry about what kind of guilt trip Tara will lay on him later.

Tara doesn't get to interact with the alters -- doesn't even know what they do, where they know everything she does -- and has a strained relationship with Charmaine, and she badly needs a friend, preferably one who only ever sees her as herself.

Marshall's crush on Jason the sweet but hard-core Christian jock (played by Andrew Lawrence, the youngest of the Lawrence brothers) has less to do with a desire to get away from his mom's condition -- he seems the most accepting of it of anyone in the family -- but there's an element to wanting what you can't have that runs through everyone's story this week.

Neil has it all wrong when he talks about how great it must be for Max to have the marital equivalent of the Kellogg's variety pack. What Max has is a bunch of flavors he's not allowed to eat, and one that won't let itself be eaten if it even suspects he's been fondling the other boxes. And that's rough.

As we're getting further and further away from when I initially saw these episodes (next week's is the last I got in advance), I'm going to move straight to the bullet points:

• Here we get our first glimse of Tara's therapist, played by Valerie Mahaffey, who has plenty of experience playing characters in need of therapy themselves. I liked the unspoken tension in the therapy scenes, how it's clear the doctor doesn't approve of Tara's decision to go off the meds but is trying to hold her tongue.

• Do you think Buck actually has the active sex life he boasts about -- including getting crabs from the woman at the bowling alley -- or is that just as much of an invention of Tara's imagination as Buck's time in Vietnam and the explosion that took away "his" equipment?

• I like how this episode undercuts the pretentiousness of Marshall and his best friend when it becomes clear how badly both of them want to get cast in the school's production of "Grease," even as they're trying to act above such a popular, predictable choice.

• Whatever my concerns about the 9/11 scene, Nate Corddry did make me laugh as Gene gave Kate the tour of Barnaby's, including the pizzazzing station and "That's Grambo, he has a glass eye."

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United States of Tara, "Aftermath": Time to start loving Orel

Spoilers for episode two of "United States of Tara" coming up just as soon as I buy tickets to the Genesis reunion tour...

"It's like they don't even want me around when I'm me." -Tara

"Aftermath" spends a lot of time introducing Alice, the last of Tara's main alters, but it also spends more time than the pilot did on Tara herself -- how she feels about waking up from one of her blackouts, how the success and popularity of the alters is giving her an inferiority complex towards herself, and how she tries to live a functional life within the confines of her disorder.

The family meeting (or "summit," as Marshall tries to call it) was a nice illustration of the mechanics of the Gregson household, as Tara runs through T's credit card charges, gets more info on the shiner she got as Buck, and tries to fill in all the blanks from her time away. The alters have an advantage on her, as they seem to know everything that goes on while they're dormant, while Tara never does.

Just as she's starting to get a handle on her latest episodes, and attempting to heal the rift with Kate over the morning-after pill, she has that mortifying encounter with the other soccer moms who make it clear how sorry they feel for her, and -- poof! -- Tara's gone, and '50s sitcom housewife Alice is at the controls.

And the thing that has to eat at Tara the most is how necessary the other personalities can be. Alice stands up to the moms when she can't, gets Marshall to admit to his bed-wetting problem, and plays a hilarious mind-game on Marshall's awkwardly-named teacher, Orel Gershinson (played by Tony Hale, without his Buster Bluth hook-hand, alas).

There's a downside, obviously, beyond filling Tara with self-loathing. Alice winds up making things worse with Kate by literally washing her mouth out with soap, but on balance, and unlike the other alters, she has designs on taking over Tara's body full-time. She's not quite the master manipulator she thinks of herself as -- Max, thankfully, sees right through her -- but the idea of one part of Tara conspiring against another part shows another way in which this isn't just a wacky game of dress-up.

Some other thoughts:

• The costume changes make it easy for us to identify the alters, which I suppose is important this early in the process, but it does seem like Tara always has a nice window to go home and get dressed whenever they occur. What happens if her psyche decides Buck needs to come out in a hurry and there's no time to ditch the skirt and heels? Or if there's a direct transition from Buck to Alice?

• Joining Tony Hale in the guest star roster: Patton Oswalt as Max's best friend and landscaping employee Neil, and Nate Corddry as the manager of the restaurant where Kate applies for a job as an escape from the Gregson household. It's a good bunch.

• Midwestern America and suburbia are both easy targets in movies and TV shows (see "American Beauty," for instance), so I'm always wary when a character utters a line like Mr. Gershinson's "We're not in Vermont." But the rest of his scenes, and Alice's psychoanalytical "It's time to start loving Orel" monologue, suggest his objections to Marshall are less about Kansas provincialism than about him trying to work out some unresolved high school issues, and I can live with that.

• Does Marshall having a female sidekick who dresses like Ayn Rand and is similarly pretentious (mocking Gershinson for having gone to a state school) make his own '40s affectations seem more natural (like the two of them decided on it together), or less?

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United States of Tara, "Pilot": Four-faced

Spoilers for the debut of "United States of Tara" coming up get my hair done up in samurai knots...

"Yeah, that is one weird thing." -Max

Because I wound up writing a Diablo Cody interview instead of a traditional review, I haven't really offered up an opinion on "United States of Tara" before now. The short, not-so-insightful version, is that I like it, but also understand why it really irritates some people (other critics, people who streamed the pilot).

Cody's dialogue will likely always be polarizing (though there's nothing in here on the level of the infamous "homeskillet" scene with Rainn Wilson at the start of "Juno"), Tara herself barely figures into the pilot, what we see of her "alters" so far makes them seem very broad, almost caricaturish, and because the family is so largely accepting of her condition, the stakes seem to be too low to sustain a series.

I get all that. But I don't mind.

Now, I'm coming at this having watched four episodes, not one. Some of the above issues are remedied in later episodes: there's more of Tara, there are (some) shadings to the alters, and you realize that the family's life isn't as mellow as John Corbett makes it out to be. But Cody's dialogue is Cody's dialogue (and as you may have noticed from my confusion during the interview, at least one of the other writers, Alexa Junge, is pretty good at mimicking her style), and even as we see more of Tara and learn more about the alters, it's still hard to shake the feeling that this is one long acting exercise for Toni Collette.

But again, I don't mind.

First, I like Cody's dialogue when she dials it back a bit from "honest-to-blog" levels. While all of the characters say clever things, I don't think they say them in the same voice. To me there's a difference in the structure and tone of something like Tara complaining that "I can't seem to micromanage my daughter's vagina" and Kate then telling Max, "I guess I should have let that fertilized egg implant itself in my uterus." They're both about female reproductive organs, and they're both fairly blunt, but I can't necessarily hear one coming out of the other's mouth, and vice versa. So mostly, I found it funny.

Beyond that, while the show is largely plot-less, I don't find the family's acceptance of Tara's condition to be a drawback. If anything, a show where they were still coming to grips with it, or a show where they tried to keep her condition hidden (ala, as my Canadian friend Rob Salem put it, "Bewitched" or "I Dream of Jeannie," or ala Diablo Cody's beloved "Small Wonder"), would get tired quickly. To bring in a comparison of a show I wouldn't have automatically thought of in the same breath as "United States of Tara," NBC's late, lamented "Journeyman" struggled in its early episodes because it had to go through the motions of having its hero, and then his wife, understand and accept that he was traveling back and forth through time. It wasn't until the time-travel became a fact of life -- when the fantastic became treated as the mundane -- that "Journeyman" really began to click, because, geez, how do you get through your day knowing that your husband could vanish into the past at any given moment?

Just because Max takes Tara's condition in the classic laid-back John Corbett fashion (if the dude could put up with Carrie Bradshaw's drama -- twice -- he can sure as heck handle Disassociative Identity Disorder) doesn't mean this life is easy for him. What do you do if your wife's body is coming onto you with the sex drive -- and personality -- of a teenage girl? How do you protect your gay son's feelings if his mother is prone to turning into a homophobic biker? What are the mechanics of life with DID like?

And speaking of which, my only knowledge of the disorder comes from TV and movies (and Grant Morrison's run on "Doom Patrol"), which means I basically know nothing about it. But it does make sense to me that the alters would in some way be stereotypes. Tara calls on them in times of stress, becoming teenaged T when she can't handle her parental responsibility, and Buck when she's feeling protective of her kids, but she hasn't been a teenager in a long time, and she's never been a Vietnam vet, let alone a man. I imagine her mind is filling in a lot of blanks with whatever knowledge Tara has, which is probably pretty scant.

There's also something to be said for holding the audience's hand a little bit with such a weird idea. Tara's family may be used to her, but we aren't, and so the characterizations of the alters are very broad, her physical transformation into them (the way her jaw re-sets itself when she becomes Buck, for instance) unmistakable, but that isn't always going to be the case, based both on what I've seen down the road and what Cody told me.

Anyway, that's me. While I have some issues here and there (some dealing with episodes down the road), for the most part I dug it.

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Sepinwall on TV: Diablo Cody talks 'United States of Tara'

In the first of today's columns (which actually won't be in the paper until Sunday), I talk with "United States of Tara" creator Diablo Cody about the show, her quick rise to fame and Academy Award approval, and the backlash that resulted from it.

When an interview is particularly lively, I like to run the full transcript, so after the jump, a brief intro and then a whole lot of talk about the above topics, and Cody's unique style of dialogue (and my inability to correctly identify it half the time), and more.

Some brief background is in order first. "Tara" (which premieres Sunday at 10 p.m. on Showtime) stars Toni Collette as a suburban mom with Disassociative Identity Disorder (or DID), who retreats into other personas (or "alters") in times of stress, including a slutty teenage girl named T, a perfect 1950s housewife named Alice, and a gruff, male, Vietnam veteran named Buck. John Corbett plays her husband Max, Brie Larson and Keir Gilchrist their teenage kids, and they all have to roll with the punches in this odd family situation.

Sportswriters used to say about Ted Williams that he was a great hitter because he had amazing eyesight, and he would always retort that his eyes were normal; he just worked really hard at hitting. People talk all the time about your great ear for dialogue. Is that something that came naturally to you, or something you've had to pay attention to?

I think I've always had a fascination with speech, for sure. I didn't know that I had an ear for dialogue. People say that I do, which I appreciate. I don't know that I do, but people say it. That was a discovery for me. When I wrote "Juno," I didn't know there was anything out of the ordinary. So it was a surprise to see that's what people were interested in. I've tried to stay true to that in subsequent projects, but I didn't want to just be known as -- excuse me, "to be just," I really hate to split an infinitive -- to be just known as a master of dialogue.

I'm sorry, did I split an infinitive? As you can see, I have a complete obsession with these things.

One of the things about the "Juno" script is that there's like a marked split between the first 10 minutes and the rest of the movie. Was that deliberate, or just the way it played out?

I think it had to do with Rainn Wilson's character in the store. I just had envisioned that guy as being incredibly eccentric. And Juno playing off of him, when you have the two of them in the same scene, it's going to be off-the-wall. Plus I thought it would be a nice introduction to the tone of the movie.

Here's my theory: I actually don't think the first 10 minutes of "Juno" sound any different from the rest. I think it's the swimming pool effect, where when you first get in, it's shockingly cold, and then your body acclimates.

Hmm... that makes a certain amount of sense.

I'm probably lying, but that's how I think about it.

We're not just going to talk about dialogue here, but I pulled out a couple of examples from "United States of Tara," and I wanted you to talk a little bit about the thought that went into structuring the line the way you did. One of them was, "Sometimes, you make me feel like I'm living in some Lifetime lady tampon movie." Lifetime's easy to beat up, I make jokes about them all the time, but this felt more cutting than mine usually are.

I'm not looking to ruin your story here, but that line was actually given to me by Alexa Junge, who is our executive producer. That is an example of us all getting into the spirit of things. I think I actually have made fun of Lifetime before in scripts. Lifetime is actually getting hip these days. I don't want to piss them off; I may do a show over there one day.

Well, let's try...

Ha ha...

I'm going to keep plugging away at this.

I know, I'm thinking, "He's going to be so disappointed."

Okay, when Tara's daughter says, "I'm sorry. I guess I should have let that fertilized egg implant itself in my uterus."

That was me. And you know what's funny? I got called out in a review, for saying that particular line was unrealistic, because there's no way the teenage daughter would be that articulate. And I thought to myself, "YAWN! Where have I heard that criticism before?" Okay, we get it: some people think my teenage characters are too well-spoken and sassy. There's no changing their minds.

I personally think that is a very realistic reaction. (Tara's daughter) Kate is a smart cookie. For her dad to be bagging on her for taking a morning-after pill, what was the alternative? That's what she's saying.

Well, let's veer off and talk about that. You're obviously very aware of how quickly the Diablo Cody love affair turned into an opportunity for people to pile on you.

It's typical. Here's the thing: I come from the world of blogging, and I have written some incredibly snarky blog entries in the past. I understand how it feels when you feel like you have no voice and no outlet for your opinions and are just shouting into an abyss. It can make you a little caustic. So I have sympathy for those people. I have been one, and can sometimes still be one. So those are my people. The meanest people are kind of my comrades, in a strange way. It's not something that I can feel righteous anger about. It's part of the Internet, part of the fun.

But you go see a Mamet play, or a Sorkin show, and everybody talks the same way --

I like where you're going with this.

-- and nobody, for the most part, beats up on them about it.

I have brought up Quentin Tarantino, David Mamet, Aaron Sorkin, whom I love, in that context. It definitely has to do with sexism. I'm sorry, I believe that it does. A female writer is not allowed to be a maverick. You can write a cute romantic comedy, even run a studio, but God forbid you have an outsized personality, or they are going to bag on you.

Do you think it's just sexism, or is there anything unique to your own personal backstory?

It's absolutely where I come from. I am a representative of those people. So naturally, they're going to turn on you. You are what you hate.

"I liked that band until they became popular."

Uh-huh. I used to post on Internet message boards all day and talk about celebrities. I loved all the gossip, and now I find myself on those pages, so I can't go anymore. It's pretty ironic. Not that I'm a celebrity, but I do come up for discussion occasionally.

Well, you are one of the closest things to a celebrity writer that there is right now.

That's exactly it, and I do wonder about that. I wonder why I was able to become a visible writer, because there aren't many of us, but it happened. It happened, and it was something I thought would fade very quickly, and now I'm back out here again, and it's a surprise.

Not to blame yourself, but is there anything you could have done differently in the "Juno" rollout campaign to limit the fact that you were being put out there?

You know what? I was so enthusiastic about the movie and had no idea that it was going to do the business that it did. Obviously, when you work on a movie that costs 7 and a half million dollars, you want to promote it as much as you can. I was incredibly close to the director and the cast, and it felt like we were all out there together. I was excited. It wasn't like I was out on this big campaign of self-promotion, though if I go back and read those materials, I can see how it could be interpreted that way, absolutely.

Because I was everywhere, and the portrayal of me in a lot of articles was really super-cheesey. Over-the-top cheesey. It's strange. I was on the cover of Written By magazine, which is the magazine of the Writers Guild. It's a prestigious publication, and every screenwriter dreams of having the cover. I get it, and the headline was "Her First Time," which is really sexually suggestive. And I'm like, "Uh, they don't do that to Bill Monahan." It felt a little squicky to me, and when people read that, they think I'm complicit in it. You know, like I said to them, (in a very breathy voice) "Hey, can you allude to virginity on my Written By cover? My mom and dad are going to love that!"

How long, if ever, do you think it's going to take before the phrase "stripper-turned-screenwriter" disappears from the first line of articles written about you?

It's funny. I would have thought it never would, and then I just sat through this panel downstairs and not a single journalist brought up the stripping thing. You could knock me over with a feather right now. I was sure of it, I had warned people, "Get ready for the inevitable derailing of this conference, because somebody will want to talk about stripping." And nobody did, thank God.

It's always going to come up in articles. That's fine with me. I wrote a book about it. I think if I hadn't written a book about it and it was a dirty secret that somebody dredged up to hurt my career, then it would be very painful. But it's always been a freak flag that I've flown, so I don't have a problem with it.

Okay, let me try another phrase from the show, (when Kate complains about someone being) "Gimp-slapped."

(Cody spins around in her chair and doubles over in laughter)

What?

I'm sorry, I swear I wrote all this content, but...

So who wrote that?

Alexa. "Gimp-slapped" is pretty funny, though. It didn't make sense to me at the time, because nobody involved had a limp, and isn't that usually what "gimp" refers to?

That or the guy in "Pulp Fiction."

But it made me laugh, and that was the way it went.

I'm going to keep trying.

I'm sorry. But I have to tell Alexa about this.

This is good, because I was the one who asked her in the press conference about the difficulty of writing like you. So, clearly, she can.

She was up for it. Certain things, like in the pilot, there was a line by T that went on too long. And for some reason they weren't able to contact me, and Alexa changed it on the set to something like "Hormones and that clap-clap can make you grow a third nipple." And I went, "You sound just like me!"

I've sat in rooms and watched David Milch rewrite every single word of his staffer's scripts.

That happens. I do not believe in rewriting. I do not mind being rewritten, I'm of the mind that most people can do it better than me. But this is one way that I don't necessarily fit into the television world: I'm not a big believer in giving writers excessive notes, I would not deign to rewrite their stuff without permission. I respect what people have to bring to the table. I feel like the only thing you have to offer as a writer is your individuality. Otherwise, it's just a vanilla sitcom. So if someone else's episode doesn't sound exactly like mine tonally, I see that as adding texture to the show. I don't see that as a problem.

Okay, we're going to give this idea one last try, and then I'm going to leave the field of battle.

This whole article is going to be about how I don't do my own writing and I've just outsourced my dialogue. All I care about is "90210" and I don't write my own lines, that's what it's going to say.

When Alice confronts her son's teacher, finds out his first name is Orel, and gives him this long pep talk that ends with "It's time to start loving Orel."

That was a collaboration, that whole scene was. I credit Toni with that, because the way she says it as Alice is just unbelievable. I wasn't sure where she was going to go with that alter, because all I had mentioned was Alice was very maternal and very traditional, and she added this great lilt to her voice. It gets a laugh.

Well, that brings me to the way Toni plays the three alters we've seen in very archetypal ways. Alice is a character out of a '50s movie, Buck is a redneck, etc. How did you decide that these three were the ones you were going to start off with?

I always try to find a feminist angle in everything. I was thinking about "What particular roles does a modern woman have to play in her life?" And I can take that to a modern extreme with this show. Alice is the caretaker, domestic, making the cake for the school bake sale. Which is the kind of thing a lot of moms have to do, even if they have a full-time job. Then there is T, who represents the sexual side of her personality, which is something we all need to tap into occasionally. And then there is Buck, when we need to be aggressive or asexual or even masculine, and you'll notice that Buck comes out when she feels threatened, or protective of her children. He's sort of the man of the house in her mind. They were definitely conceived of as a response to stress.

It sounds like there are going to be others either created or re-introduced later in the season. Are those in some way, reflections of a woman's struggle?

No, some of them were more based on research that we had done about the kind of alters that are typical. Someone (in the session) did ask, "Are they all as developed and archetypal?" And the answer is no. Some of them are a lot more mysterious than, say, somebody like Alice is out there voicing her opinion.

Well, when she slips into one of the three main alters, it's obvious on her face who she is even before she puts on the costume. Could there be times when she slips into one of these alters and it's not only not immediately obvious to us, but to her husband? Or can he always tell?

No. We played with that idea a little bit. Obviously, a show like this has potential to confuse people. So in the beginning we wanted to make it really explicit: "She has transitioned." But later in the season we were really able to play with the idea of, "Would Tara ever masquerade as one of the alters to get away with something?"

Her son Marshall, while he doesn't have DID, has his own carefully-cultivated persona as a jazz aficionado and old film buff, and he has this best friend who dresses like she's in a '40s movie. Can you talk a little about that? I think those two are the kind where people might pile on again and say, "There's no people like that out there."

I've known a lot of Marshalls, a lot of old souls. He's kind of the eye of the storm in a way. I liked the idea of his room being this very sophisticated womb in a chaotic house. He's in his own world, dreams of getting out. Seems like the kid will move immediately to New York when he's 18. He and his friend are really above it all. She makes the comment about how a teacher went to a state school. They're really pretentious, and that was kind of fun for me. The important thing about Marshall is we see he is so supportive of his mother, and they have this intense bond. So when and if that bond gets compromised later on, it'll affect people.

You're new to TV. How much have you thought through not just this season, but beyond it?

We all hope that we'll get another season, obviously. And if we did, I know we've all thought about things we'd like to do. I have high hopes for the show. I would want to be around for the life of it, absolutely.

TV, it's been a stressful experience for me. Working on "Juno," I was just the writer. And on this show, to be a creator and executive producer, and write five episodes, was quite a bit. I'm not used to being entrusted with decisions. I'm used to having other people say, "Oh, look at this amazing set we've built!" Or "Hey, come look at Juno's costume." And I would go, "Oh, this is great!" And I got to enjoy other people's decisions. Now I'm responsible for them. That was new for me, and, honestly, I'm a pretty Type B person. There's not a lot of people in the entertainment industry who are as laissez-faire as I am. So for me, it was hard to put myself into the headspace of, "Okay, you have to be decisive and ambitious."

Well, there are guys like David E. Kelley who do nothing but write and delegate all the other showrunner responsibilities to a trusted lieutenant.

Alexa was a massive help. Not only is she definitely one of the voices of the show, but she ran the room. I couldn't run a writer's room. I am not a leader of men. So that was an intelligent decision that they made. But I know there are some people who completely micromanage everything. I admire those people, but I have no idea how they sleep or eat.

So what are you like in a writer's room? Because previously you had written largely on your own.

I'm totally chill, and I honestly -- it's a strange experience. I think if I had gone into someone else's writer's room -- like, if I had been hired on a staff writer on a show -- I would have been an eager beaver, and I would have felt like, "I better get all my lines in!" On this show, I was able to be more of an observer, because it was my staff. It was cool to see how these really seasoned professionals -- we had people from 30 Rock, and West Wing, and Six Feet Under, and I would sit there going, "Tell me what it was like writing that episode!" I was like a fan. I was a pupil. I was not in any position of authority. I didn't want to be.

Has Alexa or anyone else who's a TV veteran, talked to you about saving stuff for if there's a second or third season? Because the easy rookie mistake is, "I've got all these ideas, and we're gonna get 'em in as fast as we can!" And you've got nothing for year two.

That's just something that I do in general. I'm constantly trying to cram as much information into everything I write, because I always feel like I may never get an opportunity to use this joke again. It's hard for me to pare down. The thing with Alexa is, she taught me the discipline of TV writing. As we were writing episode two, she was already figuring out episode 11. So in that way, we were already aware of what we had used, hadn't used, and what we would use, early on. It wasn't like we were throwing things out randomly until the end and went, "Hope we can think of something else." It was very calculated. We were conscious of that, and the network was as well. We did have several meetings about, "This plot point, do we want to introduce it now?"

Getting back to the Sorkin/Milch/Mamet thing, when I've talked to them in the past, they will argue that their characters do not, actually, speak alike, that they can very clearly and easily identify what would be an Al Swearengen line versus a Seth Bullock line. What, for you, is the difference between something Kate would say and what Tara would say?

I'm very interested in the rhythms of language. To me, Kate's lines have a staccato quality to them. She has more of a rat-a-tat-tat delivery. Whereas Tara is very thoughtful, and she always seems to be thinking about things when she says them. Kate is obviously a lot younger, she peppers her dialogue with more slang, and there's more anger underneath a lot of what she says. Where with Tara, there's a kind of sadness. Kate and Tara, to me, sound different. I think Marshall has a really specific way of talking, and then Max is probably the straight talker of the bunch.

That's definitely a challenge. When I write screenplays, that's always the test: you read a line and you ask, "Could anyone else have said this?" I try to avoid that.

Maybe I should have asked about Kate versus T, then. How do you do that?

T is completely confident and clueless. She's not even hearing herself. There's just all this bravado there. Kate, I think, is a little deeper than that. Some of the things T says are absolutely ridiculous.

How do you decide, with pop culture references, how much is too much?

There's never too many. And I guess, for me, that's my form of cinema verite. Because everybody I know is constantly making pop culture references. I don't know if it's because we're living in a post-modern world, or what, but it's endless. Just on my way up here, I had a conversation with a journalist about "Bewitched." To me, that's reality.

And there are some things I can't resist. When Tara makes a reference to Alice's dress looking like the robot from "Small Wonder" -- okay, I'm sorry, I know I sometimes go too far, but I couldn't not say it. It's a pinafore!

Obviously, you went with it in that case, but do you ever think, "Tara wouldn't make that reference because she's not the right age to have seen that?"

You know what I sometimes think about more is that Toni wouldn't, because she's from Australia. I wonder if she finds all of this bizarre.

I'm sure they have their own equivalent of the horrible girl robot show.

Maybe they do, I don't know. But of course, I think about those things. But Tara's young, she had the kids at 20. She's kind of of my generation.

One last one, this is from "Juno," so I know you wrote it: "Honest-to-blog?"

That was me.

Talk about the conception of that one.

I probably conceived of and typed that line in the same half-second. At that time in my life, I was not sitting around thinking about my craft. I was just, like, "I'm enjoying myself. I have two hours tonight to write and then I have to get up early tomorrow to work, and I'm going to just write this scene where two girls talk on the phone."

Because it seemed like that was the line that people pulled out of the movie and either said, "Oh God, I love her!" or "Oh God, she really makes me nuts!"

It makes me laugh. Like, it's just a throwaway line like people use in conversation. I like when people say "Oh my blog," as well.

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com Click here to read the full post