Meet Tara -- and T, and Alice, and Buck

This Sunday, January 18, Showtime will begin airing its newest season of The Secret Diary of a Call Girl, as well as the final season of The L Word.

As part of that new lineup, the pay cable network will also premiere a new "dramedy," The United States of Tara.  The show, starring Toni Collette as a woman with Dissociative Identity Disorder (multiple personalities), comes from writer Diablo Cody, who this past year won an Oscar for the screenplay to Juno.

The Tara idea, however, originated with none other than Steven Spielberg.  Spielberg and Showtime president Robert Greenblatt then came across Cody's Juno screenplay, nine months before the film even went into production, and, loving her original voice, hired her to flesh out the idea to series.

So, how much about Tara will be as quirky as Juno?  Well, the show definitely is funny, and honest. Tara's alternate personalities (teenager T; Alice, a Donna Reed-like housewife; Buck, a macho man in a trucker hat) definitely know that they're inhabiting her body.  And even more intriguingly, Tara and her family -- including her gay son Marshall, played by Keir Gilchrist, who was so funny as the kid on the short-lived Fox sitcom The Winner opposite Rob Corddry -- are "out" about her disorder; it's not a secret, kept from a nosy Mrs. Kravitz.  "Your neighbor could talk openly about being on an antidepressant, or their kid taking ritalin," Cody theorized.  "So it seemed unrealistic for it to be this huge taboo in town. ...Obviously some people are frightened, but others are intrigued.  And I think that would be the natural response to something like this."

Cody was also careful to explain that the series doesn't spring entirely from her imagination -- particularly the details about the real-life condition DID.  "I've been able in the past to use my imaginations for situations I've never been in, but in this case, when you're dealing with a sensitive topic like this, you absolutely have to do your homework."

"I didn't want to make fun because [the condition] is serious and comes from a sad place," Collette agreed.  "With all the research everyone's done, it's very personal.  I have a friend who had experience with DID who was blown away by how realistic it was."

In fact, Collette pointed out it was the pilot script for Tara that convinced her to do TV at all.  "I never had any aspirations to work in TV but I picked up this script one day from my agent and read it immediately," she explained.  "As soon as I closed last page turned to my husband and said, 'I have to do this.'  It was so delicious to read, so original and unusual, it's a complete dream for an actor.  It is about a woman with a mental illness, but it goes beyond that, into how a family lives and makes that quite normal for their lives.  It's incredibly funny but also moving and very real.  I like stories you can't fit into a box and that you can relate to as a human being."

The United States of Tara

Premieres Sunday, January 18, 2009

10 PM Eastern

How I Met Your Mother and The Best Burger in New York

This past Monday night, we learned another of Marshall Eriksen's endearing quirks: he's been bedeviled (as is Regis Philbin, it turns out) by a cosmically good burger he had eight years ago, somewhere in Manhattan. The problem is, he forgot where.

It was a fun episode -- particularly if you're a New Yorker. Because unlike so many sitcoms, this is a show that quite often gets it right. Sure, Ted and Marshall live in an apartment that would be a castle by NYC standards; but at least it's not Monica and Rachel's a-little-too-nice Greenwich Village pad on Friends or Paul and Jamie's inexplicably huge flat on Mad About You. Besides, Ted and Marshall's place can't be made too small -- because as How I Met Your Mother's executive producers Carter Bays and Craig Thomas reminded me when I visited them on the set last year while reporting for CBS Watch magazine, the cameras, after all, do have to fit!

In particular, Monday's episode, "The Best Burger in New York," got it right on several fronts. We New Yorkers do bemoan the loss of the real Upper West Side stalwart bar Fez, at 85th & Broadway. (And yes, every available retail space does seem to have turned into a Goliath bank lately -- although possibly that trend is over as of this week!) And, Carter and Craig had told me, they personally mourn the recent real-life loss of Midtown pub McHale's at 47th Street & 8th Avenue; it's one of the inspirations for Maclaren's bar on the show, and was where the two guys first started writing comedy together over a beer, as they took breaks from their MTV internship during college. And finally, there's the fun moment where Marshall goes ballistic on a guy who haplessly suggests the West Village bar The Corner Bistro -- the stereotypical answer to the question "Where can you get the best burger...," even though it's tiny and always packed (and I've never had the patience to wait for a table.)



By the way, just in case you are about to visit New York and want to, like Marshall,go on a quest, here's what you have to do: go to the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park. But do it soon -- it will close for the season in early December.

A very close second: somewhere new Frank and I just discovered, a place called Five Napkin Burger at 47th Street and Ninth Avenue. It's run by the owners of UWS favorite Nice Matin, and let me just say that the classic, titular burger, with its caramelized onions, soft Boursin-like French cheese and rosemary aioli, is so good that, like Barney, I want to make burger babies with it.

This week's episode not only made me laugh, but it made me hungry -- and now I'm passing it forward. Feel free to blame me at your Weight Watchers meeting.


How I Met Your Mother
Season 4
Mondays at 8:30 PM Eastern
CBS