WATCH UNITED STATES OF TARA PREMIERE EPISODE

Oscar winning Juno writer, Diablo Cody's new series is available to watch online now. Check out the sneak peek of the premiere episode.

What Cody has come up with is Tara, a depressive housewife and muralist-for-hire, played by Toni Collette with the open-mouthed neediness she's capitalized upon since Muriel's Wedding. But unlike Muriel, there's nothing here to make us particularly care about Tara. She's not quite pathetic enough, or crazy enough, or manipulative enough. She possesses none of the guile or sex appeal that made Mary-Louise Parker's pot-dealing mom in Weeds so instantly engaging, none of the ferocity and purposefulness of the women at the center of The Closer and Damages, none of the stifled ambition propelling the Mad Men girls. Tara might talk a lot, but she arrives utterly inert, without any reason to exist. What Tara does have, however, is a hook. She suffers from dissociative identity disorder, a very real affliction which in Hollywood's hands always seems to offer actors a showcase to flaunt one's broad-ranged capacity for flimsy stereotyping. Why perform one character well, the thinking seems to go, when you can instead embody a half-dozen lazily rendered caricatures, spanning generations, socio-economic backgrounds, and colorful slang lexicons? And so, just as the mind starts to wander away from the neither remarkable nor well-observed struggles of Tara, her long-suffering and sketchily motivated husband Max (John Corbett), and their two Junospeak-afflicted children (we meet the daughter shortly after she's taken the Morning After pill; their teenage son, meanwhile, is forced to utter the line, "Aunt Charmaine is a hosebeast," among other humiliations), we're introduced to Tara's alter egos: T, the slutty tween, Buck, the trash-mouthed trucker, and, in a future installment, Alice, the happy 1950s homemaker. We'd prefer a Hills marathon, a Larry the Cable Guy special, and some Leave it to Beaver to this. At least there's some authenticity in that artifice. source