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[[File:united-states-of-tara-season-3_8744.jpg|frame|[[Battle in the Center of the Mind|Conference in the center of the mind]].]]
Tara Gregson ([[Toni Collette]]) is a mid-30s mother of two with [[Split Personality|Dissociative Identity Disorder]]. After Tara [[No Medication for Me|takes a break from her meds]] to discover the cause, three of her alters resurface: Buck, a male alter who likes the firing range and claims to have lost his member in 'Nam; Alice, a 1950s housewife who claims to have attended Radcliffe at Harvard; and T, a pot-smoking, flirty teenager who likes maxing out Tara's credit cards.
'''''United States of Tara''''' is an American [[Dramedy]] that explores the effect DID can have on a family. That family in this case includes her husband, Max; her daughter, Kate, and son, Marshall, all three of whom have problems of their own. Max has more patience than Job, Kate's going through that awkward time known as the teenage years and Marshall has to deal with being an openly gay 14-year-old (and Buck being the manliest of men).▼
▲Tara Gregson ([[Toni Collette]]) is a mid-30s mother of two with [[Split Personality|Dissociative Identity Disorder]]. After Tara [[No Medication for Me|takes a break from her meds]] to discover the cause, three of her alters resurface: Buck, a male alter who likes the firing range and claims to have lost his member in 'Nam; Alice, a 1950s housewife who claims to have attended Radcliffe at Harvard; and T, a pot-smoking, flirty teenager who likes maxing out Tara's credit cards. {{spoiler|Additional alters surface during the course of the series: Gimme, a [[Wild Child]] seemingly incapable of speech; Shoshana Schoenbaum, a therapist whose book Tara read, and who is a dead ringer for the real deal; Chicken, Tara's personality when she was a child; and Bryce Craine, an alter based on Tara's half-brother}}.
▲''United States of Tara'' is an American [[Dramedy]] that explores the effect DID can have on a family. That family in this case includes her husband, Max; her daughter, Kate, and son, Marshall, all three of whom have problems of their own. Max has more patience than Job, Kate's going through that awkward time known as the teenage years and Marshall has to deal with being an openly gay 14-year-old (and Buck being the manliest of men).
The series was created by [[Steven Spielberg]] and written by [[Diablo Cody]]. It began running on [[Showtime]] in January of 2009 and ran for three seasons.
----
{{tropelist}}
* [[All Girls Want Bad Boys]]: Kate's first shown boyfriend (Ben, I think) is a Goth and an abusive douchebag.
* [[Attractive Bent Gender]]: Depending on the person, Buck. Depending on even stranger people, {{spoiler|[[Ax Crazy|Bryce]].}}▼
* [[Arc Words]]: Youwillnotwin.
▲* [[Attractive Bent Gender]]: Depending on the person, Buck. Depending on even stranger people, {{spoiler|[[Ax Crazy|Bryce]]
* [[Ax Crazy]]:
* [[Bittersweet Ending]]: The series finale
* [[Bury Your Gays]]:
* [[Cannot Spit It Out]]: Tara to {{spoiler|her family, particularly Max, about how she's transitioning to Buck again. And had apparently sparked a relationship with a female bartender}}.▼
* [[Calling the Old Man Out]]
* [[Camp Gay]]: Lionel, the queen of the 'Gayble'.
▲* [[Cannot Spit It Out]]: Tara to
* [[Cerebus Syndrome]]:
* [[Character Development]]: Everyone. The most obvious examples would be Kate and Charmaine's transformations over the series.
* [[Closer to Earth]]: [[Gender
** Subverted as of
* [[Battle in the Center of the Mind|Conference in the Center of the Mind]]: When Tara declares the beggining of her "dictatorship" but makes arrangements with each of the alters.▼
** More straightforward [[Battle in the Center of the Mind]] {{spoiler|when she finally drowns Bryce}}.▼
* [[Club Kid]]: Lionel likes parties, drugs, and anonymous sex.
▲* [[Battle in the Center of the Mind|Conference in the Center of the Mind]]: When Tara declares the
▲** More straightforward [[Battle in the Center of the Mind]]
* [[Country Matters]]: Tara gets into trouble for this.
* [[Darkest Hour]]: The entirety of "Crunchy Ice".
* [[Darker and Edgier]]: Boy, [[Diablo Cody]] is a lot darker than we originally thought.
* [[Driven to Suicide]]: The Gregsons' neighbor in the
▲* [[Driven to Suicide]]: The Gregsons' neighbor in the season 2 premiere. Attempted by {{spoiler|Tara Gregson}} in "Crunchy Ice".
* [[Effeminate Misogynistic Guy]]: Lionel Trane was so misogynistic that he made other, more mature and secure gay characters uncomfortable.
* [[Epunymous Title]]
* {{spoiler|[[Failure Is the Only Option]]: At the beginning of Season 2, Tara has been alter-free for three months. Guess what happens at the end of the episode}}.
* [[Fille Fatale]]: T has elements of this, what with her aggressively hitting on Max and later
* [[Freudian Excuse]]: A rather heartbreaking one:
** It's revealed in the
* [[Ghost in the Machine]]: Probably not in the actual series proper, but the title sequence stylistically represents the three alters living in a house that turns into Tara's head. It won an Emmy.
* [[I Call It Vera]]: Buck has a gun called Persephone.
* [[If You Ever Do Anything to Hurt Her...]]: Despite the actual words never being said, since he was ''already'' hurting Kate, Buck and Marshall just decide to skip straight to making good on the threat.
* [["I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight]]: [[Tear Jerker|Excruciatingly]] subverted in "Crunchy Ice".
▲* [[If You Ever Do Anything to Hurt Her...]]: Despite the actual words never being said, since he was ''already'' hurting Kate, Buck and Marshall just decide to skip straight to making good on the threat.
* [[Infant Immortality]]:
▲* [[Important Haircut]]: "Don't you know? Tara's {{spoiler|never coming back}}."
* [[Informed Attribute]]:
▲* [[Infant Immortality]]: {{spoiler|Averted. When Bryce starts violently killing the alters, sweet and innocent 5 year old Chicken is the first to be murdered.}}
▲* [[Informed Attribute]]: {{spoiler|While the flashbacks to Mimi clearly showed her as having Alice's exact personality, when Tara tracked her down in the present everyone was still reacting as if she was much more Alice-like than she appeared to be. While prim and proper, she was very much Alice-lite}}.
* [[Jerkass]]: For the first six and a half episodes, Charmaine was pretty consistently a massive bitch about her sister's mental illness. She gets better, thankfully.
* [[Jerk with a Heart of Gold]]: Buck has his moments of sensitivity.
* [[Kirk Summation]]: In the second episode, Alice rips Marshall's English teacher to shreds over his bad high school experiences. Needless to say, he reconsiders his treatment of Marshall.
**
** Grandma Sandi has an epic, and [[Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass|unexpected]], one for
* [[Knight of Cerebus]]:
* [[Laughably Evil]]: Say what you want about
* [[Mama Bear]]: Alice with a whole heap of [[Tranquil Fury]] and a side of [[Kirk Summation]]. Aside from her family Alice believes she's one for Tara herself because, in her words, Tara is weak.
* [[Mood Whiplash]]: After Pammy the bartender
{{quote|
** "Crunchy Ice" is the darkest episode of the series, but of course its chock full of [[Black Comedy]]. It's even lampshaded by Marshall.
{{quote|
* [[Never Mess with Granny]]: Despite the fact that she's a hoarding [[Cloudcuckoolander]], [[Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass|Grandma Sandi's]] got some bite. She was the only character who was ever able to effectively stand up to
{{quote|
** Also counts as a [[Crowning Moment of Awesome]] for her!
* [[Occidental Otaku]]: Kate's first shown boyfriend is a [[Goth]] and, to be blunt, Wapanese.
* [[Papa Wolf]]: Buck will kick your ass if you mess with his loved ones. [[Unstoppable Rage|Ask Kate's ex-boyfriend]]. And like Alice, he is also defensive of Tara as seen in the
* [[Romantic False Lead]]: Charmaine's new boyfriend, "Fake Uncle" Nick, is a Nice RFL with regards to the relationship between her and Neil,
* [[Shout-Out]]: Tara has an
* [[Slasher Smile]]:
* [[Soap Punishment]]: Alice, one of Tara's alters who is a 1950s housewife, invokes this trope after Kate gives her [[Ethical Slut]] rant. Alice follows through on the threat, driving Kate to get a job so she can move out (which becomes a major subplot for the next two seasons).
* [[Split Personality]]: Of course!
* [[Split Personality Merge]]: As with [[Truth in Television]], the ultimate goal of Tara's therapy is for her to integrate.
* [[Split Personality Takeover]]: Alice seems at times like she wants to do this, what with her "I'll be around all the time" speech to Marshall in the second episode and her deriding Tara for being weak in the season finale.
** This also seems to be
* [[Stalker with a Crush]]:
* [[Stepford Smiler]]: Alice. Trapped in an eternal Eisenhower era housewife personality, said to secretly get drunk off cooking wine and initially seems hellbent on staying in control of Tara's body. Though over time her own psychosis lessens as she learns to work with Tara.
* [[
▲* [[Straight Gay]]: Marshall and Noah.
** In
▲* [[Talking to Themself]]: In season 1, Alice was the only one that was able to communicate with the other alters and claimed that she had no idea where Tara would go to when she took over the body; in season 2 Tara was able to have an argument with Buck and have therapy with {{spoiler|Shoshana}}; in season 3 Tara is able to {{spoiler|fully communicate with them all and even summoned them for a conference}}.
* [[The Three Faces of Eve]]: Pretty solidly averted. T is a pretty easy fit into the Seductress, but that's complicated by her being the literal Child of the three. Alice seems to be the Mother, but she's also highly sexual while still being naïve enough to believe that Tara's IUD won't work because she doesn't "believe in them
▲** In season 3 some alters {{spoiler|were having conversations with each other while Tara was [[Locked Out of the Loop]]. But she was still able to see and hear them}}.
** Tara's
▲* [[The Three Faces of Eve]]: Pretty solidly averted. T is a pretty easy fit into the Seductress, but that's complicated by her being the literal Child of the three. Alice seems to be the Mother, but she's also highly sexual while still being naïve enough to believe that Tara's IUD won't work because she doesn't "believe in them." Tara's just complicated, as people tend to be.
▲** Tara's {{spoiler|additional alters}} further complicate things. {{spoiler|Chicken}} is obviously the child so that clears that portion up, but it's hard to deny that T can fit in the archetype as well; T, Alice, and {{spoiler|Shoshana}} have shades of the seductress but the latter two also have many traits of the mother.
▲* [[Title Drop]]: In "Wheels."
▲{{quote| '''Tara''': I'm dissolving the United States of Tara and declaring myself king.}}
* [[The Twink]]: '''Lionel''', and to an extent, Marshall.
* [[Unexplained Recovery]]:
* [[What Happened to the Mouse?]]:
** In "Wheels," during the {{spoiler|conference in Tara's mind T refers to Gimme by saying they should "drown the dog." Gimme responds by biting her, then barking}}.▼
* [[Wild Teen Party]]: Marshall throws one with Kate's help when his parents are gone in the hopes that the boy he likes will come. Charmaine immediately thinks Kate is to blame. ▼
▲* [[What Happened to the Mouse?]]: {{spoiler|Gene and Jason from the first season both vanished without mention by season 2. Possibly justified since a fair amount of time is implied to have passed between the two seasons so any manner of things could have happened to the two characters to prevent them showing up again}}.
** Jason is mentioned a couple of times in the second season.
** Also the case with T, who doesn't appear at all in the second season and is only talked about ''once''.
*** Actually, she does appear in the penultimate episode of the second season, if only briefly. {{spoiler|She comes out before Chicken at the Parmeters' house, to accuse Mimi's husband Dwayne of abusing Tara
* [[
▲** In "Wheels",
▲* [[Wild Teen Party]]: Marshall throws one with Kate's help when his parents are gone in the hopes that the boy he likes will come. Charmaine immediately thinks Kate is to blame.
* [[Woman Scorned]]: {{spoiler|Marshall's reaction to his crush making out with T is to set her shed on fire and watch as it burns. It's very Medea}}.
* [[You Have Got to Be Kidding Me!]]
* [[You Keep Using That Word]]: "Multiple personalities is DID, and schizophrenia is hearing voices."
{{reflist}}
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[[Category:American Series]]
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