T, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore...or wait...we ARE....


The pilot episode, which I've watched twice, to catch all the dialogue, was certainly entertaining, thanks to Collette alone, who is such a stunning actor that she almost made the hideously horrendous 'Connie and Carla' watchable a few years back so this series, based on a loose idea by Steven Spielberg and fleshed out by Diablo Cody, has multiple areas of promise.

The pilot has Kansas mom Collette switching to 2 different alternative personalities, the first one being a teenager who calls herself T and the second being an outrageously macho guy named Buck.

T appeared because Tara couldn't deal with the fact that her teenage daughter is sexually active. Ironically, T herself was majorly horny and became angry when her husband - I mean Tara's husband - played by the also-perfectly cast John Corbett - wouldn't give her any action because he knew from their 17 years of married life that when Tara reappeared, she wouldn't be happy about it. So she was sent to the shed. Good move; teenagers do need discipline, after all.

The appearance of Buck came about when Tara, driving to her daughter's school, caught her daughter's boyfriend 'roughing her up' in the yard. Her daughter was embarrassed by Tara's yelling at the boyfriend, and Tara was crying by the time she got back to her car, where she began transforming into Buck by putting on aviator glasses and lighting a butt, conveniently found in her glove compartment. This characterization was hilarious, with Collette talking in a deep southern drawl and adapting a macho dick swagger, even putting out one of Buck's cigs in her son's just-baked cupcake or muffin before heading to her daughter's dance recital only to spot her daughter's boyfriend, whom she proceeded to wail on. He returned the favor, walloping her good an' proper. This was funny and Collette rocks, as I've duly noted.

But there's a downside to all this marvelous mayhem ~ the shifts between Tara's alters, as they're called, occur whenever she's confronted with any situation she doesn't want to deal with, which came across as much too pat, too 'easy'. And a question arose: would Tara, as Buck, even recognize and/or remember what she'd seen her daughter's boyfriend doing, earlier in the day?

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't expecting deep psychological probing in the half-hour debut of a pilot for a comedy series, but if I had the disorder, I'd probably be insulted by this monumentally superficial depiction. Also, some of the exposition between Tara and her son and especially Tara and her sister was written clumsily as all get out. It's as if Cody is trying too hard to be hip in her writing; there's a certain unnecessary flipness coming into play which I didn't like. Of course, this was just the pilot, there's a lot of room for the writing to blossom, to get more genuine, and Collette - did I mention Collette? - will keep us along for the ride, or at least I'll be watching, just to see her bat it outa the freakin' park on a weekly basis.