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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: June 20, 2011
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: United States of Tara, “The Good Parts” (Season 3, Episode 12). [Watch on Netflix.]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: For a lot of its three-season run, United States of Tara was a show that seemed to be constantly defined by people who weren’t watching it. This was Diablo Cody’s follow-up to Juno during a time when Juno wasn’t aging that well. This was a schticky program making hay out of mental illness by presenting multiple personality disorder like a vaudeville show. This was yet another female-protagonist-with-problems half-hour on Showtime, sandwiched between Weeds and Nurse Jackie and The Big C. When Toni Collette won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy, she was the latest culprit in a trend of dramedy actresses taking prizes that belonged to “true” comedians, further tarring Tara with a brush of unworthiness.
It always seemed to me that these definitions couldn’t have been made by anybody really watching the show. If you’d actually seen it, how could you quibble with Collette’s monster of a performance as Tara, plagued with multiple personalities, played with the vigor of an actress who is far too seldom given the opportunity to really dig into a role like this. If you watched the show, how could you not immediately look past the hook of Tara’s alters to the family dynamics underneath? How could you not thank your lucky stars for a convergence of showrunner talents like Diablo Cody (who weathered the Juno backlash and who has become one of my favorite film/TV voices, after Jennifer’s Body and Young Adult) and Jill Soloway (who would go on to make Transparent, another show about a perfectly imperfect family)? How could you not thank your lucky stars for the performances of Brie Larson and Rosemarie Dewitt and Keir Gilchrist?
I watched every episode of this imperfect little show. I watched it find itself, and then threaten to lose itself, and then find itself again. Even the series finale, “The Good Parts,” reflects this struggle. The opening scene features the worst of the series’ dependence on shock value in Tara’s storylines; having Tara face down her darkest alter in a dreamspace isn’t enough, so here’s some hot-button waterboarding imagery to boot. But as the episode unfolds, the series’ best qualities step out to shine. The way Tara’s children had been allowed to grow and change as characters (Larson and Gilchrist are so good it brings a lump to my throat, still). The knotty way that even Tara’s decision to finally seek treatment isn’t received as the cover-all problem solver it might have been on other shows.
The final minutes of the episode, and of of the series, probably won’t mean as much to someone who hadn’t been on the ride for three seasons. But watching Tara say goodbye to her kids: formerly sullen Kate who’s now the responsible, empathetic one; sweet little Marshall who’s in the process of being jaded by life but who can’t keep himself from saying the exact right thing. It’s everything I loved about the show, and ending the series this way said I was responding to the right things all along. The good parts.
[You can watch “The Good Parts” on Showtime.]
Joe Reid (@joereid) is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. You can find him leaving flowers for Mrs. Landingham at the corner of 18th and Potomac.
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