”The United States of Tara” which airs 9:30 p.m. Monday, Showtime (four stars) has a new formula for Season Two.

For those of you who have never watched this show, you are totally missing out! It is definitely entertaining for anyone who has a family member that is battling an ongoing issue which affects everyone in the family.

A quick summary of the series …

• Executive Produced by Steven Spielberg
• Created by the Academy Award® winning writer of Juno,
• Suburban wife and mother Tara Gregson (Emmy® Award winner Toni Collette) juggles her family and career while suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder — a condition formerly known as multiple personality disorder. It’s never a dull moment in the Gregson household, as Tara’s supportive husband Max and their two teenaged children, Kate and Marshall, try to lead as much of a “normal” life as possible.

I read an article in the Chicago Tribune this morning written by Maureen Ryan who actually watched the whole second season of U.S. of Tara. She states that “[the show] achieved a very satisfying synthesis” regarding Season Two. Below are some points she made about the second season and why it is better than Season 1.

• Almost everything that didn’t work in Season 1 is gone
• The tone is a lot lighter
• Buck is BACK! (lol, one of my fave characters)
•  In the first six episodes of Season 2, we don’t see wild child T at all and we barely see the repressed Alice (when she does briefly pop up, she does so to excellent comic effect)
• The show has added a couple of characters: the gay neighbors and Shoshana Schoenbaum, the Tara’s newest alter 
• Shoshana arrives in the fourth episode of the season. She may be the most skilled conversationalist on the show, which is saying something, and the frisson of the discoveries she elicits from Tara gives this well-paced season an enjoyable sense of tension.
• Tara’s son Marshall still gets the occasional over-the-top line, but actor Keir Gilchrist has such a winning, low-key way about him that you can’t help but hope that Marshall survives the challenges of having an unusual mom, being a teenager and having a lot of questions about his sexuality.
• Tara’s daughter Kate (Brie Larson) gets an intriguing story line of her own; she meets an artist, Linda P. Frazier (Viola Davis), who widens Kate’s horizons and involves her in an amusing bit of online performance art.
• John Corbett does his usual fine work as Tara’s supportive husband, Max, who ends up being less supportive the further he’s pushed.
• The conversations are witty without seeming arch or forced
• Tara deals with her alters in some intriguing new ways, but their arrivals and departures are much more low-key.

To learn more about the series, visit their website here.

To read more about what Maureen had to say, click here.