Diablo Cody and Jill Soloway Talk What's Next For "Tara"

[JamesG]

Tara's Diablo Cody and Jill Soloway talk about what's next for the Showtime comedy

The transition from film to television can be rocky for some actors. But not for Toni Collette, the star of Showtime’s “United States of Tara.”

“The one thing I am loving is the pace of TV. It’s so quick,” the actress said in a recent interview in Los Angeles on the first day of shooting for Season 2 of “Tara,” which returns in early 2010. “There’s no sitting around. You get to do more of what you love, every day.”



If anyone has excelled at the art of the quick transition, it’s Collette, who flawlessly plays four characters on the show. Collette’s primary character, Tara Gregson, is a suburban mom with dissociative identity disorder (DID), which causes her to turn into one of three “alters” whenever she’s stressed.

Collette’s versatility in the role is impressive, and members of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences agreed: The actress is up for a best comedy actress award at the Sept. 20 Emmy Awards ceremony.



Speaking of transitions, there has been one behind the scenes of the show, which concluded its first season in April. Creator and Chicago native Diablo Cody, who won an Academy Award for her debut feature script, “Juno,” and wrote the upcoming horror film “Jennifer’s Body,” is still on the show’s writing staff. But head writer Alexa Junge has departed, and Chicagoan Jill Soloway (“Six Feet Under,” “Dirty Sexy Money”) is now “Tara’s” head writer and showrunner.

“The show was getting a little bit too dark in terms of delving into her past and what happened” to Tara to cause DID, according to Showtime president Robert Greenblatt. “While we ultimately want to unpeel the onion and reveal what she went through, we had to rethink how we were doing that. It’s a comedy at the end of the day. It’s not a one-hour, serious drama about this affliction.”



Despite the tweaks, it’s not as if the show will be radically different when it returns, Cody and Soloway said in a recent interview in Los Angeles.

The idea is to “open up the series and take it out of the house a little bit and show all these different facets of Tara’s life and her alters’ lives,” Cody said.

Instead of the alters—which include a macho dude named Buck, a wild teen named T and a prim, proper housewife called Alice—just “getting into high jinks,” we’ll see more of their desires and their relationships in the wider world, Soloway added. Even Tara's family members, which include her husband (John Corbett) and her two teenagers, will be exploring "their inner alters," Soloway said.



"Tara's in a different place" at the start of Season 2, Collette noted. "She's happy and she's healthy and she's feeling like she's on top of things, and that's kind of reflected in her world. It's a little more vibrant and up -- until it's not."

One big story line for Season 2 involves Tara’s daughter, Kate (Brie Larson). Kate will meet an artist named Lynda (Viola Davis), who “uncovers the artist inside Tara” and helps her discover “who she really wants to be,” Soloway said.


Though “Tara” may not have realized all of its ambitious goals in Season 1, it’s at least trying something different—it’s examining mental illness in a way that isn’t melodramatic but wry and understanding. However Season 1 lacked, at times, driving narrative tension, something that should change in Season 2, the writers said.

“Diablo and I have talked about this—we wanted to create episodes where people are like, ‘Holy [expletive], did you see that episode? I can’t wait until next week,’.” Soloway said.

"On the one hand, we're touching provocative stuff that we might have avoided before," Cody said. "On the other hand, we want to emphasize the fact that it's a half-hour show. It's a comedy. We've got so many talented comedy writers -- let's exploit that."



Cody is known for her memorably turned phrases -- check out her hilarious memoir "Candy Girl" for more evidence of that -- and so of course she has invented a term for funny/dramatic shows such as "Tara": She calls them "traum-coms" -- traumatic comedies. Showtime, which is also the home of "Nurse Jackie," "Weeds" and "The C Word" (upcoming show about cancer starring Laura Linney), certainly has its share of them.

"That's the great thing about being on Showtime, you have the ability to do something tonally a little more complex. It's not just hilarious or serious," Cody said.

As for whether she prefers working in film, where writers generally work alone, to television, which is a more collaborative medium, Cody said she didn't favor one over the other.

"I think it's funny that people assume that someone could just phase back and forth because they are so different," she said. "I think I have to be more analytical writing for television. You have to think in advance. It's like a chess game. Whereas with a movie you can just take it whatever direction you want to go."

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