TV review: Collette's many faces equal one irritating show

You can see why the United States of Tara appealed to that fine actress, Toni Collette. Would you like to play a depressed, rather dull, anxious woman in her 40s who gets to appear on screen with limp hair and no make-up? No thanks.

What if she has four alter egos? And if one was a teenage girl who raids her daughter's wardrobe, wears thongs and skinny jeans, steals her own credit cards to go to the mall, and tries to talk her own husband into a bit of quicky, teenage bonking on the couch? And if one was a pinny-wearing, prim-ish perfect homemaker who calls jeans "dungarees", the fridge "the ice-box" and who bakes a cake for the bake sale fund-raiser for "the Brazilian kids" with "Every Child Deserves a Smile" written in perfect cursive frosting? And if one was a bloke who likes guns, smoking, beer, porn and bashing up her daughter's creepy boyfriend?

That last might have swung it. Tara has recently come off the medication which has been keeping the alters away. Her family are sanguine about their reappearance, to a point. The kids like T, the teenage girl (and you can see why teenagers might prefer T to their glum mum).

Nobody can stand Alice. She wants to iron creases in dad's jeans. She washed daughter Kate's mouth out with soap. Her idea of mother/son bonding is tell a 14-year-old boy that she knows he "tee-teed" in his bed. "You know lack of control is nothing to be ashamed of. Lots of debonair men through history have had their peccadilloes. For instance, Cary Grant liked to wear women's underwear."

The boys like going to the shooting range with Buck - although geeky, gay son, Marshall, prefers to read a book while Buck/mom and dad play shoot 'em up.

Is any of this funny? It's hard to work out how funny it's meant to be. Mom, when she's not being one of her alters, is mostly repressed and unhappy. She becomes an alter when she's distressed by family circumstances: she finds a prescription for the morning-after pill in her daughter's room; she sees her daughter's boyfriend manhandling her.

Her sister, who may or may not have the hots for her brother-in-law, thinks Tara's disorder is just acting. And there's the rub: It feels and looks like play-acting, like dress-ups. And we know when alter is about to take over because Tara gets a daft, far-away look.

At heart, United States of Tara is a nicely and wryly observed take on the mystery that is the family. But who'd want to watch that? So it has to have a stunt, or stunts, in the form of Tara's alters. The real characters are mum, dad and the two kids. But the silly alters get all the attention, which has the irritating effect of making us care less about any of the characters.