Wife and mother Tara Gregson (Toni Collette) has an identity disorder that includes personalities like Buck, a beer-guzzling Vietnam veteran with a tendency for violence. TMN/Astral Media)

In another era, United States of Tara might have been one of those After School Specials. The TV series premiere alone contains fodder for a handful of Very Special Episodes: there’s a gay adolescent boy; a 16-year-old girl who takes the morning-after pill after a pregnancy scare; a social-misfit boyfriend with violent tendencies; and more than a hint of repressed trauma.

Screenwriter Diablo Cody’s world is populated by flawed parents and damaged kids, all of whom love each other unconditionally.

And that’s all aside from the central drama — namely the titular Tara. Played by Toni Collette, Tara Gregson is a married mother of two who has dissociative identity disorder. In times of stress, she has a tendency to shift into one or more of her other personalities (or “alters”), all of whom have their own quirks and histories. Tara might become the tightly wound Stepford wife Alice; the eye-rolling teen tart T; or Buck, a boorish Vietnam vet with a love of guns. Thanks to an arrangement, Tara’s annoyingly affable husband, Max (John Corbett), refrains from, um, getting intimate with his wife’s alters — although he does happily watch porn with the beer-swilling Buck.

Tara’s alters have been a part of her life for as long as she can remember, but they’ve been thrust into the foreground ever since Tara decided to go off her meds. In part, she wanted to stop feeling “numbed out” all the time, but she also wanted to go back and figure out what triggered the condition.

The dissociative identity disorder is what most connects United States of Tara to the world of After School Specials. Popular throughout the 1970s and '80s, these cautionary made-for-TV movies addressed everything from divorce to Down syndrome and drinking. (Thanks to their clunky dialogue and sensationalist subject matter, After School Specials have since earned an ironic following.)

What’s remarkable about United States of Tara is that despite the density of touchy material crammed into the plot, the show never resorts to melodrama or educational programming. UsoT is ultimately an insightful rendering of a flawed family trying its best to communicate — in fact, the Gregsons are one of the most loving and committed fictional families we’ve seen in quite some time.

In part, you can credit solid performances — particularly Toronto’s Keir Gilchrist as Marshall, the sensitive, geeky son, and Collette, who must conjure four distinct characters. Gilchrist plays Marshall as a fastidious arts enthusiast (he likes theatre and listens to Thelonious Monk) whose sexuality is almost an afterthought. Gilchrist eschews stereotypical effeminacy for a more well-rounded characterization and focuses on how Tara’s disorder has forced this wispy 14-year-old to grow up way too soon.

But what really prevents USoT from veering off course is the writing. The series’ executive producer and primary writer is Diablo Cody, the slang-slinging screenwriter behind the 2007 indie hit Juno. Here, Cody — who never met a snarky joke or kicky phrase she didn’t like — endeavours to show how Tara’s pathology is woven into the fabric of her family dynamics.

We first meet Tara as she’s narrating a journal entry to the camera — each episode opens with an excerpt from her video diary — but then she is quickly overtaken by the trash-talking T, a whirlwind of gum-snapping attitude and neon thongs. (T’s voice hews closest to the dizzying vernacular of Juno, which may be why she’s the most grating of Tara’s personalities.)

For all of this to make sense, the series’ pilot explains the particulars of dissociative identity disorder swiftly and without resorting to the dry technical-speak of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Cody’s strategy is to simply plunk us down in the middle of a brood that has been dealing with Mom’s symptoms for years.

Each time Tara emerges from a dissociative break, the whole family meets to discuss how her alters have behaved in her “absence.” At times, it can be disorienting: we have to piece together a life based on scraps gleaned from the characters’ conversations with each other. At one point, daughter Kate ruefully confesses to her jerky boyfriend that she’d rather live with the uncertainty of Tara’s multiple selves than the doped-up zombie her mom became on the sedative Halcion.

Our confusion as viewers places us in the same psychological space as Tara, who is clueless about what goes on when her alters take over. As she explains in one memorable line, “Having multiple personalities is like hosting a kegger in your brain, only you’re passed out cold while everyone else is trashing the joint.” Her life has become a Memento-like psychological puzzle, where she’s trying to create an autobiographical history based on the information her subconscious reveals through her alters.

Husband Max Gregson (John Corbett, left) is committed to seeing Tara through her personality changes. (TMN/Astral Media)

I have no confirmation that Cody was an After School Special aficionado, but I’d be willing to bet she whiled away some afternoons of her youth lying in front of a TV in a shag-carpeted rec room in Lemont, Ill., absorbing some of those Very Important Lessons. In both Juno and United States of Tara, Cody seizes on issues (teen pregnancy, multiple personalities) that could be exploited for cheap cautionary thrills. But instead of playing up their sensationalist value, she aims to prove that they are not as onerous as you might think.

Unlike the impossibly perfect nuclear units featured in mainstream TV shows, Cody’s world is populated by flawed parents and damaged kids, all of whom love each other unconditionally. Above all, she refuses to wrap things up with tidy morals. If television is responsible for creating unrealistic desires in viewers, you could do worse than striving for the profoundly honest communication and mutual respect between the characters in the Cody universe.

United States of Tara premieres Jan. 19 on The Movie Network.

Sarah Liss writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.