Everyone loves Toni Collette, but ... Tara is still bad

"The United States of Tara" should be good but it isn't, so why not? Everyone loves Toni Collette, and she's fabulous in the part of the multiple-personality-disordered Tara - but in a way she's too good. As she plays each of the (at least) 3 "alters" we always feel: wow, she can really play that character. What an actress! But that's not what the story needs. She plays each so well that we don't see Tara in the character - it's just like an actress doing a star turn: a prim matron, a tough guy, a saucy teen. It would be much more truthful, affecting, and scarier to see these figures emerge from the recognizably Tara - which would also mean she wouldn't have a full costume set for each alter. Let each one look like Tara - the old TV movie, Sybil, with personal fave Sally Field, was way better and scarier. Another flaw on "Tara," in my view, is that there is not a thing believable about her family (Gregsons?) - the kids, her husband, everyone in the community just blithely goes through life dealing with each alter in sequence as a minor inconvenience - oh, no, it's Buck. The kids don't seem frightened or disturbed or embarrassed to any significant extent - that is, they don't seem real, they basically Diablo Cody concoctions, the son, Marshall, (maybe the best character in the series) a retread of the boy in Juno and the daughter, Kate another precocious teen who talks like a 35-year-old stripper (and mumbles her best lines). Husband played be the valiant but terribly miscast John Corbett is an incredibly poorly conceived role: he's supposed to be, I guess, a guy's guy, drives a truck, works in landscaping, drinks beer from the bottle, but he seems like any of the various swells Corbett has played in his urban/urbane movies. Series supposed to be set in Kansas but has no sense of place whatever, and one could go on about the utterly preposterous behavior scenes, but one example will suffice: As one of the alters, Tara wears a poncho and straddles the bed where her father is sleeping and pisses on him (wife sleeping next to him, btw). Do you think maybe if a full-grown woman was standing on your mattress and pissing on your blankets you might wake up?