Robert Abele

When Glasgow-born, London-based satirist Armando Iannucci was assembling his knife-edged political comedy In the Loop, a fictionalized account of how bureaucratic folly and queasy alliances bring England and America stumbling toward a wretched military misadventure, he made sure to get all his research ducks in a row. Having grown up......

Showtime’s United States of Tara, created by Oscar-winning blogger/ex-stripper Diablo Cody, comes to television with pedigrees and controversy. It stars Toni Collette as a suburban hausfrau with a misunderstood illness called dissociative-identity disorder, or DID, the more recently minted term for what we’ve long called multiple-personality disorder. But if Tara......