Salon.com > Shameless

“Shameless”: TV’s dysfunctional sweethearts

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 19:50:00 +0000

Showtime’s shaggy family drama “Shameless” finished its second season last night, and just like the semi-abandoned siblings the show focuses on, it deserves more love than it receives. The series, based on a British one of the same name, follows the Gallagher clan, six kids approximately ages 2 to 22 who are left to raise themselves while their alcoholic, malignant father, Frank (William H. Macy), does as much as he can not to help them. “Shameless” is maybe the most purely entertaining series that is fundamentally a tragedy I’ve ever seen: Try as they might — and they try so, so hard — the Gallagher kids have been saddled with too much. Their lives are dozens of Jerry Springer episodes strung together ("My father had sex with my underage girlfriend!” “I think my uncle is my dad!” “My mother attempted suicide in front of me!” “I’m an African-American whose two biological parents are white!” “My boyfriend has a secret identity!”), and while their day-to-day experiences have the sort of intense circus energy that suggests, they also have the hollowed-out darkness that comes from being stuck in a life most people cackle over and then have the luxury to flick off.

“Shameless”: American TV’s problem with class

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 02:01:00 +0000

New Yorker critic Anthony Lane memorably described Ralph Fiennes in "Quiz Show" as having a literally mid-Atlantic accent -- as if the Suffolk-born actor had tried to devise a convincing speaking voice for his first American star part, only to have it get stuck somewhere between Olde and New England. Showtime's remake of the Channel 4 series "Shameless" is a whole show with a mid-Atlantic accent. Amazingly, this isn't a deal-breaker.

Co-executive-produced by original series creator Paul Abbott and former "ER" boss John Wells, and relocated from a Manchester public housing estate to a weathered Chicago neighborhood, Showtime's "Shameless" (Sundays, 10 p.m./9 Central) doesn't quite work as a rude but accurate portrait of a specific American social class, one of the main selling points of the original Channel 4 show. Its focus on Irish-American inner-city dwellers (and a couple of their non-white friends) feels faintly nostalgic -- less like a tough, funny look at plausibly real people than a bawdy 21st-century TV Chicago version of "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." (This series, "The Town," "Winter's Bone" and "The Fighter" are all part of a mini-resurgence of sensitive white working-class drama.) William H. Macy stars as Frank Gallagher, the family's long-haired, bar-crawling, pants-pissing drunk of a dad. Emmy Rossum plays Frank's eldest daughter, Fiona, who likes to cut loose in nightclubs and hook up with strange men when she's not taking care of her younger siblings. She has two teenage brothers: the talented-and-gifted horndog Lip (Jeremy Allen White), who works as a tutor; and the tough-but-sensitive Ian (Cameron Monaghan), who gets outed in the pilot when Lip finds his stash of man-on-man porn. There are more Gallagher kids; the kids have friends, the adults have friends, too, and their friends have friends, and everyone has issues.

Television without shame

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 10:30:00 +0000

Watching television these days can give you a somewhat skewed impression of our country's economic well-being. While Blair Waldorf jets around the world and the "The Real Housewives of New York City" stroke their cashmere shawls, the working class has mostly disappeared from our screens -- relegated to "America's Next Top Model" and Tila Tequila's pool house. Maybe that's why George W. Bush is so optimistic about the economy: He's been watching too much prime-time TV.

Across the pond, however, the British continue to churn out smart and literate television, like "EastEnders" and "Clocking Off," about the lives and struggles of the working poor. So if you're tired of watching suburban wife swapping, and you'd like to bring some economic diversity to your TV screen, Channel 4's "Shameless," a comedy about a dysfunctional and poor Manchester family, is worth a look -- not only because it's one of the best comedies ever made about urban poverty (ha!) but also because it's terrific, naughty fun. And if the economy goes down the tubes you might as well have something to laugh about.