CONTINUING CHAOS
A perfect blend of black humour and tear-jerking drama, “Shameless,” now in its sixth season, airs a new episode Sunday.
Despite the critical acclaim that Showtime’s “Shameless” and its British forerunner have enjoyed, the American dramedy doesn’t seem to generate a ton a buzz.
It certainly deserves to, though. The show is a perfect blend of black humour and tear-jerking drama, with a good smattering of petty crime, colourful language and the odd broken nose thrown in for good measure. At its heart, however, it ’s a show about family and the loyalty that that demands, no matter how rough things get — and in “Shameless,” things get pretty rough. Catch a new episode of “Shameless” when it airs Sunday, Feb. 21, on The Movie Network and Movie Central.
The original “Shameless” ran for an impressive 11 seasons on Channel 4 in the U.K. and received critical acclaim, taking home the BAFTA Award for Best Drama Series in its first season, as well as the award for Best TV Comedy Drama at the British Comedy Awards. Recreating foreign shows in American settings for American audiences can generate both hits (“The Office”) and misses (“Gracepoint ”), but “Shameless” transitioned seamlessly from working-class Manchester to Chicago’s South Side.
The series follows the (often illegal) exploits of the dysfunctional and disorderly Gallagher family, whose six kids live paycheque to paycheque — or, perhaps more accurately, welfare cheque to welfare cheque — with a deadbeat father and an absentee mother.
The brilliance of the show is that none of its characters possess particularly admirable qualities, yet somehow they’re likeable. The show handles some pretty heavy issues, and, on the surface, these peoples’ lives are bleak and depressing, to say the least; most of the time, they’re in pretty dire straits. Yet it still manages to be funny. The series is extremely well cast, and a lot can be said for delivering warmth and humour in serious situations.
The of f icial head of the rowdy Gallagher clan is booze-addled, freeloading, remorseless, conniving patriarch Frank, played to absolute perfection by Emmy winner William H. Macy (“Fargo,” 1996 ). The guy is the very definition of the word “bum” — he does everything he can to cheat the system, he relies entirely on the children he neglects in order to barely squeak by, he takes advantage of whomever he can, whenever he can, and despite being a total waste of skin, he’s also, somehow, an insufferable narcissist.
The unofficial head of the household—in other words, the one keeping things a float—is eldest daughter Fiona (Emmy Rossum, “The Day After Tomorrow,” 2004), who dropped out of high school in her junior year to care for her f ive siblings. Though far from perfect, she’s as self less as her father is selfish, and does her best to keep the kids in line and on the right track. Things have started to unravel for Fiona in the past couple of seasons, with a stint in jail and an impulsive and illadvised marriage under her belt, but her siblings are as important to her as ever. It ’s the constant return to the family unit, however dysfunctional, that gets the Gallaghers from one insane issue to the next.
“What I like about [Fiona] still is her desire to win, and that’ s kind of[ true] throughout all of the characters,” Rossum told The Hollywood Reporter last year. “No matter how many times they get beat up, lose their house, get separated, go into foster care — they still come together; they don’t really get bogged down the way life can bog you down. They’re fighters.”
Indeed, the whole brood is facing some pretty big issues as season 6 unfolds. Lip ( Jeremy Allen White, “Twelve,” 2010) is messing around with his married professor, while Ian (Cameron Monaghan, “Click,” 2006) is still struggling with his mental health — though it looks like he maybe gaining some muchneeded direction in life since his rescue by a pack of hot, gay firefighters.