“Gallaghers don’t do therapy.” – Fiona
Shameless has had a very strong debut, and I have thoroughly enjoyed each of the first four episodes. Having said that, I have some concerns about the show’s long term prospects. The characters (especially the kids) are great and hanging out with them in their weird little corner of Chicago has been a blast. However, that’s kind of all we have been doing; hanging out. Sure, a lot goes on in every episode, but by the end we wind up in the same place we started. There doesn’t seem to be an overarching story. Cable audiences demand serialization from their hour-long dramas (yes, Shameless is funny but I would argue that it is indeed a drama, not a comedy), a sense that a season is building towards something. I’m not saying that the show won’t have some sort of payoff, it’s just that I am having a hard time figuring out what that payoff might be.
For the most part, the first four episodes are all variations on a theme; Frank (William H. Macy) gets drunk, leaves the kids to fend for themselves, they mooch off of their neighbors Kevin (Steve Howey) and Veronica (Shanola Hampton), an expensive appliance breaks, the kids scramble to scrape together some cash while dealing with troubling personal issues, someone saves the day at the last minute and a new washing machine or hot water heater appears in the kitchen. They go to sleep and wake up to do it all over again tomorrow. So far things have worked out well, and it has been great to watch. I just worry that by the tenth episode the Gallaghers will have brand new Whirlpools and there will be nothing left for them to do.
Think about your favorite show. Say you really love Mad Men, for example. If someone who had never seen the show asked you what it was about, you would probably say something along the lines of, “It’s a show about a bunch of people in the 1960s who work for an advertising agency.” While that statement is accurate, it doesn’t really tell the person what the show is ABOUT. The characters on the show have goals, which gives the stories forward momentum. A better example might be a show like The Wire. The Wire is about so many different things at once, but plot-wise it’s pretty straight forward. The cops do a bunch of stuff to try to catch the bad guys, the bad guys try to make money and avoid the cops and politicians try to get elected. These things are the engines that drive the show. If someone were to ask me what Shameless is about, I would say, “The show is about a family struggling to survive in difficult circumstances.” Can we honestly say, at this point, the show is ABOUT much more than that? I don’t know what the ultimate goal is for these people. To rise out of poverty?
Maybe, but it doesn’t seem like it. They appear to be pretty content with their stations in life. It’s almost like Shameless is following the “Mystery Of The Week” format. At the beginning of the episode they are faced with a crisis, they band together and by the end of the hour the crisis is narrowly averted. Not much carries over from episode to episode. Would Terriers have been such an awesome show without the season-long Lindus/Zeitlin story? Sure, kicking it with Hank and Brit while they took case after case each week would have been fun, but it would not have been nearly as rewarding.
I recognize that shows often have to walk a tightrope between developing characters and moving the story forward. Hell, one of my favorite current shows, Sons of Anarchy, came under heavy fire this past season for focusing too much on plot. Viewers fell in love with the guys from SAMCRO and when the show got bogged down in chasing a baby from continent to continent, we all wished that it would just slow down. We wanted to catch our breath and just hang out with our guys. Like I said, Shameless has the hanging out part down pat. It has done an excellent job developing these characters and making us care about them. Going forward I would just appreciate a little more sense of urgency.
“Casey Casden” is the first episode to focus on the youngest Gallagher sister, Debbie. We haven’t seen a whole lot of Debbie up until this point and going in I wasn’t sold on the acting chops of Emma Kennedy, the little girl who plays her. I kind of got the impression that she was a Dakota Fanning/Abigail Breslin-type (a precocious young person who speaks like an adult), which can sometimes be a little annoying. I was wrong to doubt her though. Emma Kennedy is great, especially in the scene in the police interrogation room at the end of the episode.
Debby is bored and restless. The rest of her family is so wrapped up in their own crap that no one has time to play with her. So she finds her own playmate: a toddler named Casey who she kidnaps from a birthday party a few blocks from the Gallagher home. When Fiona (Emmy Rossum) discovers the little boy, now dressed as a girl and stuffed into a stroller, she (understandably) freaks. Debbie says she feels like it isn’t fair that other families get to have birthday parties and fathers that aren’t pathetic drunks (I may have added that second part, but I’m sure she was thinking that).
Meanwhile, Ian (Cameron Monaghan) and Lip (Jeremy Allen White) are on the streets scavenging for a hot water heater to replace the broken one at home. It’s only a matter of time until Veronica and Kevin figure out why they never have enough hot water to take a full shower. In true Gallagher fashion, instead of buying a new water heater or finding someone to fix theirs, the fellas decide to steal one from a dead lady’s house. They lug the hulking piece of metal home in a rickety shopping cart, only to have it stolen from their yard in a matter of hours. Karma’s a bitch, guys.
The Gallagher clan hatches a complex scheme to return the stolen child without the authorities getting wind of the kidnapping and sending the kids to foster homes. The details of how they got Casey back to his parents aren’t really important, because we (the viewers) know that, somehow, everything will be worked out in the end. And, of course, it does. Shameless is a pretty dark show, but not dead-toddler, little-girl-in-jail, siblings-split-up-and-sent-to-the-orphanage dark. While all of this is going down, Frank is (surprise, surprise) drunk and oblivious, content to leech off of Sheila’s (a delightfully deranged Joan Cusack) (or, more accurately, Eddie’s (Joel Murray)) largess and shout obscenities at the police and the television. (“Why are all the news ladies Chinese? They should stick to what they know; railroads and sushi.” Zing!)
One of the few aspects of the episode that seems to have the potential to carry over into next week comes from the show’s unsung hero, Kevin, who is quickly becoming my favorite character (I love the chains he wears around his neck, for some reason they crack me up). When a group of skanks won’t stop hitting on him at the bar (I really like Kev, but yeah right!), he lies and says that he is about to be married. Frank overhears this and assumes Kev must have recently proposed to Veronica. Soon, the bar is in full celebration mode and Kev winds up hammered in the middle of the afternoon. He stumbles home and drunkenly decides that maybe being engaged is actually a pretty good idea. He asks V to marry him and she gives him an emphatic yes. The next day, at their impromptu engagement party, Kev looks a little down in the dumps. “For a guy that just got engaged, you don’t seem very happy to be getting married,” Fiona observes. Kev responds cryptically, “That’s because I’m already married…” DONNN. DONNN. DOOOONNNN. Aha! Some intrigue, at last!
Some stats and info about Shameless, “Casey Casden”
TV SHOW – Shameless
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – Showtime
GENRE – Drama, Relationship Shows
CREATED BY – Paul Abbott, John Wells
CAST – William H. Macy, Ethan Cutosky, Jeremy Allen White, Shanola Hampton, Steve Howey, Emma Kenney, Cameron Monaghan, Emmy Rossum, Michael Patrick McGill
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.