"SHAMELESS Enjoyment: Finding Good in a Bad Show" by Jackie Hedeman
A couple summers ago, I had some time to myself, and rather than work on my book or pick up litter or do literally anything of value, I started watching Showtime’s Shameless. I had watched the first two seasons years before when I lived in Chicago, opening illicit streaming websites to watch other people’s pirated links seventy-five badly buffered minutes at a time, but I didn’t have great recall. I had stopped watching not because I didn’t like the show, but because most of the outdoor filming was done a handful of blocks from the community center where I worked, and it was impossible to suspend my disbelief. Little did I know that as the series rolled on, they didn’t even bother to film in Chicago, lending the whole thing an all too familiar sunbaked LA look complete with please-don’t-notice-me palm trees. I look back at those early seasons fondly, but I resent them, too, because they’re the reason I got hooked.
For the uninitiated, Shameless, which was adapted from an English TV show of the same name, follows the Gallaghers, a large Irish-American family doing what they have to in order to get by on the South Side of Chicago. Shameless, which premiered in 2011 and aired its final episode this April, spent its eleven-season run reaching for jokes that pushed (or violated) the boundaries of taste, as it meandered through increasingly aimless plots to arrive…somewhere. Along the way there were breakups, breakdowns, hookups, stickups, and a toddler got into some cocaine. (Don’t worry, he’s fine now. Shameless hasn’t had real stakes, or character continuity, for at least four seasons.)
The show premiered in 2011, the same year as Game of Thrones, at a time when Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, Boardwalk Empire, Friday Night Lights, Justified, Fringe, and Homeland reigned supreme. (As did Parks and Recreation.) Its last episode aired this month, and while I don’t feel either plugged in or objective enough to sum up the current television landscape, it’s easier to think of Shameless in conversation with its 2011 colleagues than more recent shows like I May Destroy You, Succession, Euphoria, Schitt’s Creek, Killing Eve, or Stranger Things. The intensely manufactured dismissal of the politically correct is one reason I never recommend Shameless to anyone, because the show’s ableist, racist, transphobic jokes are largely pointless shockers. These jokes are not there to illuminate anything particular about the story, and therefore are very much in line with a certain early 2010s sensibility where shows aspiring to be the next Six Feet Under or Nurse Jackie often conflated brilliance and edginess, settling for the latter.
In 2014, showrunner John Wells asked the TV Academy to move Shameless from the drama to comedy series category at the Emmy Awards. This was the fourth season, the year of the aforementioned toddler cocaine overdose, and the season as a whole was an intricately plotted and paced exploration of mortality, the myth of upward mobility, and what happens when duty to family and duty to self are at odds. The season is shot from fall to winter, and the color palette and lighting are appropriately somber. The fourth season of Shameless is excellent, is funny, is absolutely the show’s best—Rotten Tomatoes agrees—but is absolutely not a comedy.
There are other ways Shameless strains credibility. From 2011 to 2021, its South Side remained remarkably white, when in reality well over 90% of South Side residents are Black. For this and other reasons, when the characters talk about the South Side, about Chicago, and about their home, I’m not sure what they mean. If I’m imagining what Shameless had the potential to be, I don’t have to imagine very hard. In a way, Donald Glover’s Atlanta is the comedy-drama Shameless wishes it had been: a funny and profound story deeply rooted in a city, a show that takes creative risks and cares deeply for its characters trying to cobble together life.
My sense is that Shameless did not know itself particularly well behind the scenes, and that eventually translated to the screen. Wells explained the shift from drama to comedy in The Hollywood Reporter: “We’d always thought of it as a comedy, and as the series has unspooled, it became clearer.” The Academy allowed the switch-up on the grounds that “Showtime promotes it as a comedy and the writing staff consists of ex-stand-up comedians.” The cast, however, contained some very gifted dramatic actors, such as Jeremy Allen White, Noel Fisher, William H. Macy, and especially Emmy Rossum as eldest child Fiona, whose departure after nine seasons the show never quite recovered from. These actors, like the rest of the cast, were good on comedy, but transcendent on drama, and it was clear that they had a deep understanding of who their characters were.
But—and this is part of a larger problem—Shameless as a show was not as adept at walking the comedy-drama line as Nurse Jackie was, or even Weeds. It was at its best when it operated on the dramatic side of the line, so it’s easy for someone like me, who wanted to like the show, to write off the parts I hated (the broader comedy), and focus on the places the show worked, long enough to get completely absorbed.
The early 2010s also loved an antihero, and Shameless has beautiful ones. Characters like Emmy Rossum’s Fiona, Noel Fisher’s Mickey, and Jeremy Allen White’s Lip are the reason I can’t really let go of Shameless, despite everything. At its narrative and creative best, the show is at times inexcusable and at its worst is lazily written and boring, but none of that is the fault of the actors who inhabit the show’s characters. I think of a Season 11 clip I watched of Noel Fisher, who played semi-reformed neighborhood terror Mickey Milkovich, reacting to the news of his father’s death. Mickey’s father was virulently racist and anti-Semitic. He abused his children. Nonetheless, when he dies, Mickey is visibly shocked and upset. Maybe he hoped there was still time to reconcile. Maybe he wanted revenge. It’s all there in Fisher’s split-second performance, and that reaction, more than anything that occurs in Season 11, is in keeping with the arc of Mickey’s life since Season 1.
Shameless was an intermittently good show with at times indefensible edgelord humor that I nonetheless inhaled. When I love something—a show, a book—I start to see the world through its lens. Every song on the radio speaks to it. On a camping trip, I ask myself whether this character or that one would do better in the woods, in an outhouse. I know I am hardly alone here, and maybe this is simply what love is, but the experience always feels private and delicate. I don’t want to talk about anything else, but I also want to hold it close to my heart. When I love something that much, it starts to re-shape me from the inside out.
The summer I was watching Shameless, I took any excuse to talk about it with my coworker Maddy, but I tried to play it cool, updating her about the episodes I’d watched the night before and only letting myself talk about it if she brought it up again. This was partly conversational politeness, because I still have memories of childhood and college and the politely glazing-over eyes of my parents and friends as I rattled on about Joan Aiken, Patrick O’Brian, Dorothy Dunnett, Armistead Maupin, but it was also self-preservation. It was then, as it is now, difficult to name exactly what it was about Mickey, Lip, and Fiona, and to reveal too many of my thoughts-in-progress about them seemed unwise. It wasn’t that my fascination with the characters couldn’t stand up to criticism of the show—even then I knew Shameless was uneven at best—but that I needed to make my own sense of their narratives, since the show wasn’t going to do it for me.
Shameless was not, or was no longer, good, but maybe that was part of the attraction. Maybe the work I did, mulling over the show and creating order out of chaos, imagining character beats and plotlines that would make better use of the cast and ring truer to established stakes, forced the show and its characters into my soul. There are many routes to obsession, and maybe this is one: accepting a challenge.
When I started writing this essay, I thought it would be easier to convey why I enjoyed watching the show I hate so much. Life is short and I am not one to hate-watch anything, so there had to be something there. I assumed it was profound because that summer I wandered around town with one thing on my mind, and that thing was the way Mickey Milkovich banged his fist like a gavel to get everyone’s attention and then announced, belligerently, to a bar full of his violently homophobic family, “I just want everybody here to know, I'm fucking gay.” And then, much softer, to the object of his affection, his entire heart on his sleeve, “You happy now?”
I think I remember now. When I was living in Chicago, out of college and alone for the first time in my life, contemplating and forgetting a sexuality crisis, before I even started watching those illegally streamed full episodes, I was on YouTube. And in those days on YouTube, even before the algorithm came to know me better than I know myself, I couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a fan-made compilation of gay characters’ plot arcs on popular TV shows. That was a thing back then, at least for the person I was. It’s probably still a thing.
So I think I started watching Shameless because it called out to me. Its characters just keep going, because they didn’t know what else to do. In those days, I didn’t let myself fully acknowledge why I had to stay current on a handful of mainstream gay shows. I just did. It was as inevitable as homework. It was continuity across days that were often jarring and challenging. I would leave my job around the corner from where they filmed Shameless and drove forty-five minutes back to my shoebox apartment to watch Shameless. I started watching Shameless because of Mickey Milkovich on YouTube and all these years later, I finished watching Shameless because I owed it to him. Still, I won’t miss him. The television landscape has changed since 2011, and so have I.
There is a scene at the end of the show’s fourth season, where the Gallagher family patriarch, Frank (William H. Macy), stands at the end of a pier overlooking frozen Lake Michigan and the Chicago skyline beyond. He is bathed in that weak winter light. There, he unscrews a bottle of the alcohol that has nearly taken his life, takes a sip, smiles, and shouts heavenward, “That all you got? That's it? I'm still here, you fucker! Frank Gallagher! I'm alive! You see me? You see me standing here? You lost, asshole! I'm alive, motherfucker! Me, Frank Gallagher! Alive!” He pauses. His face falls. “Alive.”
It’s an unspoken question and a silent answer. It’s as close to perfect as Shameless ever got. Over the city, “The Cold” by Exitmusic takes us out: “Sing another song.”
Jackie Hedeman (she/her) received her MFA from The Ohio State University and her BA from Princeton University. Her writing has appeared in Autostraddle, The Best American Travel Writing 2017, Electric Literature, Fugue, The Offing, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Retreat Fellow and a Charlotte Street Foundation 2019-2021 Studio Resident. With Molly Olguín, she is the co-creator of The Pasithea Powder, a scripted audio drama.
