Gathering at a bar with her classmates after her welding class, Debbie is surrounded by people who, like her, are seeking a fresh start.
But none of them had a choice: whether newspaper men or taxi drivers, her
classmates are all people who were forced out of their former careers by
changes in their industries, turning to the trades to regain stable employment.
It’s a reminder that transformation often stems from a dramatic change in
circumstances, pushing you in a direction you couldn’t have imagined.
I was struck by how these men and women contrasted with
Debbie, and with the rest of the Gallagher family as Shameless enters its
eighth season. Transformation is a crucial theme in this season, as each
Gallagher tries—as they always do—to turn over a new leaf and move forward in
their life. But what struck me is how the show resists forcing any of the
characters into these positions, and instead places them in full control of
their path forward. Rather than set up arbitrary obstacles or intense setbacks, Shameless is giving the Gallaghers more freedom (and more financial security),
and testing how they grapple with developing stability within that support
system.
It’s almost alarming how comfortable Fiona’s situation is,
for example. At the end of last season, discussion here in the comments was
fixated on the idea that Fiona’s purchase of the laundromat and then the
apartment building would turn into a boondoggle, but the opposite turned out to
be true: she has stumbled her way into the path of gentrification, here turning
her rundown apartment into a bidding war between young urbanites. Even after
having buried her portion of Monica’s meth (Chekhov’s meth, let’s call it),
Fiona is not worried about trying to make ends meet for the first time in her
life, and it creates a moment of liberation.
The conflict, though, comes from seeing how Fiona chooses to
transform herself with this newfound freedom. It begins small here: she rejects
Tinder, and finds a light friendship with Jessica, the lesbian upstairs, that
you can sense the show might want to explore romantically. But the telling
moment for me is when Jessica asks if Fiona might move into the apartment
herself, and Fiona pauses: I don’t know if the show even intended it this way,
but I was struck by the idea that Fiona was briefly struck by the possibility
of independence from her family. She ultimately rents the apartment, but the
idea that her path could lead her away from her siblings has to be on her mind
as her life comes together.
And that’s the thing: while some shows would collapse if the
characters suddenly collectively (if relatively) got their shit together, the Gallaghers have
so little experience dealing with this kind of togetherness that the show feels
enlivened by the choice. At the end of last season, I was alarmed by the
montage that gave each character an easy landing pad: Lip got a sponsor and a
job, Debbie randomly ended up in a welding class, Ian kept his job despite some
serious violations of policy, and it felt like the show was painting a pretty
picture in case it had been canceled. But in practice, the seams of the fantasy
start to show, and point to how difficult it will be for each Gallagher to keep
this up.
This obviously plays out most strongly with Lip: alcoholism
is no joke, but this is also the first time the character has had a fully
functioning support system. He has a job, and a sponsor, and none of those
structures feel like they’re on the verge of imploding. For Lip, the test is
whether he can settle into that future instead of reliving the past, here
taking the form of Sierra, who is still working at Patsy’s. Brad, Lip’s
sponsor, is adamant that it’s a bad idea to pine after the woman who left him due to his alcoholism, but Lip can’t
resist stepping in to babysit her son Lucas, and the news she’s dating her ex
only gives him hope (since it means she gives second chances). While trying to
replace alcohol in his life, Lip takes up running, and tries out a fidget
spinner, but trying to reconnect with Sierra is the option that feels the most
whole, and the option that leaves him emptier than ever when her ex returns
home with her.
Lip’s decision to shift gears—paying back his professor for
rehab instead of paying off Sierra’s bills—is a good start, but Lip’s is a long
road. The Gallaghers are nothing if not stubborn, so Lip’s decision to move on
from Sierra (at least in the immediate future) is meaningful. There’s lower
stakes with Ian’s refusal to move on from Trevor, staking out the Youth Center
while on duty, but it continues the season’s interest in refusing to give each
character a truly fresh start. They could have easily written out both Sierra and
Trevor—neither were made a series regular—and start an entirely new story, but
they didn’t. That does sort of make the season feel like it’s dealing with the
leftovers from last year, but for now there’s something refreshing about the
show not running away from its leftover story threads.
This is particularly true for Debbie, whose story is still a
ticking time bomb. Debbie doesn’t think so: she’s learning a trade, planning
for her future, and in complete control of her part-time work as a parking attendant who wields a tazer. She has friends, and she even catches the eye of a
beauty school student (and continues to flirt with her teacher). It’s a great
life, until you remember that she has a daughter, who she is foisting on Neil
without realizing that her wheelchair-bound partner is in dramatically over his
head. If Franny didn’t exist, Debbie would be on track to be the most
well-adjusted Gallagher, but her choice to become a mother has created
roadblocks that she will have to reckon with sooner rather than later.
“We Become What We…Frank!” is more solid than spectacular.
Frank’s meth-fueled journey of amends is flimsy but watchable, Carl’s military
precision and “patriot” rhetoric is not really a storyline yet, and there’s
probably a bit too much happening with Kevin’s breast cancer scare and Veronica getting Svetlana arrested
by ICE for that side of the storyline to piece together cleanly. But as the
show continues to mature, I think the subtle transformation of economic
stability has—at the very least—created a new set of stakes. The weight facing
each Gallagher isn’t as immediate as it once was, with characters grappling
less with the razor’s edge of poverty and more with the psychological toil of
having ridden that edge for so many years. But that leaves room for the show to
dig deeper into who these characters are, and who they intend to be, questions
that will be important to the show avoiding the pitfalls of some of Showtime’s
other shows that ran longer than they should have.
Stray observations
- Welcome, again, to our reviews of Shameless. It’s a
difficult show to review at times, having run so long, but I’m pretty committed
to seeing where Fiona and Lip (and I guess everyone else) end up, so join me as we follow what could theoretically be
the final season, but which could also just be the start of another act for the
show. - Speaking of which: I talked a bit about the show’s Emmy
designation (as a comedy, which remains insane to me) with my class recently,
and I was struck by how many of them have watched the show on Netflix. This
show isn’t going to suddenly turn into a huge mainstream hit based on streaming
like Breaking Bad, but it strikes me as a show that stabilized due to its
availability on Netflix. - Let’s Talk About New Liam: Well, despite the fact that it
doesn’t seem like a huge amount of time has passed, Liam sure has become
talkative all of a sudden. We’ll see if we get much of a storyline outside of
the private school foregoing his education to parade him out for diversity’s
sake, but I thought the new actor (Christian Isaiah) did a fine job, even if it
was super weird for him to be so active in conversation. - There’s nothing much happening in Frank’s storyline (beyond
a tie between him and Ian both grieving most strongly over Monica), but I
enjoyed the way his meth-addled hyper-activity was evoked by the jump cuts in
his big rant to Carl. I also hope that his journey of amends brings Joan Cusack’s Sheila back into the picture. - I appreciate that Vanessa (played by Jessica Szohr, who I
know best from Gossip Girl) is an accountant for United Airlines—a nice local
element to remind us the show is set in Chicago (where United is based). - “America First, Mother Fuckers”—It’s logical the show would
go topical with ICE raids and Carl’s right turn in his politics, but I hope we
don’t hit those buttons too hard, for the sake of my sanity. - So, I know they claimed that the Alibi—sorry, Putin’s
Paradise—was busy after Svetlana’s transformation, but I have so many questions
about how that business model would function in conjunction with the gentrification of the neighborhood. In addition, Isadora Goreshter is
still a series regular despite being carted off to a detention center, so I
have questions there too (some of which are answered by a press photo of a guilty Veronica holding Svetlana’s son, which didn’t make the cut of the episode). - I know we’re sort of past the point where everything is
about money on this show, but I would have liked a conversation about how Kevin
was affording his oncologist visit after his referral from the guy who paid
$200 to smell his crotch and feel up his chest.