Are You Without Shame[less]?

You've probably heard of the television series Shameless. It would be hard not to have at least heard of a show that ran 11 seasons and 134 episodes. (Or perhaps you knew that the American version was based on a British original that also ran 11 seasons, and 139 episodes.) If you're like me, though, you've never actually watched Shameless.

Showtime fell off my subscription radar some time around the (first) end of Dexter, and while back episodes could be streamed on Netflix, watching them never seemed critical for keeping up with the cultural zeitgeist (like whatever Netflix original series was on people's mind in a given month). But at some point, I did finally give Shameless a try... and I kept watching. All of it. It was basically a year-long project. And, as a whole, it's pretty good.

In theory, Shameless revolves around Frank Gallagher: a neglectful drunk father who is exactly what the title promises. If the show were truly, principally that, it would surely be unwatchable (no matter how good an actor William H. Macy is). But in truth, Shameless is the story of Frank's family, six children who have to raise themselves in poverty on the south side of Chicago.

It sounds dark, I know, and sometimes it is. But Shameless actually strikes a fairly light tone much of the time. The large cast of characters (combined with a real-world production need to control time working with child actors) means that each episode is crammed with multiple concurrent plot lines. The formula means that any given episode tends to have at least one serious story and one quite ridiculous story, and that's mixed up among the characters over the course of a season.

They're a really enjoyable bunch of characters, too. Over 11 years, children grow up before our eyes. Some characters leave the show permanently. Some leave and then come back. There's family drama. But it doesn't feel like "drama" ALL the time.

Shameless features a great cast -- and you probably don't know most of them if you've never watched the show. Because it ran for so long and demanded so much time of its actors, they generally haven't had time for many other projects in the last decade. You may have seen Emmy Rossum singing in Phantom of the Opera (I haven't, but that's gotta be wildly different), or played as Cameron Monaghan in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. You may have heard of Jeremy Allen White's new Hulu show, The Bear, or heard that they're making a TV series based on the movie True Lies. (That one will be starring Steve Howey.) But probably, you only know William H. Macy and Joan Cusack. No matter who you know and who you don't, if you watch Shameless, you'll learn to love an actor you didn't know before.

Of course, no show that runs 11 seasons is going to be good all that time. Plenty of fans online rank the seasons in their own way, but the overall consensus is the correct one: seasons 1 through 5 (in some order) are the best of the show, while seasons 6 through 11 (in some order) are definitely a "lesser" version of the show. That's a convenient division for anyone who wants to start watching and then just quit if at some point they decide they aren't liking it anymore. However, I will speak up in defense of the final season, which arrived in 2020-2021. Shameless was one of the first shows to actually acknowledge Covid in its story lines. It has some interesting (but not too heavy-handed) commentary on poverty and Covid -- and the creative challenges of filming the end of the series under those conditions seemed to reinvigorate the writers.

The first half of the series, I'd give an A-. The back half is more like a B. The average there feels pretty accurate to me: I'd call the whole series a B+ overall. Watching it, of course, means less time for some show that more people are talking about right now. But I do think Shameless generally will reward you for your time.