It says something about Showtime's "Shameless" that it's made me want to watch the earlier episodes again

Shameless producer-writer John Wells talks about the impact of the return of the Gallagher kids' mother, Monica (Chloe Webb), in the episode "But at Last Came a Knock," which aired two weeks ago. A new episode airs tonight at 10pm and again at 11pm ET, with repeats all over the Showtime schedule.

by Ken

There was never any question that I was grabbed enough to continue watching Showtime's Shameless, adapted by John Wells from the British series of the same name created, produced, and (apparently more or less autobiographically) written by Paul Abbott, who's also listed as an executive producer of the American series. But there were so many characters to get to know that it's taken me all these episodes -- tonight's is no. 11 of (I believe) an initial 12 -- to build to my present level of enthusiasm, which is pretty considerable.

Now that I've developed a relationship of sorts for all six of the barely-scraping-by Gallagher kids, ranging in age from over-18 Fiona (Emmy Rossum) to baby Liam, not to mention their extravangant drunkard father Frank (William H. Macy) and even, in the last couple of episodes, the mother who abandoned them nearly two years ago, not to mention the assorted other neighborhood characters who are woven into the plot, I've found myself impelled to begin rewatching the earlier episodes via On Demand (they can also be watched online). Sure enough, I'm picking up all sorts of stuff that went over, under, or around my head the first time through.

I expect that viewers will respond differently to different characters. I think Fiona's double bind was obvious and immediately compelling. She's bright and beautiful and ought to have the world at her feet, and yet in her family's day-to-day struggle just to keep a roof over their heads and keep everybody fed, she can't see a path to daylight open for her in any direction, on top of which, since the departure of her mother, she has the added burden of keeping her five younger brothers and sisters above water. Of course the truth is that the kids didn't have a mother even when they had a mother. I think it was Lip (i.e., Phillip) who observed after their mother's return that as useless as their father is, he turns out to be the good parent.

So Fiona, as I say, is easy for the audience, I think, and it was fairly easy to take in the confusion in a possible relationship with the newly appeared Steve (Justin Chatwin). As it happens, her wariness about Steve is altogether appropriate, though not for any of the reasons she imagines -- not lack of sensitivity to her (he really is crazy mad for her) and not because he's a rich kid who thinks of her as casual entertainment or a laboratory specimen. No, for better or worse -- and as often happens with Shameless, that "better or worse" question isn't easily puzzled out -- what she doesn't know about him is really different.

I'm sure the ready accessibility of Fiona's -- and, by extension, the whole family's -- plight has been part of the immediate appeal that kept me coming back. The characters, not just individually but even more as a pair, who really reached me on a deeper level, and made me look deeper into the show, are the next-oldest Gallaghers, the infinitely resourceful Lip (Jeremy Allen White) and the oddly focused Ian (Cameron Monaghan). I don't know that we've been given actual ages, but they're presumably barely a year apart, and as we learned in the pilot, it's been at least Lip's perception that there have never been secrets between them, a pretty remarkable thing if you think about it.

Perhaps it's not surprising that this came out when Lip discovered that Ian had in fact been keeping a secret from him, and a huge one: that he's gay. And rewatching those first couple of episodes, I was even more fascinated watching this plot line develop. For Lip too there's a double whammy: Given where he comes from, dealing with this new fact about Ian is tough enough, but he seems if anything more disoriented from learning that there's this whole part of his brother's life that's been kept from him. Again, it may just be my particular focus, but this relationship has seemed to me continuously fascinating.

As producer Wells points out in another interview Showtime has posted, the Gallaghers and their friends engage in some mightily unacceptable behavior, but as he also points out, life is different when you're living day-to-day, as they are -- different for the people and different for the writers. As episodes have unfolded, the American Shameless has seemed to me increasingly different from at least what I recall of the British original, but it's all to the show's credit that it has established its own environment, its own tone, its own outlook. The writing and acting are all pulling in a productive direction, and everyone involved is producing a terrific product. I'm really looking forward to the season's remaining episodes, to re-viewing the whole first season, and of course seeing what's to come in upcoming seasons.


In this preview of tonight's episode, Lip and Ian get a shock when they track down an uncle, one of Frank's brothers, they've never met. (POST-EPISODE UPDATE: It turns out that the Gallagher kids have never met any of their father's brothers. The trip they take out to visit their grandmother for info on their uncles is priceless.)

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