Some further thoughts on Showtime's "Shameless" in anticipation of tonight's season finale

At the end of last week's episode Lip and Ian Gallagher were arrested in a stolen Porsche. In this preview of tonight's season finale, we see some chickens coming home to roost. But are they the right chickens, and is it the right roost?

"People ask, 'Why did Monica leave?' And I say, 'Have you seen the show and watched Frank? [Laughs.]'"

-- Shameless show runner John Wells,
in a clip we saw with last week's post

by Ken

In my piece last week about Shameless, the American adaptation of Paul Abbott's apparently in good part autobiographical British series about a working-class family without any working parents -- Monica Gallagher having flown the coop nearly two years ago (but returned for a couple of recent years in the person of that singularly lovely actress Chloe Webb), leaving the six Gallagher kids in the "care" of Frank Gallagher (William H. Macy) -- "care" in quotes because it's hard to think of anything Frank contributes to the family's upkeep (the money he scams from assorted government programs all goes to his own bar and other expenses) or well-being of anyone but himself, and he in fact requires a fairly high level of care, more probably than any of the children except baby Liam.

As I wrote, I've become a growing fan of the show, produced and in good part written by John Wells. It's by turns raucous (what the Gallaghers and their friends do for day-to-day survival rarely falls strictly, or even generally, within the law, or even socially acceptable behavior. But then, for how many seasons did we watch Tony Soprano and his associates, of course thoroughly disapproving of his criminal enterprises, and yet cheer them on in their conflicts with mobsters we told ourselves were even worse?

But what I want to go back to is some things the master of Shameless said in that clip we had last week about the return of Monica Gallagher, successfully lured by a scam of Frank's with the promise of some quick cash. (He needed her to cosign a settlement that actually would yield cash.) Now I love the quote I put up top on this post. But then Wells went on to say:

Her argument for it is that she was being emotionally smothered by Frank. That's a perfectly legitimate Oprah, Dr. Phil response to leave, this kind of pop-psychology thing. The truth is, you left a family with a bunch of children in it. But Frank, for all of his many faults, has never deserted them.

Now I'm hardly an expert on Dr. Phil, but it's my impression that he's not big on people justifying bad behavior, but never mind. It's pretty cheeky of me to question the guy responsible for the show about what one of his characters said on it, and it's possible that going by the words in the script he's right, that Monica said this, but it sure isn't the impression I got of what explanation she manages to provide for her flight -- into the arms of a butch lesbian truckdriver, with whom she's formed the daft scheme of expropriating baby Liam so they can have their own family.

Was it really not clear that Monica wasn't talking about being emotionally smothered? She was talking about fleeing for her life. Think back to Wells's crack about Frank? The show is real enough in its depiction of the family to give us a pretty strong whiff of what it would be like to be married to Frank and trying to raise six children. (And it's still possible that as many as five of them could be Frank's; we've got two definite yeses, Liam and Lip, and only one definite no, Ian.) It was an inspired stroke hiring as gentle and sympathetic an actress as Chloe Webb for this difficult role, and she was wonderful -- including the grim reality that Monica, for all her good intentions, just isn't very good at mothering.

Certainly she got her crack at it under pretty rotten circumstances, with Frank contributing neither financial nor any other kind of support either to his wife or to his children, and with his constant whining and moaning about how he's always victimized, what he mostly does is suck the life out of people. Would it not have been reasonable for Monica to be scared silly

And what's this business about Frank not deserting the family? Except in the physical sense of being under the same roof, when was he ever there? He has everyone taking care of him, and does no taking care of. What would there be for him to desert? And it isn't even literally true. Did we not early in the season see him run away from home?

My point in raising the issue isn't to duke it out with Wells, but to credit him having created and maintained the show at a high enough level of honest that we can actually debate such questions. Not much in the world of Shameless is black and white, cut and dried. It's been, I think, a heck of a season. I'm looking forward to continuing to work my way through the episodes a second time (I'm amazed at how much I'm filling in, and how much I'm simply enjoying the shows, more even than the first time now that I have so much more context for the characters), and then I'm looking forward to a second season (which our commenter last week confirmed for us is now a done deal) as good as the first.

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