Written by Katherine Murray.
Shameless, Showtime’s irreverent story of working-class hardship, has re-categorized itself as a comedy for awards season. That’s a strange choice when you consider that series star, Emmy Rossum, has spent the whole season knocking it out of the park in what is clearly a dramatic role, and clearly the show’s most serious attempt to engage with its subject matter.
Shameless, a remake of the UK series of the same name, has never been the kind of show that could go toe to toe with the Breaking Bads of the world. It has an uneven tone that often seems to make light of the class-based difficulties its characters face, and a sense of humour that slips over the line from “borderline offensive” to “actually, for real, offensive” at times. It’s never been entirely clear whether the series is supposed to be grounded in the real world, or take place in a hyper-reality where actions have no consequences and the characters are supposed to be satirical. The show’s dramatic plot lines lean toward the former and its comedic plot lines lean toward the latter (maybe because there’s nothing particularly funny about being poor in the real world).
The series follows the adventures of the Gallagher family–six children, and their drunken, absentee father, Frank. The eldest Gallagher child (and the only one over the age of majority at the series’ inception) is Emmy Rossum’s character, Fiona, who more or less serves as the moral center of the show.
Over the first three seasons, we watch Fiona struggle to care for her siblings while working odd jobs and dating men who turn out to be bad for her. Every time Fiona tries to better her life, the family drags her back down either through sabotage or (more usually) through requiring things from her that aren’t compatible with what she wants. Through all of these setbacks–and despite the occasional outburst–Fiona, like all of the Gallagher children, displays an almost super-human resilience. Despite being abandoned by her parents and dropping out of high school to raise five children on her own, despite shuffling from low-wage job to low-wage job and scrounging for money for food, despite being repeatedly cheated out of even the smallest opportunities for happiness, Fiona stays positive, optimistic, determined, and focused on doing for everyone else, when no one is doing for her.
It’s the kind of chipper, poor-but-happy attitude the show sometimes displays, which undercuts the seriousness of the situation the characters find themselves in. Events that would scar you for life, in the real world, become funny anecdotes and colourful stories about triumphing over adversity. You might get the impression, watching this show, that being poor is a great adventure that doesn’t hurt anyone’s chances to lead a fulfilling life.
And then season four happens. Wonderful, dramatic, thoughtful season four, which we are now calling a “comedy.”
In this “comedy,” Fiona finally has a stable middle-class office job. She’s a rising star in the sales department, and she has a comprehensive benefits plan that covers all of her dependents. She’s dating her boss, which isn’t great, but he’s a stable, emotionally healthy man who treats her with respect and encourages her instead of dragging her down. With no one trying to sabotage her, Fiona decides to sabotage herself.
Over the course of this season (the last episode airs this week), Fiona torches her relationship, torches her career, and–because that’s not enough–ends up with a felony drug conviction that sends her to prison, passing all of her responsibility onto her next oldest sibling, Lip.
What makes this different from previous seasons is that the story line is played completely straight. Although there’s an element of humour in the earlier episodes, Fiona’s arrest turns this into a Big Deal, and the scenes of her arrest, trial, parole, and incarceration are treated very seriously. They’re much darker than similar scenes on, for example, Orange is the New Black (which is more legitimately classified as a comedy due to its tone), and the show engages in a fairly downbeat explanation of how things ended up this way.
Fiona is a product of the environment she grew up in, and her attempts at mobility are almost pre-destined to fail. At one point, she explains that she never felt like she deserved to have a good job or a stable relationship, and she wanted to prove she was right by destroying it. The values she holds as a working class woman also play a role–she might have been able to get a better deal with the prosecutor if she had sold out the middle-class man who gave her the drugs; she didn’t, because it was unthinkable to her to be a rat.
The penultimate episode invites us, as well, to see the connection between Frank’s poor parenting and the fate of his eldest child, essentially forced into the role of parent during her own childhood. She’s self-destructing the same way her parents did and, in a world of such limited options, when so much pressure has been applied to her, it’s hard to imagine that this wouldn’t have happened someday.
The show also takes a very serious attitude to the way these events affect Lip. The first in his family to go to college, he–like Fiona–struggles with fitting into middle-class culture, and initially tries to sabotage himself by withdrawing. Just as he seems like he’s making progress, he’s forced into Fiona’s role as head (and moral center) of the family, and he looks at her with the same hatred and sense of betrayal that they’ve both directed at Frank.
This is just one of several serious, dramatic story lines this season, but it lends the show a sense of gravity and relevance that it hasn’t always had. It’s also given Emmy Rossum a chance to demonstrate what an outstanding performer she actually is–she’s come a long way from staring into the middle distance while a guy in a mask swarms around her. In fact, I might have liked to see her compete as an actress in a drama series during awards season–I think she might have wormed her way into a nomination, this time.
Alas, this is not the world we live in. In probably the least funny season of Shameless ever, and the season that treated the characters’ situation with the greatest respect, and the season that finally gave the leading actress a meaty, dramatic role to sink her teeth into–one in which, dare I say it, she takes off her clothes to a little more purpose–it’s a comedy. OK, then.
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.