- Showtime's Shameless

This is apropos of nothing, but I wanted to say something about the Showtime series ‘Shameless’.

For me it all started with Deadwood. Since then the 'made for cable' TV series became pretty much the only thing on TV that I actually watch apart from Mythbusters and Disney Channel stuff for my daughter. Shameless is Showtime's latest effort on that model.

I’m a fan of the show, even though I think the writing is as terrible and as chock full of liberal BS as anything I’ve ever seen. I mean… the writing is really is awful. Rather than being intelligent, clever and ironic, as a life of poverty can often be, it’s a collection of liberal pandering and misplaced attempts at trashing conservatives.

The characters aren’t exactly well thought out. They’re all sweet and emotionally generous with each other rather than hard and selfish, as they really would be if they were written more realistically. Well …except for Frank. Frank the father (played by William H. Macy) is the show’s token conservative. He spouts birther and tea party dogma while narcissistically abandoning his children, drinking and doping himself to oblivion, and scamming the Illinois welfare state in every way he can and several ways he can’t. He’s what Hollywood thinks all conservatives are ‘really’ like.

He’s obviously a character designed by Hollywood insiders to represent someone that they find offensive in every way – even if it means he’s a completely unbelievable contradiction. It doesn’t occur to them that someone so obsessed with his own entitlement would never demand that everyone else live up to their responsibilities. He simply wouldn’t be a conservative when everything about his manner screams narcissistic liberal. He’s a big part of why the writing for the show is so incredibly lame.

But I’ll tell you this, as bad as the writing is for this show, it isn’t so bad that it can’t be redeemed by the outstanding performance offered by incandescent Emmy Rossum.

I confess I’ve developed a TV crush on her character from the show. Fiona Gallagher reminds me of every screwed up, strung out, emotionally desperate girl I dated when I was a kid. She’s exactly the kind of needy complicated mess that has always appealed to me. But in another way she also reminds me of my own cousins Cathy, and Eileen (each of them the oldest child of one of my father’s siblings) who presided over their own circus side shows of abandonment not too different from the fictional Gallaghers.

The writing for her character is mostly lame too. She’s too sweet and supportive, and the writers haven’t figured out that people in her position are too busy baling water from their own boat to spend much energy on others. They may diaper the baby, and feed the kids, but they don’t do it sweetly; they do it with a sense of resentment for the mess that is their lives. What they want is to spend their time chasing boys, and hanging out with their friends like the other 21 year olds, but instead they’re trying to figure out how to keep the electricity from being turned off. No one smiles their way through it.

Instead they end up drinking and doing drugs to numb the pain that comes from knowing their parents don’t care about them at all. And what they can’t numb away chemically, they take out on those around them – the siblings that need them or the friends who don’t understand their desperation. A life like Fiona Gallagher’s is all about learning to survive with pain, and if the writers were aware of that, it would be a more entertaining show.

But while the writing and most of the direction ignores all that, it’s not wasted on Emmy. As an example, in the most recent episode he character confronted her mother who abandoned her family a few years before. Most of it was trite nonsense no closer to genuine emotion than an episode of Three Is Company. But her performance was so compelling that I found it tough to watch. Just thinking about it still takes my breath away.

Anyway – it’s fiction not real life. And it’s entertaining fiction even if it misses most of its real opportunities. It’s actually adapted from a British show where the Irish fill the same cultural role as blacks do in America. So it’s not a shock that some of the pieces of the puzzle simply can’t be forced together.

But as many mistakes as they make, watching Emmy Rossum act is reason enough to tune it in. She’s easy on the eyes too – although to be honest that’s not her main appeal for me. The girl is a real talent, and she’s got a very bright future.

I just hope to god she keeps her politics to herself.