
Like so many foreign cultural phenomenon, I stumbled across the British comedy/drama Shameless purely by accident. A DVD of the first season (the sixth is currently in progress in the U.K.) was very cheap at a used book shop on Yonge Street because it was region two—having a multiregion DVD player finally paid off. I've made it to the end of season two.
I instantly fell in love with the show, based on the council-estate upbringing of creator Paul Abbott. It’s a laugh riot and a celebration of life. And that’s saying something since the show presents you immediately with a major learning curve—you have to learn to find the humour in a drunken Keith Richards-without-charisma father who absconds with any money that comes near the family’s townhouse in a Manchester council housing estate. Frank Gallagher (David Threlfall) is a totally useless leech who exploits the sweetness of his conscientious eldest daughter Fiona (played by Anne-Marie Duff), turning her into a surrogate mother while he runs around town. He’s not even particularly goodhearted, looking down on most people as his moral inferiors. Our entry point into this world of welfare scams, substance abuse, casual teenaged sex and pregnancy is Steve McBride (played by James McAvoy, who left the show in season two to head off to Hollywood—Atonement and Wanted with Angelina Jolie), a seemingly posh fellow who courts Fiona. He owns his own house and drives a nice car. The two meet cute in the first episode when her purse is stolen in a nightclub and he makes a valiant effort to rescue it. His infatuation with Fiona quickly expands to include the whole family and their cavalier attitude toward adversity and it through him that we see how loveable they are.
But midway through the second season, Steve develops his own serious problems (and by serious, I mean more serious than the everyday perils of his profession as car thief) and his own descent into reprobateness meant he was no longer the outsider—he was deeper in the muck than anyone else on the show. That’s when I realized, like father’s hand quietly removed from the seat of a child on a bike, I didn’t need him anymore as my fascinated proxy in Chatsworth Estate. I had myself accepted all the bad behaviour—kidnapping a child, accidentally shooting an acquaintance or poisoning the neighbourhood—as normal and funny, heartwarming and life affirming. And that’s what makes Shameless so special. It uses a magic realist style to juggle the awful and the rib-tickling. But it also avoids using purely black humour that would set us to laugh at the bad things in life—there’s no “He’s dead, ha-ha.” We don’t actually laugh at the crime and the misery per se. Each episode keeps the focus sharply on the family’s skewed reaction to their problems—and that’s where the humour lies. We don’t laugh at Frank Gallagher blacking out behind the sofa as much as we laugh at his youngest daughter Debbie bringing him tea—she’s a trooper who will never give up on a lost cause and we laugh at the futility of what she’s doing even as we admire her.
At a certain point in season two, I thought, “Aren’t there too many pregnancies driving the storyline? Are they jumping the shark?” But then I realized that unwanted/unexpected pregnancy is not a plot device on Shameless, it’s ambiance, it’s what happens in the down moments between crises, a well-worn worry that doesn’t require the extreme reaction everything does.
All the characters except Fiona—the show’s Bob Newhart—are offbeat and delightful. But they’re not quite circus freaks. On any other show, a tantrum like horny neighbour Violet (Maxine Peake) threw during her mother’s birthday—plunging it into dark silence by yanking out and tossing the fuses—would make us dislike the perpetrator. How can she treat people so badly? But we develop such a sharp sense of Violet as a real character, we can still like her without sweeping her horridness aside. She’s of a piece, the good and the bad. We come to expect that her mother will bring out the worse in her and realize it’s up to the other characters to help her negotiate it. We are all programmed defectively and must turn to the collective to help us overcome it.
Several formulas help contextualize the show’s situations so we are able to laugh as things fall apart. Firstly, friends will always help you out in the end. Secondly, the characters never come out ahead—no matter how much money is waved in their face. And thirdly, all problems are eventually solvable. Fourthly, there’s always a party to take the edge off.
In this, Shameless is closer to the work of P.J. Wodehouse than its makers would care to admit. You can only laugh at problems when they happen in a world where they are time and time again solved or contained, a world that has proved itself totally and absolutely safe even if—and this is where Shameless diverges from Jeeves—justice is totally and absolutely absent.
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