*Trigger Warning: Mentions sexual assault, suicide, death, drinking, and drugs.
Are you the kind of person who likes to watch TV shows? What about if those TV shows are atypical, completely outrageous, disgusting at times, severely uncomfortable, and somewhat offensive? Then you might be someone who would seriously love “Shameless.” I know this because I am the exact same way. I want to be on the edge of my seat, eyes wide with uncertainty of what’s going to happen next. “Shameless” definitely succeeds in this department, with unhinged notions happening in every new episode. The show is eleven seasons long, with the cast practically growing up in front of our eyes. For ten years, we watched the ups and downs of the fanatical Gallagher family and all the shenanigans they continuously pulled, like scamming people and even winding themselves up in jail. ’m going to be reviewing the growth and actions of each character throughout the long-running show. If you’ve never seen “Shameless,” then you shouldn’t read this–I wouldn’t want to spoil anything for you. Instead, go put on the first episode and start your “Shameless” emotional roller coaster!
“Shameless,” created by Paul Abbot, is about an alcoholic drug-addict father named Frank Gallagher and his six kids. The oldest, Fiona, has taken on the role of raising her five younger siblings since their absent mother left so many years ago. In order of age, her siblings are Phillip (“Lip”), Ian, Debbie, Carl, and Liam. They live in the Southside of Chicago next door to a couple their family is very close to, whose names are Veronica (“V”) and Kevin (“Kev”). So, sit back, grab some popcorn, and let’s discuss the absurdity that is “Shameless.”
It’s only right that we begin discussing Frank Gallagher. Frank’s moral character doesn’t change much throughout the show. He starts off as an alcoholic drug addict who only cares about money and obtaining any illegal paraphernalia that he can get his hands on. This does not change. He was usually shown passed out on dirty bar floors, on the side of the road somewhere, or spending what little money the family had on drugs and booze. He was seen as careless, selfish, and extremely narcissistic by everyone in the Southside. He provided nearly nothing to his family in the way of parenting or financial support, and was generally hated throughout the dysfunctional family. It was clear he was incredibly smart and had a brilliant mind, but he would rather use his intelligence to scam people out of money or drugs and manipulate people into giving him what he wants. He wasn’t always terrible, though. He was always talking up the kids to other people. He’d go on about Lip’s smarts, Ian’s work ethic, supporting Debbie’s teen pregnancy, Carl’s want to join the military, and lastly, Liam, who he always wanted to bond with and actually parent. Not all of Frank Gallagher was bad, just most of it. However, in the finale episode of the show, Frank goes on to feel zero remorse for his behaviors and actions before his death, reminding the viewers who he truly is at heart. However, Frank’s physical state has changed much throughout the show. Initially, Frank is known throughout all the local ERs as a regular. Constantly needing medical assistance to help with his alcohol poisonings and drug overdoses. In season four, Frank discovers he has gone into liver failure after the years of heavy drinking. Unsurprisingly, no one is very interested in giving him sympathy when they find out he needs a donor liver, which he ended up receiving when he was on the brink of death. He had even been thrown in a river, where he almost died and wound up in a coma for a couple of weeks. In the later seasons, he develops dementia and begins to worsen quickly. Due to this, he attempts suicide via heroin overdose, but was unsuccessful. He aimlessly wanders the streets, contracts COVID-19, and passes away in a hospital with none of the Gallagher clan aware. However, I believe the family is better off, and happier, not knowing and not being there.
Of all the main characters listed above, Fiona’s appearance in the show is the most short-lived. Her character leaves the show at the end of season nine and doesn’t return. Fiona’s character development is rocky, which is an accurate reflection of the set of circumstances handed to her. In season one, we’re introduced to her role around the house: caretaker. She has been left to handle raising the five other children since Frank and their absent mother weren’t going to do it themselves. She had dropped out of high school to take on multiple jobs to support the kids and pay the bills. She struggles with low self-esteem and deals with a short-temper due to stress. As the other siblings got old enough, they were able to help her. She meets challenges head on and is often the one everyone turns to when there’s an issue. She enjoys the occasional drink, but tends to make pretty bad life-altering decisions when she’s drunk One instance was letting their infant brother get into her cocaine stash when she was partying which landed her in prison for a few months. She was always juggling boy problems, including cheating on her boyfriend with his brother, and leaving her fiance at the altar when she discovered he was still using heroin. These boy problems stem from deep abandonment issues. Once the kids all got older and were more able to take care of themselves, she had decided to make a name for herself and began thinking about her own future. When she began doing this, she told her family that they had to fend for themselves, because she was done taking care of everyone except herself. She impulsively bought an apartment building, a laundromat, and a few other purchases that she lost in the end. In the process of all of these bigger purchases, Fiona began to become even more unstable than she was before. She developed a bad drinking problem, became angry and impulsive, and self-sabotaged hard enough to push away almost every member of the family. Everyone was mad at her for something at some point in time. The other siblings deemed her too irresponsible to run the household. She lost her job and even got kicked out of the house by Lip. She assaulted a woman for harassing Liam. However, this all came to an end when one morning, she woke up outside on the ground next to Frank. That was rock bottom. She began going to AA meetings until she got a large sum of money from a previous investment and made the decision to move away and start over somewhere else, away from her family and away from the Southside.
Philip “Lip” Gallagher is the second oldest sibling in the Gallagher family and the most academic. With a GPA of 4.6 in highschool, Lip inherited his father’s intelligence and has a keen knowledge of mechanical skills. However, he wastes it away acting like everyone else in the Southside and doing Southside things, like theft, drugs, drinking, smoking, etc. He will use his smarts how Frank does, for breaking the law and getting away with it. However, it’s not in the same way Frank does because Lip does it to make extra money for the bills. Lip has been arrested a few times before, usually with Ian, but he’ll always cover for Ian. He’s extremely unrestrained with his criticism and very blunt, which gets him in trouble with authority figures. He got his high school girlfriend, Karen, pregnant, had a relationship with his polyamorous college professor, and even slept with his roommate’s girlfriend. His apathy toward almost everything and his pessimistic views are the main reasons he is constantly clashing with Fiona, even when she’s just trying to better their situation and lives. He’s known to rebel against social norms and tends to be very self-destructive. For example, when he drunkenly smashed up his professor’s car and assaulted campus security, he got expelled from college and made a fateful return to the Southside. Then his drinking got much worse, and he ended up in the hospital with a blood alcohol content of 0.35. After he completed a rehab program,he regularly attends AA meetings, manages his addiction, and even has a baby with his girlfriend. In the last season, he begins thinking about a long term future for him and his new family, while also thinking of his brothers and sisters. He makes the decision to sell the house, so everyone can have a chunk of money to start over with, away from the Southside and the toxic cycle his family has seemingly been stuck in for generations. I personally feel as though Lip has one of the strongest finishes. He got it together after a rough couple of years and stepped up when no one else fully could.
Ian, the next oldest sibling, went on some roller coasters of his own throughout “Shameless.” We learn in season one that Ian is gay and hiding it from the entire family until Lip finds out. As everyone in the family slowly begins to find out, he’s anxious that he’ll be scrutinized for it. However, despite his family being full of issues, Ian’s sexuality was not a problem, and he was fully accepted for it. His behavior is sometimes erratic, and he makes impulsive decisions, like dropping out of high school and using Lip’s name to join the military without telling anyone. He was gone for a few months, until he decided to steal a helicopter. He fled and was wanted on criminal charges. When he was in hiding, he got diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which he inherited from his mother. He’d been in an on-again-off-again relationship with Mickey Milkovich, an aggressive neighborhood thug who was originally closeted and extremely homophobic. In a psychotic break, Ian steals Mickey’s baby he had had with a Russian woman named Svetlana, and drives off without telling anyone where he was going. He got arrested, but friends and family convinced Svetlana not to press charges. Later in the series, he spiraled out of control again off his meds, and convinced himself and his followers that he was “gay Jesus.” He went to prison for blowing up a van in the middle of the street. He spent two years in the system. Before prison, he’d managed to get a job as an EMT, with things looking up for him. He cannot be blamed for his illness, but he was distrusted to take his medications regularly, which created tension when he was constantly hounded about taking them if he ever showed behavior that strayed away from normal. In the last seasons, Ian and Mickey actually get married and move out of the house to a nicer apartment building in a different neighborhood of Chicago. Ian was the only sibling dealing with a diagnosed mental illness. His manic states were severe and always landed him in trouble with the law. As a viewer, watching him fall down over and over again was hard. It was also hard to see how little attention the family gave it. When asking if he was taking his meds, there was always anger detected in their tones. Even when seeing the signs of a manic state, the family would often not get involved because they had their own issues to deal with. The only person who truly understood Ian was his unmedicated bipolar mother, who often encouraged Ian’s manic states when they were with each other. After Ian did his time in prison, he had his disorder under control, took his meds, and didn’t have any further issues regarding his mania.
Debbie, the third youngest sibling, ages backwards in a sense. In the beginning, Debbie is extremely mature and grounded for her age. She was forced to be an adult at such a young age, so much that it negatively affected her ability to socialize and relate to kids her own age. However, when she gets older, she becomes immoral, immature, self-centered, delusional, etc., just like her father. As she got older, her innocent love for her parents turned to hate as she became aware of all the abuse and neglect. She deals with torment from kids at school for being different. All of this leads to feelings of self loathing and insecurities. She was obsessed with having her first kiss, losing her virginity, getting her period, and growing up faster in general. She meets a twenty-year-old, Matt, and makes the firm decision that he’s who she wants to take her virginity. However, upon learning her age, Matt tells her that it’s not going to happen until she’s sixteen at the earliest. Debbie obsesses over this, so much that she throws a party, invited him, gets him very drunk, and (TW) rapes him when he’d passed out. When she hears word of his new girlfriend, she starts a war by planting a snake in her car. Obviously, things didn’t end well in that situation, and she lost Matt completely, definitely for the better. Not long after that, she meets a guy named Derek. She falls for Derek, and they begin having a relationship. They have sex, and Debbie ends up pregnant at fifteen. Derek doesn’t want to raise a kid so young, so his parents shipped him off to Florida to live with his grandparents, leaving pregnant Debbie. Fiona tries to convince her to get an abortion, but Debbie refuses. She keeps the baby, Franny, and begins to raise her on her own. Reacting to feelings of doubt, Debbie almost abandons Franny, but decides against it at the last second. This is when she began stealing stuff for the baby. It leads to her stealing a countless amount of baby clothes, clothes for her, and more. Eventually, she gets a welding job and moves in with a disabled man named Neil. To Neil, they’re in love, but to Debbie, Neil has money that she can use to support herself and Franny. Not long after, Debbie begins questioning her sexuality and starts exploring same-sex relationships. When Fiona was struggling with her drinking, Debbie took over as head of the household. She was serious about it. If people weren’t coughing up their portion of bills, they weren’t allowed to stay in the house. Debbie, when over the age of eighteen, slept with a seventeen-year-old girl, who took Debbie to court and got her registered as a sex offender. Debbie isn’t a person who takes no for an answer. She is dark, reckless, manipulative, and arrogant. She lived out delusion, cynicism, and frustration.
Carl is the second-youngest sibling. In the early seasons, he’s a complete delinquent, carrying out acts of deviance and violence. He loves weapons, explosives, death, and drinking. He has all kinds of weapons hidden around the house for when he needs them. He begins selling drugs on street corners as a teenager and bullying kids at school. However, he’s always been there for his family When attempting to smuggle drugs through his cousin, he gets sent to juvie. However, he was fine with this, as he wanted to use it as a way to boost his reputation, and since he didn’t snitch, he was immediately accepted into his dealer’s prison gang. When he got out of prison, he adopted a mindset that he was too good and too tough for everyone. He and his prison friend, Nick, begin a gun dealing business. However, when Nick kills someone, Carl is traumatized and turns a new page, ditching his thug behavior. He was inspired by his then girlfriend’s father to go to military school. This was when he realized that he didn’t want to end up like his family, with issues surrounding poverty and addiction. Like the rest of the siblings, Carl finds himself always stuck in toxic relationships with mentally unstable people. Like the rest, this could partly be because of the abandonment issues that they all have. I feel as though there’s not much else to say about Carl. The older he got, the more mature and mellow he became. He did not do well in military school and ended up becoming a cop. He remained a cop until the very end of the show. He quit his life of delinquency and turned himself around for the better. Go Carl!
Lastly, the youngest Gallagher sibling: Liam. While Liam was there for the entirety of the show, he was a baby and wasn’t necessarily a main character with a storyline or lines until around season eight. Liam is the only Black person in the family. He was told that a DNA test confirmed he was Frank and Monica’s kid, and that there were “Black genes” in the family after an interracial affair. He was shielded from much of the bad influences since he still had a shot at being the only normal person in the family. As he grew up, he knew this and was grateful to his siblings for it. As he grew up, the rest of the siblings had their own lives to deal with, so his only true parental figure was Frank. Frank also saw this opportunity to bond and have a good relationship with at least one of his kids. Liam had inherited Frank’s (and everyone else’s) manipulation skills, allowing him to be a very good schemer. Frank had managed to get Liam into a private school on scholarship, so he could get the education he deserved. However, after a few years or so, he got kicked out and was forced to go to public school. Private school had made Liam more intelligent and outspoken than most kids his age. This outspokenness is what prompted Liam to start wondering about where he truly came from and encouraged him to begin exploring his heritage. He educated himself on famous and influential Black people and spent time with his mother’s extended family. He soon realized that no matter what, at the end of the day his siblings and Frank were his family, and he should embrace that he is a Gallagher. He is the only sibling who sympathized with Frank up until the very end, and felt bad when anyone else was cold or cruel to him.
If you’ve already seen “Shameless,” then none of this is new information or surprising. Breaking down each character’s storyline allows you to understand all of them individually, but also how they interact with each other. Each and every character has a multitude of issues of their own. Each of these issues, and how they handle these issues, reminds them that at the end of the day, they always have each other, even when they’re upset with one another. If you haven’t seen “Shameless,” then I hope this was full of crazy-enough sounding storylines that pique your curiosity, and you put down this article to go watch it. I’m even tempted to go restart it!