In Praise of 'Shameless'

During a trip to Australia in 2006, a friend of mine introduced me to the British television series Shameless. It quickly struck me as one of the best plotted, most entertaining television programs I had ever seen, and I have reviewed it since Sundance Channel began airing it in America. Though critics have lauded the show rightfully, I will use this space to expound on two possible reasons why the show has been successful. 

 

First, the actors cast to play Frank's children do so without saccharine, cheeky predictability. Unburdened by cutesy artifice or trite caricature, the viewer can experience a depiction of what it may be like to grow up hard. Evocative, empathetic, their performances within the collective construct of the family or as the featured, individual vignette in a given episode do not command a response. Rather, the viewer can respond genuinely to impressions rooted in fact rather than ideas. As literature, the show does not make a deliberate point, but the performances allow the viewer to draw his own conclusions about psychology, morality, and society.

 

On the second score, Shameless takes place in Manchester on a lower class housing estate rife with petty crime, teenage pregnancy, and substance abuse. Recently, television audience preferences have leaned towards shows about the wealthy or the middle class. Despite the success of programs like Good Times, All in the Family, and Married with Children, quotidian working class travails do not have much appeal. As social commentary and as well crafted comedy, those programs did not shy away from story lines about existential struggle, a Marxist determination against a superstructure, or overcoming the circumstances of a tough life. Perhaps bourgeois sensibility does not want its entertainment to shock, but a cultural landscape devoid of artistic rendering of a multi-faceted society is more of the issue. Fictional content shows lose viewership to reality programming as well as non-television alternatives, and, hence are not as profitable to vet each season. Seemingly, animated series such as South Park, The Simpsons, and The Boondocks have picked up where their aforementioned forebears left off, but their thrust comes from using cartoons as effective satire to point out grotesqueness, to depict distortions, and to dispel taboos. NBC's My Name is Earl, though revolving around the exploits of a segment of the lower middle class population, seems to propagate stereotypes of poor, white Americans as buffoonish and ignorant. 

 

Where others have failed, Shameless succeeds in intertwining some gravitas into its stories without taking itself too seriously. Subtle, witty, it neither glorifies living on state aid, nor does it beg its audience to pity the unfortunates. In the tradition of Hardy's Wessex or a Breughel canvas, the Chatsworth Estate is a landscape portrait of complexities, humor, and human pain. Cheers for its creator, producers, cast, and all affiliated with the program for accomplishing the difficult task of putting out a respectful treatment of unique, variegated lives. Cheers for courage in creativity.