TV COLUMN: 'SHAMELESS'

William H. Macy Shines as the Archetypal Fall-Down Drunk in an Unexpected Morality Tale

By: Clare Elfman

March 24, 2011

(Showtime) When I saw a bit of the pilot for Shameless, I thought: Well that’s rock bottom, as far as the old taboos are concerned.  HBO broke the language barrier with Deadwood.  It finished off "Thou Shalt  Not Kill" with the lovable family man Dexter, who takes on the job of judge/executioner/human meat-packer and body-disposer. A kindly family man and high school coach in Hung finished another taboo when he decided that a good after-hours job was male prostitute, but of course with a true desire to make women happy.  And there’s Californication and likable Nurse Jackie and her snorting habits and etcetera.

Now Showtime finishes off the last of the taboos with Shameless and its opening toilet scenes where older sister sits on the can when siblings walk in; brother is caught masturbating when kids walk in; baby brother dips his toothbrush in the toilet water and brushes his teeth. Yuk.  Not appealing. The daughter’s boyfriend, a med student, moonlights by stealing cars. And granny is in the clink where she doesn’t mind the food and quite likes the sex.  Double yuk. I’m not the right demographic for this one. This one is beyond “edgy.” It’s fallen over the edge.

So why, after a short look-in, was I drawn back? Drawn enough to watch a second episode? Was it the unlovable father of this grossly dysfunctional family, William H. Macy--multi-talented star of Fargo and The Cooler--as the fall-down pukey father who wants to cheat the system out of Workers' Comp. money by stapling his hand to a wooden box? And by giving up his youngest child for a financial settlement? Maybe his cry of “I want the money!” parallels Edward G. Robinson’s response to Humphrey Bogart’s question in Key Largo. “What is it you want?” “More,” is the snarly answer. “I want more!” Well, you hate rapacious Edward G., but you can’t quite hate the guy who shoves his own son, who has an unset broken arm, in front of a moving car in order to compromise the investigator who suspects that Frank is faking illness into thinking he’s responsible?  Why?  Because Frank Gallagher is a cartoon. Just as unreal as Daffy Duck.  I don’t mean his acting skills. He’s wonderful. As is the whole cast.

But what I sense in Shameless is a symbolic shift toward something (let me call it “old-timey").  I sensed it when I saw The King’s Speech and realized that this “old-fashioned” story with no “edge,” with no violence, with simply a relationship between two men of different stations who respect each other and want to help each other, had found an audience; that it signaled a shift, a little hunger for the “traditional,” and I find that, in its oddly bizarre way, so does Shameless.

What came to mind as I watched and rewatched these episodes (consider that being an old gal, I am a sort of time machine. I’ve been watching the movies since the first Tarzan film back in 1932 and I bought my first TV in the days of I Love Lucy) is that I’ve  lived through enormous social changes.  And as far as TV family dramas are concerned, I’ve lived from Little House on the Prairie to Shameless--from an age of “restrictions,” certain accepted rules of “behavior,” especially attitudes toward sex and marriage, to Shameless, where all the restrictions are gone.

But what amazes me is that there is something comfortable about Frank Gallagher’s family, in spite of the fact that boyfriend steals cars, granny is in the slammer, and some of the kids are not quite sure who their parents are.

I remember a lecture I heard back in the '40s, when UCLA charged, if I recall correctly, about $29 a unit: "Society," said the lecturer, "is either headed toward a 'golden age' or receding from one." To me, “golden age” meant a sense of hope and expectation--a comfortable feeling that there were happy times ahead. That if you worked hard and “followed the rules,” all things were possible. There was an essential happiness, a satisfaction that life could be good. Or would get better.

When I was in high school, the '40s, the last of the “good wars” was full on. Boys were drafted yet they could identify the enemy and they went off to war willingly. And they conquered! Now it was on to better and more hopeful times.  For middle classes at least, pre-marital sex was taboo. You wanted sex, you held out for that marriage license. Not that everyone respected the taboo…but let me tell you, it was there, especially in the movies. Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle (1940) was a taboo breaker. She had a child “out of wedlock,” and she got her own apartment and her own job and stood up for herself. Yet, in the end, her life went back to the “traditional.”

So you married young, had kids, followed the “thou shalt nots,” and you and husband stayed together through “sickness and health,” and if you beat back the evil Hitler, you could prevail against all enemies.  If your politicians were crooked, you could get rid of them.  Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) had James Stewart fight the crooks and, in the end, the evil one was vanquished.  In  The Bishop’s Wife (1947), heaven sent an angel down (Cary Grant) to warn the bishop that it’s better to take care of the poor than to build a giant cathedral, etc.  You were your brother’s keeper. We still felt good times ahead. Hope swelled the human breast.  

Then came a series of wars in which we did not understand the enemy. The Vietnam war brought big counter-culture and broke the first sexual taboos. You could challenge your sacred institutions. Make love, not war.  See the film version of Hair.

In the '60s, when I took my first teaching job, I taught English to “unwed mothers.” In a few years, that term was exploded and I taught all subjects to “Schoolage Expectant Mothers.”  But in film, couples still slept sexless in single beds. If you got married and were pregnant, you covered the deed with a smock. Fast-forward. Now in Juno, the stigma of motherhood outside the “institution” of marriage was gone. And we celebrate marriage with Bridezillas.

Now note:  I am not, as old grannies are wont to do, saying that we lost the good old times. In those “good old times,” if you had a tough “relationship,” you were the “wife” and you just swallowed hard and accepted it. We fought for women’s lib, and rightly so.  We fought for individual freedom, and rightly so.  I just took another look at the first Tarzan film (1932). Jane left her comfortable society to live in the trees with her ape-man lover. That’s women’s lib! Brave new world? Tarzan was ape-like, but he was white. The explorers, looking for the elephant burial ground to steal the ivory and cart it back to civilization, had black “savages” to carry the heavy loads, and if the carriers got tired, you gave them a touch of the whip.  So much for “good old times.”

So where are we today? Looking back at a “golden age?” Certainly disappointed in our institutions. But then we’ve had war after war in which we have not understood exactly who was the enemy.   Our institutions have failed us. Our politicians have failed us.  We just had a mayor of a major city try to sell offices for money. A small city where the mayor shoved tax money into his own account. Cheated. Lied. A society where a major banking system betrayed the common good. Where a major safe car skirted rules in order to save money and caused tragedies.  What major institutions do we not question? We have been disappointed and roller-coastering away from a “golden age” at breakneck speed. We worship the golden calf. We want to get on American Idol and get rich!  We tell our kids, "Stay away from drugs," and the whole of television is sponsored by drug companies telling us the positive power of pills, even though they are forced to expain how the dangers of taking the new pill may equal the value of taking it. Who trusts anybody in any major institutions to tell the truth? Where is hope?  We fought to break the shackles that kept us from individual freedom, and we’re in free fall and I think it’s made us a bit nervous.

But when The King’s Speech found a popular audience, I sensed a hunger for some of those old-timey “virtues.”  And with Shameless, in times when every film is now free of sexual taboos but very few films have anything to do with love, this show, which is, on the surface, free of that old-timey sense of “morality,” is oddly a tribute to family.

The kids claim to hate what this father has done to the family; they survive in any which way they can, but they don’t really cast him out. And they stick together.  The mother, for the second time, deserts her six children, but this time because she knows she does not have the capabilities to stick to them, and in her performance (stellar) is that sense of personal loss. If she believed she could pull it off, she’d stay. She tries to take the youngest with her. The siblings will not permit it.  When a brother has a chance to leave the family for a stable home, he has finally found his real father, he cannot bring himself to disturb the peace of this new family, which his presence will undoubtedly do, and he loves his siblings and wants to stay with them.

So tell me that this is not a “morality” tale. “Shame” is a restriction. You do something which is “taboo” and you feel bad about it, and it changes your actions. No more taboos. Shameless. And suddenly we have the Gallagher family. And those six sibs will do anything, to hell with institutions, anything to survive. They love each other.

Shameless is not only a morality tale, it’s a love story. Frank Gallagher, an unapologetic drunk, has brought us a family determined to hang together, and there’s nothing to be ashamed of in that.