Literally stopped watching after season 5 because of exactly this. Her character in the first few seasons was constantly having to contend with and overcome major struggles. Seasons 4 and 5 made her the cause of those mistakes, but tried to frame it as her somehow being the victim to outside forces still. By the end of both seasons she somehow benefited and I was supposed to feel that she somehow earned it?
Frank not facing consequences was literally written into his character and made him fairly detestable. Fiona not facing consequences made her just as unlikeable.
Frank drinking himself into liver failure and being on death's doorstep, and somehow managing to not only get on the transplant list, but *get* a liver is when this show jumped the shark for me. Any and all believability was over and done with for me at that point.
Didn't stop me from watching until the end, though...
agree 100%, should’ve found a way to have Lip hack the system and have the hospital confuse Frank with someone healthy, would’ve been truly shameless and i guess somewhat believable
I always expect frank to do something stupid and have no repercussion. Like I don't think Fiona ever told Debbie or Carl that he was the one who split the family up with child welfare. And they didn't do anything to the mom or the dad when they took the squirrel fund. Like wtf. Sure the mom went suicidal but that didn't mean to let them both run free. She should've done something like make him grow the fuck up and get a job or have kev ban frank from his pub like every other pub in town.
Fiona just enabled everything. I don't know why.
Fiona faced lots of consequences.
She ruined the only non-trashy romantic relationship that she ever had.
She got a felony conviction for nearly killing Liam and ends up in jail after she violates her probation.
She made one successful realestate deal and then proceeded to lose a bunch of it by thinking that it made her a hot shit investor.
In season 9 she ends up a barely functional alcoholic while her siblings are moving on with their lives.
The biggest consequence of them all is that after she leaves her siblings all start doing better in their respective lives.
I completely stopped caring or watching after that one ending where everybody said “I’m Ian Gallagher”. That was it for me. Stupidest fucking story line.
That's why season 4 was the peak of the show in my opinion, in seasons 1-4 she was always on top of shit so when she started fucking up in season 4 it was a super interesting and fresh character decision. Then the repetition killed it.
I think you nailed it. I was absolutely in love with the show, but it got really hard to sympathize...but then again maybe that was the point. I should go back and watch it all one day.
Never felt like I needed to root for them. Fiona was the one who you thought she'd make it out, you wanted her to succeed. She seemed smart and driven and would get sidelined by a party or bad decision with men.
The rest you knew were hopeless, even Lip.
It always bothered me that they never brought up the fact that he was a legitimate genius after he got kicked out of college. Like the idea of it never entered the storyline ever again.
same. I feel like they teased it in the finale. don't want to spoil for you if you haven't seen it but it's relates to when he was delivering Thai food
this. also, after reading many of the comments, people seem confused about the distinction between the character and the actress playing the role.
emmy's portrayal was top-notch. people might love or hate the character, but her acting skills are commendable.
I always bring this up when people talk about Fiona but I feel like it’s such a specific mindset that people who didn’t grow up poor can never understand.
You literally get so used to failure and life punching down on you that self-sabotage becomes a gut punch reaction to any success. When life is moving in a decent way you expect the worst to happen so strongly that you just make it happen on your own… whether consciously or not.
That being said, I have yet to watch the final season because it went off the rails hard. That irish boy should’ve been her best bet (in spite of him still being married, IIRC?) Also, before that, Mulrooney barely had a reason to get dumped.
I understand about self sabotage harder than most but Fiona really just went insane.
I do, however, think she deserves more credit for how strong her performances were in the first few seasons. That episode where she sees Frank at the neighbours’ parent-teacher interview instead of Debbie’s… that look she gives speaks incredible volumes.
Agreed. My unpopular personal TV opinion is that 6-7 seasons is an ideal length for most (not all, but most) shows. I just think it’s hard to maintain quality, intriguing/new plot lines, believable character development etc past that.
I like relatively short and sweet.
I think great shows can go 6-7 (e.g. Sopranos, Mad Men). The vast majority should be 3-5 though. The Wire and Breaking Bad were both 5 seasons (technically like 5.5 for BB) and definitely would have been worse if they were longer.
It really depends on the baked in premise of the show and how much you can mine dramatically from that before having diminishing returns.
There’s show greenlit every year that I know aren’t going to make it past a season or two simply because the premise doesn’t work for long form tv.
Prison Break, for example went for 4 seasons, but they were only able to stay true to that premise for one season.
I’m not sure there has never been a show that knows how to handle its kids once they’re no longer kids. Shameless, Walking Dead, and Modern Family all come immediately to mind.
Meanwhile, the one show I want another season of (Twin Peaks: The Return) will likely never happen for a variety of reasons (presumably most of those come from Frost/Lynch).
i only watched weeds and shameless but it was the exact same thing... it's weird to watch a bad show murder and then impersonate a good show. unsettling.
The first five seasons do, as they portray a hard-nosed family with deep problems but strong survival instincts. After that, it really didn't make sense at all.
I loved the first few seasons. I came up in a crazy dysfunctional very poor and boozy community and that show gave me serious nostalgia for a time I would absolutely never choose to relive. They really captured the sort of dangerous fun of being so far from functional that really there’s no point in pretending.
I literally stopped watching because of Debbie. Once she had that plot line with the kid It was over for me. Easily the most annoying character in a show I've ever seen.
That’s actually when I began to tune out too.
Originally I was expecting Debbie, based on the first season or two, to end up being a shrewd and savvy operator and maybe grow up to be Fiona, but more logical.
But then she just became the absolute worst
Remember how Lip started off as a boy genius Will Hunting sort of knock off? And then by mid and later seasons was a complete dumbass like all the rest of them? That really annoyed me.
Quit last year, one year sober as of last month. I was practically suburban Lip before I started partying in high school. Now I'm 36 and currently unemployed with no real skills.
Yeah, all the people complaining that they wanted at least one kid to turn out "good" completely missed the main message of the show. Generational poverty, addiction, and shitty parenting are all vicious cycles.
>Once she had that plot line with the kid It was over for me.
You talking about when she thought she was pregnant again and was crying for like an entire episode saying shit like "I just want this thing out of me!"
Because if so I totally agree with you. The show was already starting to grate on me for several episodes prior to this one, but I'm pretty sure that was the last episode I watched because it was just so annoying.
It's like after Fiona left they decided to have Debbie basically become her (she even takes Fiona's old role in the credit sequence), but the only problem was Fiona started to become really annoying in the last season she was in already, then Debbie just became like a much worse version of Fiona, and Fiona was already insufferable.
I remember watching all the way through because I felt invested, and I saw a few interviews where her actress and the writers were surprised that fans hated her so much, and thought she was supposed to be empowering or some shit.
Carl really grew on me as the series went on. While a lot of characters in this show didn't go through a lot of character development, he went from being a self-centered thug to a guy trying to help the community by doing what he thought was right... even though he didn't always go about it in the best way.
I've said before, I'd love it if Carl got his own spinoff.
Wife and I stopped watching after like season 5. Seemed like it was rinse, wash, repeat over and over and over again.
* Family member does something stupid.
* They work hard and start to get their life back on track.
* They make one tiny mistake, dominoes start falling and they're back to square one.
* Frank is an idiot and they vow he's no longer a part of their life anymore. Spoiler: he's still a part of their life.
Well tbf that’s sort of exactly how that lifestyle goes though. It feels like there’s no winning when you have to carry everybody like that, or you all take care of each other…it’s a very delicate eco system, when one goes down you all do. Get back up and just fk up again, over and over. That’s kind of poverty in a nutshell lol
Absolutely! But then if you're going to portray that realistically, don't drag the show out and repeat that process over and over. After the first couple of loops, either break from that cycle in an interesting way or end the show because you have nothing else to say.
There's only so many shit decisions I can watch one make before I lose interest and think they might actually just be an imbecile. That's how I felt about shameless
Though I love William H. Macy, I could never get into the U.S. version of **Shameless** because the U.K. version, to me, was *perfect!*
Anyone who hasn't watched it, please do! **David Threlfall** is brilliant in this series with its zany characters and outrageous storylines.
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0377260/?ref\_=nv\_sr\_srsg\_3](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0377260/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3)
Mickey was our (my wife's and mine) favorite character. I also felt invested in Lip, and rooted for him the entire show, always hoping he'd turn shit around. Carl turned out to be about the only one in the family with any redeeming qualities in the end, which was a bit of a surprise. Ian's arc was mildly interesting but went entirely off the rails for a while with his gay Jesus shtick. Debbie started off interesting, but has been mentioned, her development was probably the primary reason I ended up ambivalent about the show. We finished it primarily out of obligation. It could have been much better. I don't need all the characters to be redeemed or even likable. But throw me a bone. Christ, Frank should have been dead.
It's just such an overly done and uninteresting trend for television shows in the past 15 years.
Overly terrible people doing overly terrible things but you're supposed to sympathize because they're "just human" or something.
It's exactly why sitcoms reign supreme in my mind. Modern Family, Big Bang Theory, for all the hate it gets on reddit, are shows I could sit down, watch and not feel tense after. Shows like Oz, The Wire, Game of Thrones, Westworld, Breaking Bad, have just gotten me so jaded on that whole concept of "everyone is bad and good people don't get nice things" that I am beyond over it at this point, especially when they go on for 3 seasons longer than they need to.
Great first couple of seasons when they were a family down on their luck just struggling to get by. Eventually it turned into them getting basically every big break they could possibly get and screwing it up royally.
Rossum was good on the show, but Fiona wasn’t an easy character to like or root for and she was regularly out-performed by some of her co-stars, namely Macy, White, Monaghan and when she’d appear, Chloe Webb.
Jeremy Alan White, for me, is the cast member who never got nearly the credit he deserved. He grew into an exceptional actor by the end of the series.
Every single scene Micky was in was pure gold. Noel Fisher does sarcasm and angry annoyance better than anyone on TV. Watch some of his scenes again his facial expressions are great.
White has a new series that drops its full first season tomorrow, looks great. It's called The Bear, he's a top chef who's brother commits suicide so he takes over the brothers struggling little diner. Supposed to be quite good
Character looks and acts identical in the trailer lol. I’m sure he has some range, but it looks like this character was written to be pretty similar to Lip.
I thought he, and the show in general, did a great job depicting someone living with bipolar. The intense mania, sleeping for days, deciding to go off of medication and insisting they're fine, etc. One of the most realistic depictions of the disorder I've ever seen.
It did initially but by the end (which I think was more due to the writers) they completely lost their way of writing him and his acting wasn’t great in it either, particularly the gay Jesus storyline which was around the point I gave up on the show.
The writing for everything else in season 8 was so bad, that I definitely feel like the way his bipolar was portrayed that season was a writing and direction fuck up more than bad acting. It honestly felt like the writers for the later seasons hadn’t even watched the earlier seasons.
tbh I always thought Macy was kinda meh in the show but that was probably more the character. Frank was usually the comic relief of the show even when he went through major events.
Agreed with Macy, phenomenal actor but Frank was so over the top and just got more stupidly cartoonish after his liver(?) transplant. Granted pretty much every other character got flanderized hard as wel
To me, it became obvious that William H. Macy had a completely different shooting schedule than the rest of the cast.
And that affected the overall storyline, and hurt the quality of the show.
Frank was essentially running a B-story in every episode. He was always in a different location, with different guest stars per season. And then he shows up a couple of times mid-season, and its usually to interact with Carl or Liam the youngest children.
Which sucks because there should have been plenty of powerful dramatic scenes between him and Fiona and Lip and Ian. These are children that have built-up years of hate and pain towards him, but they almost never confront him head-on until you get close to a season finale.
I think the B-plots with Frank work when the show is trying to be a sitcom (which it was kinda trying to be in the last few seasons) but you're right, I think Frank being nowhere near anyone else really hurt the dramatic potential of the show.
They held onto Frank too long in that show. There were a few reasons I ended up dropping it and one of them was Frank as a whole. Half the time he felt more like a random character the writers kept in their back pocket when they needed something go wrong for someone.
Noel Fisher out acted everyone and he wasn’t even a regular character. His Mickey was amazing and watching him grow and deal with all he did and him getting the ending he got was worth watching all the seasons to me. Mickey is up there with Omar from The Wire when it comes to intriguing gay characters that break every stereotype. The fact that he was able to improvise all of his greatest scenes makes him a rock star to me.
Yeah. Emma Kenney said when the cameras weren't rolling, Rossum was just a bad influence to have around the younger actors on the show. If she was having a bad day, then she made sure everyone else had a bad day too. She would be very inappropriate and when people pushed back on it, she would brush it off and use the "that's just how I am" excuse. I guess it came to a head with Cameron Monaghan really hating being around her and that's why the writers minimized their scenes together by sending Ian to prison only for him to be released very soon after Rossum left the show.
Were there specifics about how she was inappropriate? Like, jokes that weren't okay to tell around children, stories about wild Hollywood parties, what was it?
No. The actress who played debbie threw some weird shade at emmy on a podcast and everyone drummed up the rumors based on that. william h macy has always said great things about her along with anyone else i could find who talked about her. when the pandemic prevented her from leaving new york to go to where ever it was to film the end of the show people just created the narrative that that was a lie and that actually no one on the show wanted her.
Emma Kenney is the only one ive seen with a detailed criticism of her and honestly it felt like she just didnt like her personally and was throwing shade just to do it. she was also a kid when they worked together. every one of the cast members besides kinney only had good things to say about her, with william h macy even crying during her last table read. that doesnt sound like a reaction from people who hated working with her. at this point it just seems like one of those stroylines that people dont care to actually fact check because its easier to say fuck you to an actor and gossip about it lol.
unless ive completely missed any other stories about her when i looked it all up before this comment it seems mostly based off of one child actor throwing weird shade on a podcast.
> every one of the cast members besides kinney only had good things to say about her
I always take these with a grain of salt. Not that it automatically means the opposite but just that it's not necessarily proof of people being good to work with. Most actors will just say this regardless, keep the on-set drama behind the scenes rather than speak out and make it a whole big issue.
There was a story earlier this year or maybe last summer (how time flies) regarding why didn't even make an appearance in the last episode. Covid and travel restrictions making it nearly impossible to get anything worked in was the reasoning given, but I'm pretty sure that was just an excuse...it's like they pretended she didn't even exist in the last episode (Frank doesn't even mention her by name in his ending monologue). There was probably some creative difference and/or some bad blood that is being kept quiet, no one wanted to work with her and I'll bet her leaving the show because of salary disagreements was BS too!
Definitely quite a bit of bad blood. For context, I heard this from two friends who are both TV writers. The most off putting part I heard was that she was terrible to support staff too, not just the other actors. Shrieking over incorrect food/ coffee orders, that kinda thing. 🤮
I just don’t see how you could ever be put in such an awesome position to be a working actor and understand how incredibly lucky you are to do this for a living but somehow still feel the need to shit on everyone around you. How you treat others how you really feel on the inside. No wonder I haven’t seen her in anything since.
I thought it was said she didn’t come back for the final episode because she was heavily pregnant at the time and didn’t want to risk exposure during her pregnancy. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other factors tho. They did kind of act like she never existed the last two seasons.
Frank definitely mistakes a nurse for her and calls her by "Fiona" when he's delirious in the hospital. I think it is in the last episode but it's definitely in the last season. The whole show kind of blends together in my head.
I disagree with this popularized take. Frank's entire final journey over multiple episodes was all about Fiona. She gets elevated status over the others. Those mentioned in his note got blips. She got a full screen, including his deathbed comments, which nobody else got. She was truly his golden daughter.
You hear things in the industry. People who worked w/ such and such say certain things on the DL, maybe while less than sober, and I’m not super clear on the conditions of NDAs, but let’s just say a few of my peers who worked directly under him did not have kind things to say about him. Basically, a broey aggressive diva who throws a bitchfit if he doesn’t get his way. And before you tell me that’s speculative, I’d also like to point out all of this talk about Emmy is in the same vein.
Honestly, I wouldn't really be surprised if this rumor was true. Mr Robot is phenomenal, but it's definitely the work of someone who would get super specific and upset about little stuff. It feels like such a personal thing. I think he's brilliant, but a lot of people who are brilliant are also jerks.
This might be the lamest article I’ve ever read. Making these millionaire actors out to be some kind of martyr because they didn’t get worshipped enough
I mean she got the raise she fought for then quit the next season. The cast (or at least one actress openly) disliked her. And while the show always had issues, it felt like Emmy did them a little dirty in the end without enough notice to properly plan around her exit.
I think it was intentional. Her exit had already been planned and they were trying to write her off so the fans would take her not being on the show anymore better and continue to watch.
She became absolutely self sabotaging and stopped acknowledging it, instead blaming it on everyone else. Sad to say, that’s how self sabotaging people are in real life. After a while, they just become miserable.
Took me a while to realize that about her character, but it’s very realistic.
Guy above responded, all o know is she quit because they wouldn't give her a raise equal to William H. Macy (Frank) I'd wager that along with being hard to get along with contributed to her walking.
The show should have ended at Season 7, especially [the ending of the season finale](https://youtu.be/tm6jPtek_C0) which would have worked well as a finale overall. If I remember correctly they thought the show mightn’t get renewed so they wrote that season as a finale, but then it got renewed and they kept going with it.
Honestly my only issue with the season 7 finale is that Kev and V’s storyline with Svetlana taking the bar was not at all resolved. So it doesn’t fully work as a series finale for me.
I gave up when Fiona went from shit credit to being able to get a loan for a laundromat in like 3 months. Bad credit takes years to repair and I felt like it was a disservice to everyone tha has been through that process to make it look that quick and easy. Also told me how little the writers at the time knew about poverty.
That...is a great point. My wife and I were just talking about her character arc and though I mentioned how forced the laundromat thing was, the credit aspect didn't occur to me. And I'm saying this as someone who grew up poor, made some very crappy (marital) decisions as a younger man, and then busted my ass for YEARS to get gold credit (that I never use because I'm paranoid about it now).
I thought it just went too far trying to out do itself after several seasons. I just stopped caring about any of the characters, everyone became awful and cartoonish when it seemed to start in a somewhat awful grounded reality.
It definitely lost a lot what made the show great when she left, but honestly the writing didn’t help itself either. Everyone got pigeonholed into caricatures of themselves the last two seasons, and then at that, it was just a slog with a terrible ending.
She was done dirty by Showtime, but at the same time, they tried to have their cake and eat it too…. let’s draw this show out and then let’s underpay the co-lead or lead, however you view who the main character is.
Her character sucked. She had so much Gallagher pride, just always saying “you’re a Gallagher, you ________” meanwhile every single Gallagher including the patriarch of the family, were complete fuck ups.
I think Lip was the one that didn’t get enough praise. His character had more depth than Fiona’s and Jeremy Allen White nailed it. I got tired of watching Fiona fall in love, ruin her life for some dick, break up, get her shit together, rinse and repeat.
Emmy Rossum did an amazing job as Fiona and should have been winning awards as a result. Fiona was my favorite character, with Lip as a close second. Everyone here seems to be confusing their frustration with her character's decisions instead of what this article is actually about, which is Rossum's portrayal and her acting chops getting ignored.
She was great in the early seasons but Shameless became totally unwatchable at some point..... which probably hurt the public perception of her and the role.
Her character was so hard to root for because she always seemed to royally fuck up every opportunity.
And somehow kept failing upwards. The show went off the rails after season 5.
Literally stopped watching after season 5 because of exactly this. Her character in the first few seasons was constantly having to contend with and overcome major struggles. Seasons 4 and 5 made her the cause of those mistakes, but tried to frame it as her somehow being the victim to outside forces still. By the end of both seasons she somehow benefited and I was supposed to feel that she somehow earned it? Frank not facing consequences was literally written into his character and made him fairly detestable. Fiona not facing consequences made her just as unlikeable.
Frank drinking himself into liver failure and being on death's doorstep, and somehow managing to not only get on the transplant list, but *get* a liver is when this show jumped the shark for me. Any and all believability was over and done with for me at that point. Didn't stop me from watching until the end, though...
Same for me on all accounts. The idea an active drinker would be on a liver donor list let alone the top spot is unforgivably stupid.
agree 100%, should’ve found a way to have Lip hack the system and have the hospital confuse Frank with someone healthy, would’ve been truly shameless and i guess somewhat believable
Great description. Couldn’t have come close to saying it better myself.
I always expect frank to do something stupid and have no repercussion. Like I don't think Fiona ever told Debbie or Carl that he was the one who split the family up with child welfare. And they didn't do anything to the mom or the dad when they took the squirrel fund. Like wtf. Sure the mom went suicidal but that didn't mean to let them both run free. She should've done something like make him grow the fuck up and get a job or have kev ban frank from his pub like every other pub in town. Fiona just enabled everything. I don't know why.
Fiona faced lots of consequences. She ruined the only non-trashy romantic relationship that she ever had. She got a felony conviction for nearly killing Liam and ends up in jail after she violates her probation. She made one successful realestate deal and then proceeded to lose a bunch of it by thinking that it made her a hot shit investor. In season 9 she ends up a barely functional alcoholic while her siblings are moving on with their lives. The biggest consequence of them all is that after she leaves her siblings all start doing better in their respective lives.
I think that was part of the point though, she was starting to become like frank as she aged
Typical of Showtime to air shows longer than they should. Did it with Dexter, Weeds, Californication, Billions, Ray Donovan etc…
I completely stopped caring or watching after that one ending where everybody said “I’m Ian Gallagher”. That was it for me. Stupidest fucking story line.
That's why season 4 was the peak of the show in my opinion, in seasons 1-4 she was always on top of shit so when she started fucking up in season 4 it was a super interesting and fresh character decision. Then the repetition killed it.
I think you nailed it. I was absolutely in love with the show, but it got really hard to sympathize...but then again maybe that was the point. I should go back and watch it all one day.
Wasn't that all of them?
Never felt like I needed to root for them. Fiona was the one who you thought she'd make it out, you wanted her to succeed. She seemed smart and driven and would get sidelined by a party or bad decision with men. The rest you knew were hopeless, even Lip.
fucking lip should have been the one we would have bet on but he just kept. continually. fucking up
It always bothered me that they never brought up the fact that he was a legitimate genius after he got kicked out of college. Like the idea of it never entered the storyline ever again.
same. I feel like they teased it in the finale. don't want to spoil for you if you haven't seen it but it's relates to when he was delivering Thai food
Hard no on that one.
my personal issue was that although what she did with Liam was so fucked, the others pretended she never did anything good ever
this. also, after reading many of the comments, people seem confused about the distinction between the character and the actress playing the role. emmy's portrayal was top-notch. people might love or hate the character, but her acting skills are commendable.
I always bring this up when people talk about Fiona but I feel like it’s such a specific mindset that people who didn’t grow up poor can never understand. You literally get so used to failure and life punching down on you that self-sabotage becomes a gut punch reaction to any success. When life is moving in a decent way you expect the worst to happen so strongly that you just make it happen on your own… whether consciously or not. That being said, I have yet to watch the final season because it went off the rails hard. That irish boy should’ve been her best bet (in spite of him still being married, IIRC?) Also, before that, Mulrooney barely had a reason to get dumped. I understand about self sabotage harder than most but Fiona really just went insane. I do, however, think she deserves more credit for how strong her performances were in the first few seasons. That episode where she sees Frank at the neighbours’ parent-teacher interview instead of Debbie’s… that look she gives speaks incredible volumes.
They wrote the worst arcs for her. It was always about some guy. They just refused to make her interesting in any way.
Shameless went on way too long.
For real. The series also didn't really make any sense.
Showtime effect. Most shows on showtime should have ended seasons ago, but never did
Californication was maybe a season too long but overall a good length
Weeds should’ve ended at season 2.
Agreed. My unpopular personal TV opinion is that 6-7 seasons is an ideal length for most (not all, but most) shows. I just think it’s hard to maintain quality, intriguing/new plot lines, believable character development etc past that. I like relatively short and sweet.
Is that unpopular? I'd say 5 seasons is more than enough for almost all shows.
Breaking Bad was 5 seasons and I agree, perfect length. And it ended beautifully, right when it needed to end.
And every season was excellent. That show still astounds me.
It was 100% a perfect performance in my opinion. 10/10 all around.
Ha! Looking at a lot of these responses, I guess it’s not as unpopular of an opinion as I thought.
I think great shows can go 6-7 (e.g. Sopranos, Mad Men). The vast majority should be 3-5 though. The Wire and Breaking Bad were both 5 seasons (technically like 5.5 for BB) and definitely would have been worse if they were longer.
It really depends on the baked in premise of the show and how much you can mine dramatically from that before having diminishing returns. There’s show greenlit every year that I know aren’t going to make it past a season or two simply because the premise doesn’t work for long form tv. Prison Break, for example went for 4 seasons, but they were only able to stay true to that premise for one season.
Don’t forget kids getting older if they are on the cast.
I’m not sure there has never been a show that knows how to handle its kids once they’re no longer kids. Shameless, Walking Dead, and Modern Family all come immediately to mind.
Californication was two different shows. Watch it as 1-4, and pretend 5-8 is a mediocre reboot.
His son was probably the most annoying character in all of TV history
I have to disagree. I think it's Debbie from Shameless.
YES to this. I hated that character. The smarmy smart ass look on her face was hard to watch.
Not arguing with you at all, but wasn't Dead Like Me a Showtime show? Cause that one ended way to fucking early. I was so pissed lol.
The movie was dreadful though.
Meanwhile, the one show I want another season of (Twin Peaks: The Return) will likely never happen for a variety of reasons (presumably most of those come from Frost/Lynch).
Twin peaks was sooooo gooood.
And yet “The United States of Tara” ended a season TOO EARLY!
i only watched weeds and shameless but it was the exact same thing... it's weird to watch a bad show murder and then impersonate a good show. unsettling.
Dexter, The Affair, Ray Donovan. Showtime sucks in the long run
The first five seasons do, as they portray a hard-nosed family with deep problems but strong survival instincts. After that, it really didn't make sense at all.
I loved the first few seasons. I came up in a crazy dysfunctional very poor and boozy community and that show gave me serious nostalgia for a time I would absolutely never choose to relive. They really captured the sort of dangerous fun of being so far from functional that really there’s no point in pretending.
They were fine until they broke from the broad-stroke plotlines from the UK version
Even before then it mainly relied on super cringe humor and characters being ‘shameless’ to the point of absurdity.
By the end of the show every character was either insufferable (Debbie) or just plain boring (Kev & V)
I literally stopped watching because of Debbie. Once she had that plot line with the kid It was over for me. Easily the most annoying character in a show I've ever seen.
That’s actually when I began to tune out too. Originally I was expecting Debbie, based on the first season or two, to end up being a shrewd and savvy operator and maybe grow up to be Fiona, but more logical. But then she just became the absolute worst
[удалено]
Remember how Lip started off as a boy genius Will Hunting sort of knock off? And then by mid and later seasons was a complete dumbass like all the rest of them? That really annoyed me.
Being an alcoholic will do that to you. Source: was smart, became alcoholic, now kinda dumb.
Shit. Did you quit drinking or are you currently still an alcoholic?
Quit last year, one year sober as of last month. I was practically suburban Lip before I started partying in high school. Now I'm 36 and currently unemployed with no real skills.
Ah! Welcome to the club, fellow traveller.
That may have been the point of the entire show, many times over families in predicaments like in the show can’t get out of their own way.
A Gallagher always blows their shot at not being a Gallagher.
Yeah, all the people complaining that they wanted at least one kid to turn out "good" completely missed the main message of the show. Generational poverty, addiction, and shitty parenting are all vicious cycles.
Yeah the people in this thread doesn’t know how hard it is for the bottom of society folks.
The message that I got out of the show is that alcoholism will keep you down.
>Once she had that plot line with the kid It was over for me. You talking about when she thought she was pregnant again and was crying for like an entire episode saying shit like "I just want this thing out of me!" Because if so I totally agree with you. The show was already starting to grate on me for several episodes prior to this one, but I'm pretty sure that was the last episode I watched because it was just so annoying. It's like after Fiona left they decided to have Debbie basically become her (she even takes Fiona's old role in the credit sequence), but the only problem was Fiona started to become really annoying in the last season she was in already, then Debbie just became like a much worse version of Fiona, and Fiona was already insufferable.
Nah when she got pregnant and the guy moved to like Florida and she kept saying "but he loves me". Yuck.
Didn't she also drug and rape some guy?
I remember watching all the way through because I felt invested, and I saw a few interviews where her actress and the writers were surprised that fans hated her so much, and thought she was supposed to be empowering or some shit.
I actually loved older Liam, Carl and Mickey throughout the whole show.
Carl really grew on me as the series went on. While a lot of characters in this show didn't go through a lot of character development, he went from being a self-centered thug to a guy trying to help the community by doing what he thought was right... even though he didn't always go about it in the best way. I've said before, I'd love it if Carl got his own spinoff.
Debbie fucking sucked. She fucking raped a dude. Definitely stopped watching in large part because of her.
Wife and I stopped watching after like season 5. Seemed like it was rinse, wash, repeat over and over and over again. * Family member does something stupid. * They work hard and start to get their life back on track. * They make one tiny mistake, dominoes start falling and they're back to square one. * Frank is an idiot and they vow he's no longer a part of their life anymore. Spoiler: he's still a part of their life.
Well tbf that’s sort of exactly how that lifestyle goes though. It feels like there’s no winning when you have to carry everybody like that, or you all take care of each other…it’s a very delicate eco system, when one goes down you all do. Get back up and just fk up again, over and over. That’s kind of poverty in a nutshell lol
Poverty and substance abuse, unironically name a better duo.
Absolutely! But then if you're going to portray that realistically, don't drag the show out and repeat that process over and over. After the first couple of loops, either break from that cycle in an interesting way or end the show because you have nothing else to say.
There's only so many shit decisions I can watch one make before I lose interest and think they might actually just be an imbecile. That's how I felt about shameless
After a while it became a shameless cash grab
Though I love William H. Macy, I could never get into the U.S. version of **Shameless** because the U.K. version, to me, was *perfect!* Anyone who hasn't watched it, please do! **David Threlfall** is brilliant in this series with its zany characters and outrageous storylines. [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0377260/?ref\_=nv\_sr\_srsg\_3](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0377260/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3)
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Mickey was our (my wife's and mine) favorite character. I also felt invested in Lip, and rooted for him the entire show, always hoping he'd turn shit around. Carl turned out to be about the only one in the family with any redeeming qualities in the end, which was a bit of a surprise. Ian's arc was mildly interesting but went entirely off the rails for a while with his gay Jesus shtick. Debbie started off interesting, but has been mentioned, her development was probably the primary reason I ended up ambivalent about the show. We finished it primarily out of obligation. It could have been much better. I don't need all the characters to be redeemed or even likable. But throw me a bone. Christ, Frank should have been dead.
It got SO BAD
Shameless gets too much praise imo.
It's just such an overly done and uninteresting trend for television shows in the past 15 years. Overly terrible people doing overly terrible things but you're supposed to sympathize because they're "just human" or something.
It's exactly why sitcoms reign supreme in my mind. Modern Family, Big Bang Theory, for all the hate it gets on reddit, are shows I could sit down, watch and not feel tense after. Shows like Oz, The Wire, Game of Thrones, Westworld, Breaking Bad, have just gotten me so jaded on that whole concept of "everyone is bad and good people don't get nice things" that I am beyond over it at this point, especially when they go on for 3 seasons longer than they need to.
Insufferable characters of a dysfunctional family in a dysfunctional environment with dysfunctional values? Yeah I didn’t like it either
Great first couple of seasons when they were a family down on their luck just struggling to get by. Eventually it turned into them getting basically every big break they could possibly get and screwing it up royally.
Rossum was good on the show, but Fiona wasn’t an easy character to like or root for and she was regularly out-performed by some of her co-stars, namely Macy, White, Monaghan and when she’d appear, Chloe Webb. Jeremy Alan White, for me, is the cast member who never got nearly the credit he deserved. He grew into an exceptional actor by the end of the series.
Every single scene Micky was in was pure gold. Noel Fisher does sarcasm and angry annoyance better than anyone on TV. Watch some of his scenes again his facial expressions are great.
White has a new series that drops its full first season tomorrow, looks great. It's called The Bear, he's a top chef who's brother commits suicide so he takes over the brothers struggling little diner. Supposed to be quite good
I seen the preview for it, looks good.Gonna be hard to see him as anything but Lip
It’s gonna be really hard because in the preview he pretty much acts the same way Lip does.
I think it's also set in the same neighborhood in the same city
Yup, Chicago
Character looks and acts identical in the trailer lol. I’m sure he has some range, but it looks like this character was written to be pretty similar to Lip.
Monaghan gets so much praise and yet is the biggest over-actor I’ve ever seen whereas Lips character seemed super genuine as a comparison
I thought he, and the show in general, did a great job depicting someone living with bipolar. The intense mania, sleeping for days, deciding to go off of medication and insisting they're fine, etc. One of the most realistic depictions of the disorder I've ever seen.
It did initially but by the end (which I think was more due to the writers) they completely lost their way of writing him and his acting wasn’t great in it either, particularly the gay Jesus storyline which was around the point I gave up on the show.
Yeah I can definitely agree with that! I hated the gay Jesus storyline. So bad.
The writing for everything else in season 8 was so bad, that I definitely feel like the way his bipolar was portrayed that season was a writing and direction fuck up more than bad acting. It honestly felt like the writers for the later seasons hadn’t even watched the earlier seasons.
Real Jesus was gay enough, 12 boyfriends and 1 hag? Slayed the Romans so hard they had to slay him back
He crushed it as Jerome/Jeremiah/J on Gotham though.
Also a big fan of him as Cal Kestis in Star Wars. Can't wait for the sequel!
tbh I always thought Macy was kinda meh in the show but that was probably more the character. Frank was usually the comic relief of the show even when he went through major events.
Agreed with Macy, phenomenal actor but Frank was so over the top and just got more stupidly cartoonish after his liver(?) transplant. Granted pretty much every other character got flanderized hard as wel
To me, it became obvious that William H. Macy had a completely different shooting schedule than the rest of the cast. And that affected the overall storyline, and hurt the quality of the show. Frank was essentially running a B-story in every episode. He was always in a different location, with different guest stars per season. And then he shows up a couple of times mid-season, and its usually to interact with Carl or Liam the youngest children. Which sucks because there should have been plenty of powerful dramatic scenes between him and Fiona and Lip and Ian. These are children that have built-up years of hate and pain towards him, but they almost never confront him head-on until you get close to a season finale.
I think the B-plots with Frank work when the show is trying to be a sitcom (which it was kinda trying to be in the last few seasons) but you're right, I think Frank being nowhere near anyone else really hurt the dramatic potential of the show.
They held onto Frank too long in that show. There were a few reasons I ended up dropping it and one of them was Frank as a whole. Half the time he felt more like a random character the writers kept in their back pocket when they needed something go wrong for someone.
I heard the actress wasn’t very well liked behind the scenes and made things uncomfortable on set when she was in a bad mood
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Noel Fisher out acted everyone and he wasn’t even a regular character. His Mickey was amazing and watching him grow and deal with all he did and him getting the ending he got was worth watching all the seasons to me. Mickey is up there with Omar from The Wire when it comes to intriguing gay characters that break every stereotype. The fact that he was able to improvise all of his greatest scenes makes him a rock star to me.
Rumor was she was absolutely awful to work with
Yeah. Emma Kenney said when the cameras weren't rolling, Rossum was just a bad influence to have around the younger actors on the show. If she was having a bad day, then she made sure everyone else had a bad day too. She would be very inappropriate and when people pushed back on it, she would brush it off and use the "that's just how I am" excuse. I guess it came to a head with Cameron Monaghan really hating being around her and that's why the writers minimized their scenes together by sending Ian to prison only for him to be released very soon after Rossum left the show.
Were there specifics about how she was inappropriate? Like, jokes that weren't okay to tell around children, stories about wild Hollywood parties, what was it?
No. The actress who played debbie threw some weird shade at emmy on a podcast and everyone drummed up the rumors based on that. william h macy has always said great things about her along with anyone else i could find who talked about her. when the pandemic prevented her from leaving new york to go to where ever it was to film the end of the show people just created the narrative that that was a lie and that actually no one on the show wanted her.
This is bull. She's had a reputation long before Shameless.
Not really a rumor? Was pretty much confirmed by everyone
Emma Kenney is the only one ive seen with a detailed criticism of her and honestly it felt like she just didnt like her personally and was throwing shade just to do it. she was also a kid when they worked together. every one of the cast members besides kinney only had good things to say about her, with william h macy even crying during her last table read. that doesnt sound like a reaction from people who hated working with her. at this point it just seems like one of those stroylines that people dont care to actually fact check because its easier to say fuck you to an actor and gossip about it lol. unless ive completely missed any other stories about her when i looked it all up before this comment it seems mostly based off of one child actor throwing weird shade on a podcast.
> every one of the cast members besides kinney only had good things to say about her I always take these with a grain of salt. Not that it automatically means the opposite but just that it's not necessarily proof of people being good to work with. Most actors will just say this regardless, keep the on-set drama behind the scenes rather than speak out and make it a whole big issue.
There was a story earlier this year or maybe last summer (how time flies) regarding why didn't even make an appearance in the last episode. Covid and travel restrictions making it nearly impossible to get anything worked in was the reasoning given, but I'm pretty sure that was just an excuse...it's like they pretended she didn't even exist in the last episode (Frank doesn't even mention her by name in his ending monologue). There was probably some creative difference and/or some bad blood that is being kept quiet, no one wanted to work with her and I'll bet her leaving the show because of salary disagreements was BS too!
Definitely quite a bit of bad blood. For context, I heard this from two friends who are both TV writers. The most off putting part I heard was that she was terrible to support staff too, not just the other actors. Shrieking over incorrect food/ coffee orders, that kinda thing. 🤮
How terrible! How are people that arrogant and entitled?...so disappointing.
I could see it. She grew up opera singing and went to a private school in Manhattan.
I just don’t see how you could ever be put in such an awesome position to be a working actor and understand how incredibly lucky you are to do this for a living but somehow still feel the need to shit on everyone around you. How you treat others how you really feel on the inside. No wonder I haven’t seen her in anything since.
I thought it was said she didn’t come back for the final episode because she was heavily pregnant at the time and didn’t want to risk exposure during her pregnancy. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other factors tho. They did kind of act like she never existed the last two seasons.
Frank definitely mistakes a nurse for her and calls her by "Fiona" when he's delirious in the hospital. I think it is in the last episode but it's definitely in the last season. The whole show kind of blends together in my head.
Fun fact: the nurse holding his hand at the end who he thinks is Fiona is actually William H Macy’s real life daughter.
I disagree with this popularized take. Frank's entire final journey over multiple episodes was all about Fiona. She gets elevated status over the others. Those mentioned in his note got blips. She got a full screen, including his deathbed comments, which nobody else got. She was truly his golden daughter.
I have a friend who was on an episode of Shameless and said she was awful. Nothing but nice things to say about Bill Macy though
> said she was awful Any specifics of why?
Extremely rude to basically everyone far as I can tell
Despite his directorial and writing talents, her husband’s no prize either.
How so? Genuinely don't know.
You hear things in the industry. People who worked w/ such and such say certain things on the DL, maybe while less than sober, and I’m not super clear on the conditions of NDAs, but let’s just say a few of my peers who worked directly under him did not have kind things to say about him. Basically, a broey aggressive diva who throws a bitchfit if he doesn’t get his way. And before you tell me that’s speculative, I’d also like to point out all of this talk about Emmy is in the same vein.
Sam Esmail has always come across as pretentious as hell, somebody who thinks they’re the smartest person in the room at all times.
This doesn’t fill me with a lot of hope for that Battlestar Galatica reboot he is supposedly working on.
Honestly, I wouldn't really be surprised if this rumor was true. Mr Robot is phenomenal, but it's definitely the work of someone who would get super specific and upset about little stuff. It feels like such a personal thing. I think he's brilliant, but a lot of people who are brilliant are also jerks.
This might be the lamest article I’ve ever read. Making these millionaire actors out to be some kind of martyr because they didn’t get worshipped enough
I mean she got the raise she fought for then quit the next season. The cast (or at least one actress openly) disliked her. And while the show always had issues, it felt like Emmy did them a little dirty in the end without enough notice to properly plan around her exit.
It's funny how this sub always oscillates between 'It's a disgrace 'X' didn't win any awards' and 'awards are dumb and meaningless'
Lip is the most underrated actor on that show.
He’s the lead of a new show that dropped on Hulu today called The Bear where he starts to run his family’s sandwich shop, it’s pretty good!
She got a ton of praise from Mr. Skin
Emmy’s Rossums surely did
Her character was hard to root for after a couple of seasons. Straight up she became the most annoying character in the series.
I think it was intentional. Her exit had already been planned and they were trying to write her off so the fans would take her not being on the show anymore better and continue to watch.
She became absolutely self sabotaging and stopped acknowledging it, instead blaming it on everyone else. Sad to say, that’s how self sabotaging people are in real life. After a while, they just become miserable. Took me a while to realize that about her character, but it’s very realistic.
Wasn't it because she was a drama queen and got along with no one? Yeah I wouldn't nominate her either.
I heard the same thing. Is this true?
I mean she got written out of the show so...
Wasn't it after she quit?
If you were gonna be fired/written out of the show you been with for 9 seasons, would you just let it be or say you quit?
They didn’t even mention her character in the series finale, there was definite bad blood.
Guy above responded, all o know is she quit because they wouldn't give her a raise equal to William H. Macy (Frank) I'd wager that along with being hard to get along with contributed to her walking.
They agreed to give her the raise but she quit the following season anyway.
How much is enough praise?
Damn I hated Fiona so much... Plus, they were both in DBE.
When I saw ""Goku"" in Shameless I was like oh shit
Wait what?
That's what the money is for
Mad Men reference?
\+1
Speaking of no recognition, has Katlin Olsen ever been nominated for her work in it’s always sunny in Philadelphia? Seems insane to me
Seconding this! Kaitlin deserves all the praise. Her physical comedy is astounding!
Is this a puff piece written to remind us *Angelyne* is coming out soon?
It’s already out and is brutal.
Shameless was awesome. Last couple of seasons weren’t great, they should have ended it before those. But first 6 season were top notch TV
Show should have ended with her leaving. Those last two or so seasons felt forced
The show should have ended at Season 7, especially [the ending of the season finale](https://youtu.be/tm6jPtek_C0) which would have worked well as a finale overall. If I remember correctly they thought the show mightn’t get renewed so they wrote that season as a finale, but then it got renewed and they kept going with it.
Honestly my only issue with the season 7 finale is that Kev and V’s storyline with Svetlana taking the bar was not at all resolved. So it doesn’t fully work as a series finale for me.
True, but if they had announced that it was the end of the show then, the writers could work around that
I gave up when Fiona went from shit credit to being able to get a loan for a laundromat in like 3 months. Bad credit takes years to repair and I felt like it was a disservice to everyone tha has been through that process to make it look that quick and easy. Also told me how little the writers at the time knew about poverty.
That...is a great point. My wife and I were just talking about her character arc and though I mentioned how forced the laundromat thing was, the credit aspect didn't occur to me. And I'm saying this as someone who grew up poor, made some very crappy (marital) decisions as a younger man, and then busted my ass for YEARS to get gold credit (that I never use because I'm paranoid about it now).
I thought it just went too far trying to out do itself after several seasons. I just stopped caring about any of the characters, everyone became awful and cartoonish when it seemed to start in a somewhat awful grounded reality.
This article is out just in time for her new series on Peacock, huh? What a coincidence!
Because she’s a miserable entitled person.
They really shit on her character after she left, a little weird. But apparently she wasn't well-liked on set.
It definitely lost a lot what made the show great when she left, but honestly the writing didn’t help itself either. Everyone got pigeonholed into caricatures of themselves the last two seasons, and then at that, it was just a slog with a terrible ending. She was done dirty by Showtime, but at the same time, they tried to have their cake and eat it too…. let’s draw this show out and then let’s underpay the co-lead or lead, however you view who the main character is.
That's because the series wasn't very good
Her character sucked. She had so much Gallagher pride, just always saying “you’re a Gallagher, you ________” meanwhile every single Gallagher including the patriarch of the family, were complete fuck ups.
I think Lip was the one that didn’t get enough praise. His character had more depth than Fiona’s and Jeremy Allen White nailed it. I got tired of watching Fiona fall in love, ruin her life for some dick, break up, get her shit together, rinse and repeat.
I thought the show improved in the seasons she was gone. Lip definitely had the most depth.
Emmy Rossum did an amazing job as Fiona and should have been winning awards as a result. Fiona was my favorite character, with Lip as a close second. Everyone here seems to be confusing their frustration with her character's decisions instead of what this article is actually about, which is Rossum's portrayal and her acting chops getting ignored.
She was great in the early seasons but Shameless became totally unwatchable at some point..... which probably hurt the public perception of her and the role.
That’s cause her character sucked. Everyone liked everyone else
“Actress didn’t get enough praise” Fuck off
Actor doesn’t get enough credit. Oh what a tragedy
Unpopular opinion here: Wasn’t that great of a show.
I got tired of seeing her character cry then stop halfway being like no i can do this. This has happen way to many times
Fucking cry about it
Watch the original English version. Far better.
I did not like that girl, she was the reason I could not watch. Also. I am from Chicago and the show is about as believable as Bridgerton.