Shameless

[NOTE: sorry for this being all caps, I typed it before looking and realizing it and guess what I'm not typing this shit again]

ONE OF THE MORE FRUSTRATING THINGS ABOUT WATCHING SHAMELESS OVER THE YEARS WAS THE REALIZATION THAT FOR SOME REASON, THEY JUST DECIDED TO PRETEND THAT LIP HAD NEVER BEEN PRESENTED AS A GENIUS. WHICH IS WHY THE FINALE WAS SO FRUSTRATING, AS SO SAYETH THIS PERSON:

After failing to sell the house, Lip resigns himself to entering the gig economy, borrowing a motorcycle and schlepping food to hipsters for an Uber Eats stand-in. And as he delivers food, he starts to see pieces of his former life: a tech start-up not unlike the ones he did work for while he was in college, and a day trader bro with software problems and a $4000 deal on the line that Lip clears up no problem. But all he gets for his help is a 10% tip, a reminder that he’s just the delivery guy, and there’s no place for him in this enormous historic home with a fancy car out front.

And yet despite seeing these glimpses of a life he left behind, the finale suggests that this inspires no self-reflection from Lip. After years of completely ignoring that he was once a genius headed for a brighter future until alcoholism derailed him, Shameless finally comes back to it and all we get is Lip graffiting the guy’s car?

As I wrote last week, it’s fine that Lip didn’t escape the South Side, but the character’s motivations have been wildly unclear, and thus the consequences of his failure make no sense.

They also curiously botched the whole Fiona thing, for no real reason:

But whereas some of the choices in “Father Frank, Full Of Grace” defy reason, it’s actually pretty obvious why Wells is insistent that Lip is a father figure for his siblings: it’s because he believes the show is about how their lives are defined by their absent parents, and the actual surrogate parental figure left the show two seasons ago. It is indeed time for us to address the issue of Fiona Gallagher, and it’s important upfront to acknowledge that this is one problem that may have been out of the show’s control. Yes, Wells and the writers are responsible for writing Fiona into a hole too many times, and driving Rossum to quit abruptly at the end of the ninth season without giving them time to build a proper exit ramp. And it’s on them that they chose to write the character off so completely that, beyond a phone call when Fred was born, the characters neither speak to nor mention Fiona outside of the non-canonical “Hall Of Shame” special where they are inexplicably recording testimonials for her appearance on a reality TV dating show. This “out of sight, out of mind” approach to the former lead of the show is not without precedent—The Office did similarly with Steve Carell—but this is a family drama, not a workplace sitcom. And heck, even The Office brought Michael back for Dwight’s wedding, while Fiona didn’t even send a goddamn card to Ian and Mickey’s. Her complete erasure never made sense, and it was always going to create a burden for a finale that would, inevitably, have to address Fiona in one way or another if it was to try to bring the show full circle.

 Fiona’s name was never brought up in the conversations about selling a house that we have every reason to believe is under her name, or in the questions around Liam’s guardianship. To the bitter end, even when it made no sense, the show pretended that Fiona was completely off the grid in order to paper over the fact that Rossum had left. To be honest, I wasn’t completely convinced this was an act of spite before this finale, but then Fiona was left out of Frank’s suicide note voiceover that brings the episode to a close. In the end, it’s hard not to see this as an act of disrespect toward Fiona, Rossum, and audiences who cared about the nine seasons of the show she anchored.