Why Won't You Let Shameless Be Great?

The Showtime series is better than ever, so why aren't we talking about it?

While over 100 million people watched Super Bowl XLVIII's adolescent Seattle Seahawks demolish the record-setting Year of the Broncos, Showtime unwisely slipped out the most pointed episode of Shameless's transformative fourth season, in which each of its crazy Gallagher children bulldozed into the worst parts of their destructive selves. The hits on both sides are uncomfortably brutal: While Peyton Manning's legend is stripped away play by play, no one watches Emmy Rossum's character Fiona getting fingered on a dingy Chicago train by her boyfriend's brother. Both takedowns leave me with Eli Face: a mind-blown, stunted expression of bottomless pity.

I actually can't be the only person who watches the American adaptation of Britain's Shameless, because it's Showtime's highest-rated series behind Homeland. But while it wasn't going to match America's Game, it drives even less Sunday TV talk than Girls (HBO's own witty take on poor white people) while drawing more than double the crowd each week. We're so excited about Lena Dunham's tits-out take on millennial feminism and stuff that no one sees Rossum standing in the Gallagher kitchen, bare ass naked, ready to be taken seriously.

Shameless inexplicably slips off the critical radar every year as it simultaneously becomes a stronger, more confident series. The story of the Gallagher family — which includes William H. Macy's Emmy-worthy portrayal of drunken patriarch Frank — continues to explore the struggle of earnest ambition in the face of perilous poverty. But this season's four episodes have tackled those contradicting ideals head-on, and "Strangers on a Train" is the lowest it gets yet for Fiona, Lip, and even young Debbie. Never have the Gallaghers been so close to solid ground (ostensibly reinforced by Frank facing his own death) and never have they been so recklessly willing to tear it all down: Fiona's search for a perfect career and relationship, Lip's desire to succeed in college, and Debbie's desperation to grow up are exactly what lead to things falling apart.

"Strangers on a Train" displays wild bouts of reductive behavior. Sometimes in the face of growth and change, you're suddenly losing your grip and smashing windows and running from cops and banging all the people you shouldn't. The lofty achievement of stability feels too safe and too simple, and the Gallaghers' fraternal addiction to destruction isn't done with them yet, hence the increasingly tense and fantastic season of inevitable doom. Lip may stay strong enough to shoulder through school, but there's no way Fiona makes it through this season with her relationship and her family intact. Something will give way and reverberate through the entire household, something that will be all her own doing.

Yet it's Debbie Gallagher who delivers the night's best quote through sobs as the rejection of her 20-year-old suitor (he's sensible enough to not sleep with a 13-year-old) mingles with all the isolation she feels from her sex-intelligent peers. "I wish I could skip the part where I don't know what to do, and get to the part where I do," she prolifically stammers, as Fiona helplessly looks on, lost in her own wreckage. It's the most profound moment yet for the show and its ultimate legacy. Shameless can be a bizarre, twisted show when it wants (if the fingering on the train didn't clue you in), but it's also telling a better coming-of-age story than anything else on TV.

Of course, a disastrous fall from grace is infinitely more entertaining when it's live, and when 100 million more people are watching.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
More From TV