"Shameless" Episode 6 "Frank Gallagher, Loving Husband, Devoted Father"

2/27/2011 Posted by Admin

"Shameless" Episode 6 "Frank Gallagher, Loving Husband, Devoted Father"

Television Review

By our guest blogger, Nick Hanover


Almost nothing clicked for me in this episode of "Shameless." The bookies chasing after Frank continue to be a stupid waste of screentime and hopefully, we're done with them now. Even dumber was Frank's plan to get rid of them and the senseless way the Gallagher clan agreed to help him out despite him being a leech on all their resources and energy. This episode as a whole is a strong contender for the worst of the season.

Nothing illustrates its faults to me more than the way Frank's faux-wake devolves into everyone happily forgetting how much of a loathsome asshole Frank is by letting him have yet another party where everyone basks in his glory. It's like everyone in this show needs fake to be such a fucking blemish on their lives and they just keep empowering him. I guess this makes him like a downtrodden, Chicago slums version of Charlie Sheen.

Barely more interesting was the Kash/Ian subplot, which found their affair finally exposed. How it was exposed was utterly idiotic and what happened after was just as obnoxious, with Kash's wife deciding that she'd rather he just give her another baby than divorce him. Maybe I'd care more about this entire arc if Kash's wife was more than a hateful caricature. Instead, I was much more interested in the surprise sex scene with Ian and Mickey, which amazingly managed to come off in a way that didn't feel gimmicky and contrived.

Elsewhere, Sheila finally sort of left the house in a scene that was broadcast from several miles away it was so obvious and in a move I'm sure the writers think is ingenious but is really just awkward, her lesson from the incident is not that the outside isn't so bad after all but that she needs to stop taking her birth control and have another baby. The last several episodes of "Shameless" have just left me irritated and bored, and it's getting harder and harder for me to motivate myself to even watch this show. It continues to squander every last inch of development it makes and every time I praise it for a leap forward it rockets several thousand miles backwards immediately after.

It needs to improve immediately or it's going to lose me.

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