TV Rewind: Remembering the Shameless Pilot Ahead of the Showtime Series’ Finale
We raise a pint to the Gallagher family.
Photos Courtesy of Showtime
Editor’s Note: Welcome to our TV Rewind column! The Paste writers are diving into the streaming catalogue to discuss some of our favorite classic series as well as great shows we’re watching for the first time. Come relive your TV past with us, or discover what should be your next binge watch below:
There’s a word uttered in the pilot of Showtime’s Shameless that isn’t much heard these days as the long-running dramedy nears its last call: “Dad.”
In the first episode, which lays the groundwork for John Wells’ South Side of Chicago-set adaptation of Paul Abbott’s working class British comedy, we learn about the Gallagher family: Eldest daughter Fiona (Emmy Rossum), a dropout with a repressed thirst for danger who quashed any dreams of her own to care for her younger siblings; high schoolers Lip (Jeremy Allen White) and Ian (Cameron Monaghan), who always watch each others’ backs; tween Debbie (Emma Kenney), who is still in her girlie pink and pigtails phase; trouble-making elementary schooler Carl (Ethan Cutkosky); and toddler Liam (played here by twins Blake and Brennan Johnson).
The quintet is introduced in the series’ opening scene by Frank Gallagher. Despite being a perpetually drunk, stoned, and unemployed con artist who’d rather spend his fraudulently-claimed disability check on a bar tab than helping his offspring pay off the electricity bill, William H. Macy’s patriarch still somehow manages to conjure empathy out of them. They also respect him enough in this first episode to address him as “Dad” or “Daddy.” When the police bring a sloshed Frank home and interrupt Fiona’s dalliance with a new guy (Justin Chatwin), she simply responds with a smirk and a “what are we gonna do with you?” shrug as he falls on the kitchen floor—relieved, really because she thought they might be coming for her.
Of course, this was before Frank would (and this is neither a complete list nor one that is in any particular order) sabotage Fiona’s wedding, cut off her jeans and turn them into shorts for himself, steal the kids’ cash savings to spend on drugs, convince Carl he had cancer to extort the Make a Wish Foundation, lose Liam in a bet, and alert Child Protective Services to say the children are living without a guardian when he feels he’s not being properly respected at home. (He also amputated a couple of Debbie’s toes when he stumbled in drunk and saw her lying injured on the kitchen table. We’ll let that one slide because she needed the procedure done, couldn’t afford a real doctor, and it was clear Frank had more experience in the matter than her original choice of Liam).
Now in the 11th, and final, season, Frank is usually referred to by his first name, usually uttered in a tone of exasperated screaming such as when one of the now-grown kids kicks him out of the house or tells him to mind his own business. Or it is said with piercing directness. When Rossum left the show in 2019, some of her character Fiona’s final words to her father when he tries to suggest that she merely “helped” him raise her younger brothers and sister were “I did it all, Frank” and “see ya around, Frank.”
But in the pilot? A lifetime of failed parenting that no doubt pre-dates the start of the show doesn’t mean Fiona won’t stay up late rolling joints and drinking long necks and shots of Makers with Frank as he argues reverse sexism with Chatwin’s character while blasting Cream’s “White Room.” Debbie, who in an episode from this season argued to loyal Gallagher neighbor Veronica (Shanola Hampton) that she had a worse upbringing in part because of Frank, is seen in the first episode putting one of her hot pink pillows under her father’s head so he won’t asphyxiate when he’s passed out on the floor.