What I’m Watching: Shameless

Shameless: Season 6, Episode 4 “Going Once, Going Twice” (B+)

Aside from them all being depraved people, the one constant when it comes to the Gallagher family is that they live in a house right under the L train filled with way too many people and plenty of deplorable activity. It was a rollercoaster of an hour for Fiona to figure out the best way to be able to keep the house, first rejecting Carl’s instant offer of $3,000 in drug money and then ultimately accepting Sean’s savings stipend to get to the finish. Still, it couldn’t prepare her for the opportunity to be outbid by a very nice-seeming couple who just want to live in a new home, and I can imagine it’s going to get very ugly from here since the Gallaghers will fight to keep their home and someone is going to pay for the injustice of what happened to them when Patrick tried to get out of paying back money that he owed. That Sean confessing to having killed someone is not the most memorable development of the hour is a credit to this show’s ability to juggle so many plotlines and characters at once. Ian’s new firehouse obsession should be interesting, and hopefully it will help him get better rather than make him too attached to something unattainable. Helene confessing to Lip that this wasn’t just a fling was made so much more heartbreaking when she wrote it off as drunken nonsense the next morning, and now I think he won’t give up which will only get him hurt in the end. Frank is trying harder than ever to pull off his latest scheme, fixing Debs up with a man whose wife is dying from cancer, returning him from brief hopeless romantic to the hopeless depravity he’s mastered so well.