Sunday, December 13, 2020

What I’m Watching: Shameless

Shameless: Season 11, Episode 2 “Go Home Gentrifier” (B+)

It’s so strange to see Franny turning five years old since I can still remember when Debs, Carl, and especially Liam were close to that age when the show first started. Debs was the one trying hard to return to her childhood in by planning the perfect princess party for her daughter who couldn’t be any less interested. I enjoyed seeing Sandy and Tami interact since those two relatively new additions to the cast haven’t spent too much time together, even if all they were really doing was bonding over how overboard Debs was going for the party. There were a number of business developments in this hour, starting with Liam taking a stand to distribute free lunches to the kids at school labeled with “lunch debt” which feels like a very Frank move, seemingly philanthropic but surely with ulterior motivations, like the donations he was collecting or the fee he was planning on charging. Mickey wasn’t great at trying to make an honest living, instead coming up rather quickly with a plan to steal the dumpster full of expired food and sell it to the prison, a far speedier financial remedy than Ian’s carefully-calibrated hours. Kev and Veronica getting into business with Frank is clearly going to make them a lot of money, but not nearly as much as the sly and clever Frank plans on netting for himself. Lip and Tami discovering that their neighbors were the ones trashing their house so that they could keep property taxes down feels like a very appropriate thing for this show, an unfortunate realization that just counts as the way of life. Carl couldn’t have been more poorly-matched with a partner than Joshua Malina’s conflict-avoiding, eggplant parmesan-eating officer, but it appears he’s remedied that by getting him so drunk that he nearly died and probably won’t be fit for duty anytime soon. This show really is a blast.

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