2/2/2024 0 Comments Shameless us![]() ![]() And it leads to translation problems - that mid-Atlantic thing I mentioned up top. But the scene-for-scene approach does close off any chance of revising the concept to make it feel unmistakably American. Abbott was intimately involved in the American remake, which was originally supposed to air on HBO, and neither he nor Wells is inclined to fix what isn't broken. The show's fidelity to its source is no big shock. Nearly all interior scenes on TV feel like a climate-controlled Southern California simulation of life - a narrative taking place somewhere in the United States of Television.Īnd on top of all that, "Shameless" seems (based on the first three episodes screened for critics) to be an almost scene-for-scene remake of the Channel 4 show - the under-the-table double-header Fiona's meet-cute with the dashing Steve (Justin Chatwin), who tries and fails to catch a guy who stole her purse and ends up hanging with her all night and buying her a new washing machine the next day. (All the walls look freshly painted, then freshly distressed.) If a kid from "Modern Family" peeked around the kitchen doorway, he wouldn't seem totally out of place. Despite the hand-held camerawork and the production design's run-down-and-cluttered signifiers, the interiors all look a tad "lit" and feel soundstagey. But whenever the show goes indoors, suddenly you're smack-dab in the land of the TV people, watching blocked-and-costumed actors wander around a set that feels like a set. ![]() They look as though they could fix a flat tire in the rain without losing their composure they're real-world people, not TV people. (Lip gets his first hummer during a math tutoring session, then brings Ian over a couple of days later as part of a de-homo-fication scheme when Ian asks Karen if she felt any response, she asks him if he's ever tried to play pool with a piece of rope.) Macy and Cusack are charismatic character actors (and Chicago natives), and unlike most of the younger performers, they're attractive but not airbrushed-pretty. The most credible cast members are Macy and Joan Cusack, who plays Sheila Jackson, the family's agoraphobic neighbor and the mother of Karen (Laura Slade Wiggins), a charming but loose girl who gives under-the-table blow jobs to two of the Gallagher boys. When the characters are out on the Chicago streets, stumbling down snowy avenues and riding elevated trains, the on-location visuals sell the conceit that you're watching plausibly real characters that just happen to be kooky, exciting and profanely witty even though they're mostly played by slim, well-groomed, TV-shiny performers. There are more Gallagher kids the kids have friends, the adults have friends, too, and their friends have friends, and everyone has issues. She has two teenage brothers: the talented-and-gifted horndog Lip (Jeremy Allen White), who works as a tutor and the tough-but-sensitive Ian (Cameron Monaghan), who gets outed in the pilot when Lip finds his stash of man-on-man porn. Emmy Rossum plays Frank's eldest daughter, Fiona, who likes to cut loose in nightclubs and hook up with strange men when she's not taking care of her younger siblings. Macy stars as Frank Gallagher, the family's long-haired, bar-crawling, pants-pissing drunk of a dad. Its focus on Irish-American inner-city dwellers (and a couple of their non-white friends) feels faintly nostalgic - less like a tough, funny look at plausibly real people than a bawdy 21st-century TV Chicago version of " A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." (This series, " The Town," " Winter's Bone" and " The Fighter" are all part of a mini-resurgence of sensitive white working-class drama.) William H. Amazingly, this isn't a deal-breaker.Ĭo-executive-produced by original series creator Paul Abbott and former "ER" boss John Wells, and relocated from a Manchester public housing estate to a weathered Chicago neighborhood, Showtime's "Shameless" (Sundays, 10 p.m./9 Central) doesn't quite work as a rude but accurate portrait of a specific American social class, one of the main selling points of the original Channel 4 show. ![]() Showtime's remake of the Channel 4 series "Shameless" is a whole show with a mid-Atlantic accent. New Yorker critic Anthony Lane memorably described Ralph Fiennes in "Quiz Show" as having a literally mid-Atlantic accent - as if the Suffolk-born actor had tried to devise a convincing speaking voice for his first American star part, only to have it get stuck somewhere between Olde and New England.
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