By Jacob
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Half-baked, condescending and aggressively white? Showtime must be back in season!
But seriously, it only takes about half the pilot before the weird tone, Britishisms that don't connect, and the entire preposterous unnecessary existence of this show altogether fade into the background and you realize that, pedigree aside, you're not looking at the show's resume but at a good story and some terrific performances. (And one truly gruesome dance scene better never spoken of again.) After that, you just sort of adjust and forget that you're watching the copy of a copy of the ghost of a semiautobiographical stranger... And then you maybe fall in love. Shocked the hell out of me.
That's all due in no small part to Emmy Rossum, who manages to make looking totally jacked-up seem like a valid fashion choice; William H. Macy, who vacillates depending on the demon drink between a man who looks like William H. Macy and something they pulled out of William H. Macy's drain; and old favorite Justin Chatwin, who has grown up real nice and plays the ethically challenged but sympathetic new guy Steve.
So. Steve finally gets to meet his dream girl, Fiona, when a dude steals her purse. He doesn't get the purse back, but he does knock down a mean bouncer whose relatives will be coming for his ass in weeks to come. That night, he and Fiona have some pretty thrilling sex on the floor that is interrupted by her drunk dad Frank; he spends the few days trying to overcome her presumptions about their class differences and whatever. Turns out he's a car thief anyway, which is just romantic enough that she sets aside her low self-esteem -- and occasional glints of a pretty dark, claustrophobic emotional paralysis -- long enough to let him into the family.
And what a family it is. The thing I forgot is how whichever Gallagher is onscreen is always the awesomest one. The oldest of the kids, Lip, is a thuggish, good-hearted kid who finds his younger brother Ian's gay porn and immediately drags him over to this blowjob girl's house to cure him. (That is how Lip works, and it is great.) Then, just when you're thinking the girl Karen is like the sad collateral damage of our oversexed society or whatever, she throws her clown-obsessed dad out of the house in a blazing rage and you realize she's great, too. (Also, her mom is Joan Cusack playing essentially Joan Cusack, a role at which she excels because that is the only thing they ever pay her for. She's the reason I never worry about Michael Cera.) Pray we see much more of Karen and her mom.
door is this neat couple, Kevin and Veronica: Veronica is blindingly competent, Kev is a bartender at Frank's favorite place (when not accidentally flopping his giant wang around like to drive poor Ian 'round the bend). The second-hardest worker and second-youngest after Lip, future paramilitary Ian is currently sleeping with his father-of-two Muslim boss at a deli, a warm young guy whose white wife is played by my very favorite actress. Lip struggles with his brother's sexual identity and experiences for like one minute, then it's just gay jokes all the way down; we have every indication that the deal with Ian and his boss is a lot more complicated and okay than it first appears. (Better than that, we have Ian's word.)
The younger kids, we don't know much about yet. Debbie is both a pickpocket and incurably charitable; Carl either loves animals or tortures them, I can't tell yet; and Baby Liam is, well, black. It doesn't seem we're going to be discussing that, but it sure does make things picturesque.
So. If you like poor people, and who doesn't; if you like big drunk speeches by obsolete old men who once held promise, and how can you resist; if you like seeing Justin Chatwin naked doing dirty things, and trust me you do; if you want to know what having brothers is actually like, or what it would be like to be Dave for an infinity of Chipmunks; if you like blowjobs or little kids drinking beer, and who doesn't love these things, then I must recommend this show. Plus, and I know I mentioned this, but Emmy Rossum looking like hell is like seeing a unicorn. A sad, nasty unicorn with bad breath, but still.
week: Poor parenting, thug behavior, probably more blowjobs, and we get to know more about this incredibly large group of unsavory people. At some point perhaps there will be dignity, but until then, keep it shameless.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Meet Frank Gallagher, a drunken self-important loser and paterfamilias of a fairly gross, fairly awesome family in some poor area of Chicago or something. He's got about a billion kids, who frankly would be better off if he disappeared one day; wife's out of the picture. The oldest, Fiona, is super gorgeous and super messed up in her head. She raises the kids and tries not to be totally disappointed in her circumstances, which is like this Herculean task, because her life is objectively repulsive. She starts out being the most important one, but they're all going to end up pretty important.
The two oldest boys are Lip and Ian, a study in contrasts: Lip is smart in that hood-rat way, ethically challenged; Ian is super responsible and keyed up and honorable, but as we'll see, he also has his share of iffy secrets. Then there's Debbie, who is sort of like in that movie Stigmata where they talk about how the closer you are to being a saint, the closer you are also getting to true evil: She's both at once, and it's fantastic. Carl and Liam are the babies. Carl's an eight-year-old psycho in training, and Liam is mysteriously black: "I'm no biologist, but he looks a little bit like my first sponsor. He and the ex were close."
Anyway, he discusses other people we'll meet in a bit, and then it's morning: Fiona passes around a cereal box for money to pay the electric, and they all toss in. Because they are a family of grifters and thieves, everybody has something to contribute except the babies. There's a lot of whirling camera action as we see just how busy a morning is when you have a million kids, and just how busy a morning can be when you're poor Fiona. She hands Liam over to Debbie in lieu of a real Show & Tell ("Show them the birthmark on his back, it looks like Latvia"), gets their shared cell -- what you call a Ghetto Family Plan -- from Lip (fourteen minutes left), feeds the kids, collects almost enough to keep the lights on, et cetera.
There's a bunch of smash-cuts and slow-mo and speed-up and whatever, the editing better calm down soon because it was annoying in the UK version but straight up dickless here and I don't want to discuss it at all. I mean, at least they had reasons to be all self-satisfied and dorkily overproduced: One, have you ever seen British TV, and two, the pilot here is practically shot-for-shot the original one, which was 2004 I think. Which is like 1998 in UK years. (And I'm not being racist or whatever, it's a continuum: 2011 here is like 1950 in Japan years.)