#Shameless us series

The series ends with a scene of everyone getting together to celebrate Ian and Mickey’s wedding anniversary. I would have been interested in seeing the plight of this family without Frank and all that he brings hovering over their heads. But you can fill in the blanks however you want to fill in the blanks as a viewer. And Ian (Cameron Monaghan) and Mickey (Noel Fisher) have a kid. In my mind, Lip gets a motorcycle shop and settles in and loses the neighborhood and becomes the new patriarch for that crazy family. We would have loved to continue making the show because I love making the show - and you’ve heard me say that a bunch of times. I think I have an idea about what would happen over the next few months, but I have no idea what would wholly happen. In your mind, do you know how it ends for these characters? And that makes me feel good as a viewer and a reader. Many wonderful novels end and you’re still thinking about the characters and what they do. It’s the same reason that at the end of ER we walked away from the hospital in the middle of a shift, and at the end of The West Wing Santos (Jimmy Smits) had just gone into the White House and Bartlet (Martin Sheen) was headed home. Shameless is obviously outrageously exaggerated, but we tried to ground it in a real world in which you felt like if you turned the right corner of Chicago, you could run across some Gallaghers and their whole world. I want to think what I want to think about the characters, where they end up and what happens with them and have the audience have those conversations with others over drinks. It’s fun in American Graffiti where you tell everyone what happens. We’re so invested as writers and audience members in their lives that you want to fill in some blanks and not run the American Graffiti end crawl. I’ve been pretty fortunate to do a number of longer-running series and, as a fan, I always appreciate things not being wrapped up. Why wrap the show without answering any of those questions? The finale doesn’t offer any resolution about whether Lip sold the house, what happened with Debs (Emma Kenney) and Carl (Ethan Cutkosky) and Liam (Christian Isaiah) - or if Kev and Vee sell the Alibi and move to Louisville. You love them as adults but, man, you can never really fully replace that love you feel for your kids when they’re little. ( Laughing.) As the light fades for us, I think and hope we will remember the things that bring us joy, and a lot of that would be parents remembering their children. Millions of people have been going through this experience this past year. My family can relate to that experience of not being able to say goodbye and not being there when it happened. I like keeping it with the audience’s imagination of who would react and how when they finally discover that he’s gone. I really didn’t want to play the more sentimental version of them having to react to his death. That’s an experience many people have had with relatives who have died of COVID. I lost a close family member who had been ill in December of COVID, despite following the COVID protocols. Not only does Frank die, but he does so alone and the series ends without his family knowing about it. It seemed unrealistic to do something about the South Side of Chicago and people living barely above the poverty line and not have anybody succumb to this horrible pandemic.Īnd he certainly had a number of preexisting conditions … It’s not like we took out the healthiest individual you’ve ever seen. It could have been one of many things it was the last thing that pushed him over the cliff, but he was barely hanging on. With all the comorbidity that Frank had, Bill and I both talked about it and said, “It would be unrealistic to not have anybody in this community actually suffer severe consequences of the pandemic.” And Frank seemed like the logical choice. We arrived at alcoholic dementia and had written more than half the season when we shut down. Bill and I had always made deal that there would have to be consequences for all of Frank’s abuse to his body, between the drugs and alcohol.

We planned on alcoholic dementia when we were only a few days from shooting when everything shut down in March.