Shameless: The family business changes the game in “Be A Good Boy. Come For Grandma.”

No other episode sums up this season of Shameless better than “Be A Good Boy. Come For Grandma.”. There are the usually great performances and some discernible high points scattered throughout, but they’re coupled with more lazy writing and an increased insistence on pushing forward story arcs that’ll never resonate at this point. Even though this is most certainly a step up from the overwhelming disaster that was “Pimp’s Paradise”, this was still an installment that imbues little faith for the season’s upcoming final stretch.


There’s an undeniable inconsistency this week that both worries and excites; every poorly-construed mess of television writing is equally matched with a brief, winning moment. This sort of thing also applies for the tone that Shameless was going for here, which is overwhelmingly defined by Carl’s anxiousness to reprieve himself from the drug ring he involved himself in. Some of the season’s darkest material (and some of Ethan Cutkosky’s best work to date) comes in the form of his conversations with both Fiona - who begins to administer a sense of the type of trouble her younger brother has found himself in - and Sean - who risks his clothes and his car to help yank Carl out of this mess for good. “Be A Good Boy…” is Shameless at its best when these three characters are the only ones on-screen. And while I truly wished Carl’s story arc bled into the finale instead of being so conveniently capped here, the show maneuvers around a lot of potential contrivances and keeps both the revelations and the imminent threat of Carl’s situation rightfully grounded. (Side note: Fiona forcefully getting rid of Carl’s dreadlocks after all of this was a nice way of hinting that Carl’s truly prepared to hit the “reset” button on his life and move on.)


Even though I hate the very idea of Fiona living with Sean after relentlessly fighting for her house back, it did allow for some decent push-pull between her and Will. Fiona’s very own presence from Will’s perspective was illustrated extremely well, and in addition: having her own f*cked up history of parents messing around with various new flings be the link that got Will to lighten up with her plays right into the show’s strength of reaching out to its audience on an emotional level by vividly detailing a past we never saw for ourselves. Things got dark rather quickly when Sean caught his son toying around with a live pistol, which has me wondering if Carl briefly sleeping at his place is going to carry serious implications down the line (like Sean ultimately losing any remaining custody over Will).

This stuff is all well and good, but the episode as a whole was never truly cohesive. Like I said before, it structurally and tonally fails to find a solid middle ground all throughout. Debbie’s brief fling with that creepy pregnancy fetishist is supposed to be funny, given how shocked the guy and his side-chick were when Debbie finally puts two and two together, but it comes out sick and perverted. It also does nothing but interrupt the main action, but that’s the least I can say about Ian’s latest endeavors with Caleb. I’m running out of different ways to express my frustration over this particular story arc, because obviously Ian deserves better as a character than to be trotted around like some generic, lovestruck sap by another generic, lovestruck sap. It’s maddening to have the show create its own drama by having Caleb reveal that he’s HIV-positive, and it’s especially irritating when the build-up to said reveal features a brunch with some of the most stereotypical caricatures for gay men I’ve ever seen (I almost counted all of the clichés the show effortlessly threw into that one single scene).

RATING: 7

+ Carl’s out of the game

+ Fiona getting to Will

+ The scene that gives the episode its name

- Debbie-Ian-Lip-Frank subplots

- Kev and Veronica still underused

- Sex, sex, sex, and even more sex…with some sex on the side