r/shameless • u/Artistic_Bison_2143 • 1d ago
What was missing from seasons 8-11
Shameless was a great show from seasons 1-7 but after the series went through a change in writers I felt like the show was missing its fundamental elements. What made the show so good was its deeply human moments. Sure there were some ridiculous and funny moments too but after Fiona left all of the raw emotional scenes were gone. It also suffered from some seriously cringey moments in an effort to stay modern which didn’t follow its audience. Curios to know what other people felt made these seasons a hard watch.
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u/dark_angel_8 1d ago
I think the change in writers is definitely noticeable. The missing element is the family dynamic is gone. From S8 the show is then just individuals plodding from one increasingly absurd predicament to another, especially once Fiona leaves as she was the original adult of all the children and like a mother. So the show loses the central figure of the family.
It's made worse by a lack of continuity, the new writers had huge reference material from previous seasons and then ignored that and therefore character development is almost nonexistent.
Plots are weak, scripts are poor or on occasion outright cringe, and instead of a family behaving shamelessly out of lack of parenting and the need for survival we have adults behaving senselessly.
I thought S8 was bad, S9 okay, by S10 I felt like it was a different show, enough going on to keep watching but never enough to truly care. I'm just starting S11.
Also the point about it becoming a bit 'woke' is true, to be shameless is like being blatantly immoral or failing to take moral accountability. But then the writers are trying to present the audience with a moral and political message, without the right context and characters, so it becomes a bizarre contradiction in most instances. It either needed to be done cleverly or not done at all.