Vanderdeath fucked around with this message at 09:26 on Dec 28, 2016

• There were so many times that a character betrayed someone horribly and wound up in jail, only for the person they betrayed to pay their bail. I got the sense that the writers wanted it to be an act of ultimate forgiveness and trust on the betrayed's part, but it happened so often that it felt like a running gag.
  
• It's easy to spot a new love interest for Fiona a mile away. Are they male, about her age, and even slightly attractive? They gonna bang. This is par for the course in TV shows, but I liked how it happened to Ian as well. I can't think of many shows where that parallel happens.
  
• I got sick of Jimmy real quick. The mob poo poo was garbage and didn't fit the show.
  
• It's a little uncomfortable how casually the show treats grown adults wanting to have sex with underage kids. And then has an episode where they run the hot teacher out of town, when Ian had the same situation since episode one with the store manager. There's a couple of strange inconsistencies like that, such as Ian suddenly thinking bisexuality is a turn-off when he knew Mickey was all along.
  
• Kev and Veronica are the best. I don't want a spinoff, because I think we'd all be loving sick of their increasingly cartoony antics if they weren't balanced out against the dark humor of the Gallaghers. If you take just their scenes, they pretty much are a spinoff, because they barely interact with the Gallaghers anymore. Kev is still my favorite character.
  
• Debbie is the true worst character in the show, ignoring Frank who is mostly comic relief, emphasis on the comic at this point. She makes poor decisions and never learns from them, only has an entitlement complex when she's caught and then digs the hole she's in deeper. She's actually the one most likely to wind up like Monica and/or Frank. I feel like the point of the show is how each character is doing their best to break away from the cycle of poverty and bad decisions that runs in their family, while being dragged down by that family, their own questionable morals, and society keeping them down because they're from a poor area. Debbie was the "good girl" in the beginning, so I think that her gradual downfall into someone reprehensible is intentional. Everyone else takes turns being The Worst, but sooner or later they bounce back. Like I said, Debbie started out with nowhere to go but down.
  
• The shift from seasons 1-3 to 5-7 is really noticeable. Season 4 is kind of a stepping stone. The original supporting cast all moves on, even if there's some guest appearances later. Every supporting character introduced from then on is introduced with the knowledge that they're just a plot device to be phased out within a couple of episodes, where the season 1-3 characters had long-lasting presence and felt deeper because there were many plot threads associated with them instead of just one. It was like once Shameless showed that characters were disposable, it became me waiting for the shoe to drop and a character to peace-out forever. The scope of the show kind of changed once it stopped revolving around the house, which was inevitable as the kids all grew up.
  
• Of course I get into the show right as a season ended, so now I need to wait until Fall 2017/Winter 2018 for a new season.