Shameless, Showtime’s tragicomic study of the ever-expanding American lumpenproletariat, ends this year after over a decade of being the only series of its kind on television, an anti-Horatio Alger tale that lays bare the gaping maw where our social safety net should be. The Gallaghers, a dysfunctional South Side Chicago family, are different from other working-class TV families like the Bunkers from All in the Family, or the Connors from Roseanne. As show creator Paul Abbot told the New York Times, “it’s not blue collar, it’s no collar.”
Such reflections have always been hard to find in mainstream mass media. Early Hollywood’s system of self-censorship, known as the Motion Picture Production Code, forbade depictions of crime on film, unless the criminals were unsympathetic characters who suffered for their sins. Code rules also discouraged portrayals of illicit drugs and the “selling of a woman’s virtue.” While the code officially ended in 1968 and didn’t apply to television, its spirit haunted the small screen for decades, clashing with audience appetites for stories about drugs, prostitution, and other types of crime—the vicarious experience of watching characters violate social norms. The challenge for TV writers has been to give viewers what they want, while simultaneously reinforcing the traditional middle-class values that have undergirded the genre since the 1950s. How to do this? Make crime ubiquitous, but poverty invisible.
At the dawn of the 21st century, a study revealed that one-third of all prime-time TV shows revolved around crime. Curiously, it also found that TV writers gave the majority of criminal characters professional or managerial jobs, or else left unknown the matter of their work and socioeconomic status. The same holds true today. The fictional criminals we watch on shows like Billions or various “copaganda” programs are frequently white collar, or they’re rendered somehow class-less. The narratives focus much more on individual pathology than on material conditions. Television is also more likely to portray violent crime—e.g., rape and murder—over the more quotidian crimes of survival, like shoplifting, petty drug dealing, or offering the occasional hand job for cash, the small informal ways of making ends meet in an era of suppressed wages and skyrocketing rents. Few television programs have engaged, politically and ideologically, with issues of class and labor. Fewer still have explored how (and why) poor people are pushed into criminalized underground economies.
Enter Shameless, which debuted in 2011, adapted from a British series of the same name. When showrunner John Wells pitched network executives, he had to fight suggestions to set the series in the American South or in a trailer park, those well-worn tropes used to telegraph deprivation in pop culture. Instead, Shameless takes place in a multi-racial city whose denizens have been left behind by gentrification but who see survival—against all odds and by any means necessary—as a point of familial pride. The Gallagher offspring are neglected by their chaotic parents, a mother with bipolar disorder and a father with chronic alcoholism, and so must fend for themselves in a crowded ramshackle home. Nearly every move they make in hopes of bettering their lot is thwarted by a byzantine public welfare system and an indifferent neoliberal state. They have no bootstraps, no boots, and for one character who suffers a workplace accident followed by a DIY amputation, not even a full set of toes.
You couldn’t find a better illustration of the concept, theorized by Marx and Engels, of the lumpenproletariat, the prefix of which translates to “ragged” or “rabble.” In 19th century Europe, the lumpen were those with “questionable means of support and of dubious origin,” like beggars, gamblers, pickpockets, and prostitutes, who inhabited the streets or urban slums. This so-called “surplus population” lived on the “crumbs of society” in part because their drug and alcohol dependencies made them unsuitable for traditional labor. In contemporary America, members of the lumpen fall through the cracks of a system that happily starves people with disabilities and deprives the poor of mental health and drug treatment services, leaving them cycling in and out of formal employment and underfunded institutions. They’re depraved, as the Sondheim lyric goes, on account of they’re deprived.
