For most of its final season, Shameless hasn’t really been acting like it’s in its final season. This isn’t necessarily surprising: the show has had a fast-and-loose relationship with seriality in recent years, often resetting its focus between seasons and making it harder to create the momentum one might normally associate with a pending series finale. But it has nonetheless been frustrating to see the show killing time when it could have instead come right out of the gate by establishing real stakes that could elevate the show ahead of the end of its run. Advertisement It’s possible that COVID complicated those plans, but my feeling is that the writers have struggled to abandon the now-regular patterns of a