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‘Shameless’ Season 8: Showrunner, Cast Predict How The Series Ends

By Jackie Villegas
Published on: 08:17 PST, Nov 4, 2017

Shameless Season 8 makes its much-anticipated debut this weekend, and fans of the Showtime comedy-drama are on the edges of their seats waiting to find out what sorts of trouble the Gallaghers will be getting themselves into this time around.

Giving fans a hint of what’s to come, showrunner John Wells recently revealed that Shameless Season 8 will instead find the Gallaghers being more responsible and more adult-like than usual. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Wells said that this season, the Gallaghers will finally be growing into better versions of themselves.

“We’re not trying to do it with exactly a theme, but it’s true: As you grow older and you move from childhood into adulthood, you realize that you have responsibilities to more than yourself if you’re going to be successful.”

For the Shameless clan, this means finally listening to Fiona (Emmy Rossum) and working harder than ever before. Shameless Season 8 will find Lip (Jeremy Allen White) doing his best to stay sober and taking responsibility for two of his friends. Ian (Cameron Monaghan) will be standing up against a local gay conversion program and Fiona will be busy helping her tenants sort out their lives.

Even Frank (William H. Macy), the deadbeat alcoholic/Gallagher patriarch, will be keeping on the straight and narrow.

“I don’t want to frighten you, but Frank shaves,” Macy told Variety.

“He has a credit card; he buys a car; he gets a job.”

Though this all sounds like good news, it also begs the question: Now that the Gallaghers are finally maturing, could Shameless be coming to an end?

As the show enters its eighth year, Shameless fans are wondering if this could be the final chapter for their favorite dysfunctional family. All shows — even the best ones — must come to an end. But because the series has been so popular in recent seasons, it also seems to make financial sense to just let it go on and on.

“We can write it forever, because things are going to keep happening to them,” Wells said.

However, the veteran producer said that’s not how he sees the future of Shameless.

“More than likely, we’ll probably just drop out of it at some point, likely when some of the cast members decide they don’t want to continue anymore. That’ll probably be the end of the show more than anything else.”

For Rossum, who made her Shameless directorial debut in Season 7, the series ends when Frank dies.

“[T]he show, for me, has always ended with Frank dying.”

But, the actress quipped in an EW chat in 2016, perhaps Frank is somehow impervious to death.

“We’ve seen him skirt death so many times… or maybe he’s just that cockroach that will never die.”

Macy, meanwhile, had a more concrete answer to the question of when Shameless will come to an end. According to the actor, after Season 7, which was supposed to be the end of the series, he had actually begun entertaining thoughts about his life after Shameless.

“I gave some thought to it — a little bit — about how we would end,” he said.

“But I think that’s not upon us. Not yet. I think we’ll do another season, perhaps two more.”

Shameless Season 8 premieres Sunday, Nov. 5, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Showtime.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khRWGSllNKw

[Featured Image by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images]

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