Shameless is a comedy about poverty that refuses to be inspirational about it. The Gallagher kids scam, steal, drink and love their way through the South Side of Chicago while Frank — William H. Macy giving one of TV's great performances as a genuinely irredeemable man — burns down every good thing they build.

Fiona is the beating heart of the show's best years: a woman parenting five siblings while being told she is a failure for not escaping. Lip carries the weight of being the one who might get out, and the show's central romances are some of the most earned on television. The show is very funny and then, without warning, extremely cruel.

The characters make this show. They’re flawed, selfish, reckless and often deeply misguided, but the show rarely forces them into tidy redemption arcs or makes them apologise for who they are. Even when they make terrible choices, those choices feel consistent with the people we’ve come to know. The Gallaghers aren’t trying to become perfect versions of themselves — they’re simply trying to survive on their own terms, and that unapologetic sense of identity is a big part of why Shameless has remained such a mainstay all these years later.