Part of that is because we didn’t abandon stories, but we didn’t pursue them once we realized just how difficult it was going to be to get people from other parts of the country to Los Angeles to work and with all the quarantine protocols. No, it really hasn’t been what we’ve been doing. Does it force you back into criminality if you’re trying to stay away from it? Ian and Mickey’s story about trying to get a job and stay employed was impacted as well. They’re one of the groups of people that was so widely publicized last year in that 40 percent of the population doesn’t have $400 to deal with any kind of crisis, and the pandemic has certainly been a crisis. Tami and Lip and their precarious financial state because they have lost a lot of work. Then it impacted the edges of everything. That has had to continue to change - the openings and the closings and the question of how are you going to survive and trying to get federal or state assistance and how almost impossible that has been for most small businesses. The biggest one that really changed was Kevin and Veronica and the financial plight of small business people, like bar owners, through the pandemic. We didn’t end up completely scrapping any storylines, but we did adjust them to what’s going on. We had to move more of the show back onto our existing sets and we weren’t certain that we’d be able to shoot anything in Chicago. On the practical side, we weren’t going to be able to, under the COVID work protocols, do some of the larger scenes that we wanted to do - particularly storylines with Liam, Debbie and her daughter, Franny, which were going to have a lot of child extras. But the impacts on all of us - particularly on working-class and poor communities - have been significant and we’re trying to deal with those issues in a satirical way but also taking an honest, dry-eyed look at what has actually happened to these communities and specifically to our characters. We try and make it as specific to the time when we’re shooting it, even though we know we are going to be a couple of months off.
We rewrote all of the first six or seven episodes, all of which were already written.
To be honest, I haven’t written the finale yet because we have been adjusting the show as we go along to events on the ground because we thought it was important that Shameless deal with the issues of the pandemic and the economic and health consequences for a community like Shameless takes place in. We were three days away from shooting when everything went to hell in March.
#Tami shameless series#
How did the knowledge that this is the final season impact the type of series finale you crafted - and how did the pandemic change that? We’ve talked over the past few years about how, for the last couple seasons, you crafted a season finale that could have doubled as a series ender because you weren’t sure if Shameless was coming back. Macy) “can’t have survived forever without any consequences.”
Below, Wells talks with The Hollywood Reporter about how COVID-19 changed the final season (onscreen and off-), exploring racial injustice and how Frank (William H.
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