Friday, October 18, 2024

DVD/TV Series Review: Shameless Season 10

 


The 12-episode 10th season of Shameless aired from November 2019 to the end of January 2020. Season 10 of the show has even more cast turnover, the largest of which, of course, is the loss of Emmy Rossum. This leads to everything from the opening credits being updated to a large hole in the family dynamic. Although Fiona is mentioned a couple of times, the family has, for the most part, moved on without her. One thing that does give the show is the potential for more developed and fleshed out storylines. Frank is still horrible but gets a bit of a comeuppance from someone with a grudge against him, Debbie continues to have relationship issues, Carl is trying to be a productive member of society, Liam is still the outsider of the family, and Lip is dealing with both a new baby and Tami's issues. Noel Fisher did rejoin the cast as a series regular, and one of the most prominent storylines of the season deals with Ian and Mickey's relationship, which, as has always been the case, is tumultuous.

The DVD set is a three-disc set. The A/V transfer and quality are horrible, which knocks it down a couple of stars for me. Of course, as most know, after 9 seasons of blu-ray releases, the show is only being released on a MOD DVD release which is, honestly, not much better than a bootleg release. It does have captions and deleted scenes for some episodes, but no other extras at all. And, I had an issue with the audio track going out of sync with the video. If I hit stop on the DVD player and immediately hit play again the issue always resolved, but it was still annoying. While physical media is going extinct (especially TV series releases, and even more especially TV series releases on blu-ray, Shameless is still a popular enough show that it should get a better release than this, and should still be available as a MOD blu-ray release. There is always an outside chance that the complete series may get a blu-ray release (ala Masters of Sex, which had two seasons released on blu-ray, did not have seasons 3 and 4 released on disc at all in the US, then got a blu-ray release for the complete series box set).

The show will be getting a final season starting in December of 2020. I definitely think that it is right to end the show at 11 seasons because it is definitely getting long in the tooth. Not necessarily horrible, but it is starting to get stale. I hope they can get at least some of the departed cast members to come back, even if just for a cameo, in the final season, but I am unsure if there are any plans for that. I have not watched the 11th season as of this writing, so I am unsure if any of the ex-cast members appear in the final season. I cannot say that everyone, even die-hard fans of the show (especially the early seasons) will like season 10. However, if you have not been a fan of the show up to this point, there is probably nothing about season 10 that will change your mind about the show.

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