All the British Shows That I Have Seen

1. Being Human: The First and Second Seasons (UK). Between its attempts to appropriate cultural territory last touched by my beloved Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its whole "Look, Ma, We're Not Victorian" attitude, I should hate this series, but instead I have found it shamelessly addictive. Annie the ghost is my favorite character on the show thus far -- perhaps because she is the most positive character on the show. (Let's face it. Positive characters are not always easy to write nowadays.) Mitchell the ageless vampire and George the reluctant werewolf are likable in their own way too but it is Annie that provides the glue that keeps this from being just another endless stroll in the supernatural darkness. I will undoubtedly have more to say when I view the third season.

2. Shameless: The First Season (UK). I have seen so many shows and movies about the dysfunctional lives of people who live in the ghetto or the barrio that I often forget that white poor people live dysfunctional lives too. And no, I am not waxing sarcastic here. One of the major problems with focusing exclusively on the problems of the dark-skinned poor is the subsequent tendency to define poverty, substance abuse and other social problems as an ethnic thing and not a human thing. After all, as long as we can define such issues as a "black thing" or a "Latino thing," light-skinned people don't have to worry about them -- and the problems never get solved. Yet as I grow older and spend more time with people in general, it becomes obvious that you can find just as much dysfunctionality among the white poor as you can anywhere else. Indeed, it is kinda depressing to note how many such problems get ignored because no one expects to find those type of problems in a white neighborhood -- and it is even more depressing to note how the experiences of my Hispanic relatives who were born in poverty and worked their way out indicate that such things do not necessarily have to be that way.

Anyway, Shameless is one of the few TV shows that I have seen that focuses on the dysfunctional white poor. Of course, it helps in terms of audience acceptability that the show is set in Great Britain, which means most white Americans are not likely to take it personally. Moreover, it revolves around a family led by a drunken patriarch named Frank Gallagher -- so the Brits can just as well pretend such dysfunctions are an Irish thing and not a British thing. Oh, well. When the show is on the ball, it does a great job of describing the not so quiet desperation of Gallagher's children without glamourizing the behavior of their alcoholic father. Indeed, one of the virtues of the show is that its writers are realistic enough to not even pretend that the father is likely to get his act together any time soon. Instead the show chooses to focus on the oldest daughter and her efforts to keep the family together despite a mother who left home years ago and a father who rarely does anything save make things worse.

If the show has one major problem, it is that it wraps up everything so neatly in the first season that it is hard to believe that the show did not end right there. But then certain troubles never cease to be.