School's Out For Gallaghers

Between Fiona's multiple run-ins with the law and Frank's multiple near-death experiences, it seems unlikely that the entire Gallagher clan actually made it to Season 5 intact. Fragmented, sure -- Frank's still living with his new wife Sheila, and no one's really that psyched about Sammi, the family's newest addition -- but everyone's alive, and some are actually doing the Gallagher equivalent of thriving.

This being Shameless, happiness is relative and misery is rarely far behind it, so this season we'll be covering each episode by ranking the characters according to how well they're doing in the context of their lives...which, probably, doesn't necessarily jibe with how the cops would say they're doing if they knew about our protagonists' various schemes and scams.

1. Liam
   Talk about your heroic recoveries: Liam seems to have completely bounced back from his accidental cocaine OD last season. Fiona's around to take care of him and even build an above-ground pool for him; when she and her boss Sean realize they've left the ladder outside and tell Liam they're all just going to have to live in the pool from now on, he's perfectly fine with that. Later, his drug crisis gets used against Fiona by a bitter Frank, but he doesn't have any idea, so he's fine.
2. Svetlana
   From what we can tell, she's come to terms with the fact that her baby's father would rather spend time with his boyfriend, and gone on to make money from her vagina in a different way: by passing herself off as a kindergarten teacher in order to become a surrogate mother. Lemons out of lemonade!
3. Kevin & Vee
   I can't tell if Vee's renunciation of breastfeeding is supposed to be a harbinger of postpartum depression, but generally speaking, these two just seem to me to be having the usual problems brand-new parents have, alleviated by the fact that they still love each other and are in it together. (Kevin's intensity as he seeks constipation advice from an online mommy board and sincere offer to fuck up the guy cruising Ian in the dollar store are why he remains my favourite character.)
4. Fiona
   Look at this one: keeping healthy with a morning jog; cheerfully joking about her ankle monitor; recognizing that the fox with the hot accent who hits on her at her job is a bad idea. Whatever's going on between her and Sean is probably also a bad idea (although the fact that he is wise enough to let her know he knows she's sneaking old pies to her family and won't tolerate it suggests he may be better at maintaining boundaries than she is), and she can tell something's up with Ian that she'd better keep an eye on, but this is the kind of happy, functional Fiona that just makes me worry that she's headed for a self-destructive crash in the next one to three episodes -- and that $100-tip-leaving Angela is going to have something to do with it.
5. Deb
   Normally, a tween girl having problems with her female peers jamming her out for no apparent reason isn't anything to be that alarmed about -- it's a horrible rite of passage all women go through, unfortunately. However, this being Shameless, one must worry that Deb's going to use all her free time, now that school's out, to concoct an elaborate and bloody revenge plot against her antagonists.
6. Carl
   Any other kid with a broken ankle would resign himself to a summer on the couch. This one steals an unattended Rascal. Sure, he's got to spend the next few months contemplating how much it's going to suck to have to repeat the sixth grade -- but at least he can do it on wheels!
7. Lip
   He's gotten through his first year of college, thanks in no small part to the Type A assistance of Amanda. But now that she's going home for the summer and he's returning to his old neighbourhood (and the old friends who already think he's a pussy for seeking post-secondary education), will he be able to avoid a Gallagherian slide back into what's easy/illegal? At least he hasn't smoked any of his buddies' angel dust-laced weed...yet.
8. Ian
   Despite his refusal to seek psychiatric attention for what looks, from the outside, like a textbook bipolar manic phase...at least he's getting free anonymous wristies out of it.
9. Mickey
   That his fake moving company scam doesn't require him or his henchmen to use guns is progress of a sort, but it seems like one that he won't be able to sustain for very long in the age of Yelp. Plus, he's in denial about Ian's probable bipolar disorder, and isn't even getting any free anonymous wristies out of it.
10. Sammi
    I really hope this whole "Sammi, a thirty-five-year-old woman, is trying to get her father's attention by acting out like a high schooler" is the prelude to her getting written out of the show, because it's both dumb and gross.
11. Chuckie
    His mother's inappropriate sexual behaviour leads to his being present in the room as she kneels to give her latest trick a blowjob, but even worse (maybe) than that is that he becomes collateral damage when Sheila bans him from her house unless he calls ahead. Yes, having to watch your mom go down on a guy is pretty brutal, but this is a kid who's so lonely that he crawled into bed with his grandparents. Getting cut off from human contact, other than his mother's, might scar him worse.
12. Sheila
    Sheila's not my favourite, but even she doesn't deserve to be made a double victim of Sammi's sexual crime wave -- first, when Sammi leaves noticeable sex smells on Sheila's furniture, and then when she finds that Sammi has violated the sanctity of Sheila's box of sex toys. THIS BITCH GOTS TO GO.
13. Frank
    Despite his conviction that he can have one beer a day (even though the scar from his liver transplant still looks pretty fresh and his daily test of his vitals is showing that he's losing weight), Frank has decided to get into brewing. He seems a lot less concerned about his estrangement from most of his children than he is about keeping the project secret and perfecting his recipe. (I hope anyone who samples it knows that the wood chips he used were stolen from a playground and thus have been peed on by countless animals -- and, probably, children.) When he allows himself one more drink after midnight and wakes up fully nude in a park bandshell or something, getting sketched by a bunch of art students, we know Frank isn't doing as well as he could. And that maybe Sheila would be able to keep track of him if she wasn't busy DISINFECTING ALL HER DILDOS, SAMMI.