
Netflix quietly adds 'best show ever' as 'obsessed' fans cancel their weekend plans
Netflix subscribers have confessed they're scrapping their weekend arrangements to binge-watch a cherished series that's just landed on the platform.
US comedy-drama Shameless originally premiered in 2011, based on Paul Abbott's British programme of the same title. The American adaptation, located in Chicago's South Side, Illinois, lasted for 11 seasons before concluding in 2021.
The show centres on the troubled Gallagher clan, headed by Frank, a negligent alcoholic dad to six children. Whilst he wastes his days jobless, getting intoxicated and high, his offspring Fiona, Phillip, Ian, Debbie, Carl and Liam battle to earn money, resorting to cons, relationships and criminal activity to get by.
Despite tackling gritty themes including serious problems and family dysfunction, supporters have labelled it "hilariously genius" and have started rewatching the programme once more.
The cast features William H Macy as Frank, plus Emmy Rossum, Jeremy Allen White, Cameron Monaghan, Ethan Cutkosky and Emma Kenney, reports the Express.
The programme boasts an average Rotten Tomatoes score of 82%, with multiple seasons achieving flawless ratings individually.
One viewer gushed: "I can talk about this show 24/7 when I started the first episode nothing could stop me for watching it I stayed up all night all day infront of my laptop watching this masterpiece."
Another commented: "Seriously Shameless is the best show I have ever watched."
A third posted: "Shameless is the best series ever created, I'm not kidding. the only series that talks about important issues without making them boring or too heavy."
"I can't believe it's taken this long for me to get obsessed with this show. It's amazing-the type you can't miss for a quick bathroom break or you'll miss the storyline. Every individual character was cast so well and each one is unbelievable and grows on you in a hilariously genius way," someone else praised.
"This is probably one of the most raw and impressively jarring dramedies on television. From its witty humor to its exposure of deep human emotions, Shameless is a masterpiece of intelligent screen writing and chaos," another echoed.
Upon hearing it had landed on Netflix, some devotees even went as far as scrapping their weekend arrangements.
One person declared: "Shameless is now on Netflix, weekend plans cancelled."
Another penned: "Proud to say every season of Shameless is now on Netflix, I'll be rejoining the Gallagher family soon."
"All 11 seasons of Shameless are on Netflix. Nature is healing. What a perfect time to be on sick leave man," someone else remarked.
The programme left supporters heartbroken when it concluded in 2021 following an 11th series, with showrunner John Wells subsequently discussing how various plotlines remained unresolved and the possibility of a future spin-off.
When quizzed about a potential comeback, he told The Hollywood Reporter: "There is nothing planned. But never say never. It's a crazy world out there with people reviving shows and characters.
"But we get to tell a lot of great stories with these people and wonderful actors, writers and directors. If we never tell another story with them, I think we did a lot that I'm proud of and that we're all proud of.
"You never know. But we're surely not planning anything."

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New Statesman
6 minutes ago
- New Statesman
The landlord stranglehold
Illustration by Pablo Blasberg / Ikon Images Lofty views have long moved thoughtful souls to reflect on their property portfolios. The great Alexander hiked up the Eurasian Steppe in order to cry, because there was no land left to conquer. Mufasa the lion led Simba up Pride Rock to celebrate the fact that 'everything the light touches is ours'. I believe stout Cortez did something of the like too. Probably none of those famous perches reached a vantage so high as London's 224-metre 'Cheese Grater' skyscraper. But the unpropertied folk who gathered there on Tuesday 22 July had less vaunted reflections. Alexander wept because he owned all of his view. The attendees here wept because they owned none of theirs. Everything the light touched was a landlord's. The event was titled 'Shit! I'm in my 30s and not on the property ladder WTF?!' Before the talk, I spoke to a 28-year-old civil servant from the north-west who wanted a child and a garden with his girlfriend. But, he said, 'I genuinely cannot work out a calculation that puts me in a job where I can afford to.' Without family dying and leaving inheritances, there was no way anyone could afford anything. 'People are facing a worse time than ever when it comes to buying… It's such a depressing state to be in.' He had heard Japan was encouraging pro-immigration sentiment so young immigrants could fund the ageing population. But as more housing would damage the value of the existing stock, he had little hope of new building. 'I hate to be prophet of doom but it's what goes around inside my head. And I absolutely know that it's what goes around the heads of people my age all around the country.' Hosting the panel were columnist and housing campaigner Vicky Spratt and mortgage expert Andrew Montlake. The sofa had a hero for the crowd: a thirty-something professional living in a flatshare, wondering how she might ever buy a home. And the house villain: a slickly besuited man who had stopped 'messing around' trying to become a musician at 27, and was now an estate agent. But despite the potential Punch-and-Judy casting, the points made were tender. As Spratt put it, British people 'want a piece of the world that is theirs'. In lots of places, owning your house is not part of the culture. It's quite normal to rent all your life in several northern European countries. But the fact is that, in Britain, ownership is entrenched. Putting wealth in inert assets is not productive; but it has been profitable for generations, and it is now habit. In a recent Times column, Matthew Syed explained that his generation bought homes with their money 'because we naturally wanted to own our homes but also because we knew our wealth would surge'. They were right. He points out that in the last 30 years, London house prices are up 2,100 per cent. But that climb took prices far beyond wages, and so far above what the next generation could afford. It's such a glaring injustice that even Nigel Farage has made it part of his schtick, at times sounding like Jeremy Corbyn. (Ander perhaps Generation Rent is listening: Farage has more TikTok followers than all other MPs together.) He puts it succinctly. 'Getting a house, getting a good job. All they want is what their mum and dad have had! Or what their gran and grandad have had.' A difficulty in changing Britain is that the have-nots are so exposed to the haves. And that makes them angry. The young professional on stage fumed that the people who had answered no to her Instagram poll on whether people deserved to own homes were those whose parents had helped them buy one. Repeatedly summoned was the figure of the owner-landlord, who gets their tenant to work off their mortgage, or pay for their holidays. As the essayist Oliver Eagleton has put it, 'domestically, rentierism is the major structural problem for the British economy'. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe It is a problem for the British heart too. The government has recognised this and plans soon to implement the Renters' Rights Bill. And the panel expected that any future governments would continue the popular course. The near-term upshot of a more hostile letting environment is a transfer of stock as landlords sell to private, live-in buyers. What that means, the panel explained, is that if you can, you should buy as soon as possible. The supply flow will suppress prices but squeeze rents. (And Spratt noted that rent never seems to come back down again after inflationary pressures abate.) There will be between three and five years of this. Then, the supply dried up and the rent raised, property value will start to climb again. There is a right side and a wrong side to be on when that happens. Our only really radical solution available is to build much more housing. Oli Dugmore called for 5 million new homes in these pages. But Labour's flagship planning reforms recently made concessions to Chris Hinchliff's environmental regulations. And at the Cheese Grater, there was simply little hope that the young could ever prevail. For most owners, the house is the most valuable asset. They don't want it cheapened, and they have the power. [Further reading: Landlordism is killing culture] Related


Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
What I learned from running my own Squid Game
You know how this story goes. The cameras are rolling. The audience is cruel. You're trapped in the game and the game is death and the game is going out live from the heart of the state of nature where empathy is weakness and you kill each other off until there's only one left. What will you do to survive? Who will you become if you do? This is the plot of Squid Game, Netflix's Korean mega-hit that just drew to its gory conclusion. It is also the plot of The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, The Running Man, Chain-Gang All-Stars and The Long Walk. We have spent several decades watching desperate people slaughter each other for survival to entertain the rich and stupid. Future generations will probably have thoughts about why we kept returning to this particular trope with the bloodthirsty voyeurism we associate with Ancient Rome. Obviously, these stories are meant to say something about human nature, and the depraved things desperate people can be made to do to each other; they're meant to say something about exploitation, and how easy it is to derive pleasure from someone else's pain. Squid Game says these things while shovelling its doomed characters through a lurid nightmare playground where they die in cruel and creative ways. After each deadly game, blood-spattered contestants are offered a chance to vote on whether to carry on playing. It's a simple referendum: if a majority votes to stay, they're all trapped in the death-match murder circus with only themselves to blame. If they object, a masked guard will accuse them of interrupting the free and fair elections and shoot them in the face. This is everything Squid Game has to say about representative democracy. 'I wanted to write a story that was an allegory or fable about modern capitalist society,' said director Hwang Dong-hyuk, just in case you didn't get the message. The whole thing is as subtle as a shopping-mall shooter. I'm reliably informed that the English-language translations strip away a degree of nuance, which probably helps audiences in parts of the Anglosphere where irony is an unaffordable foreign luxury and the experience of everyday economic humiliation feels a lot like being hit over the head with a huge blunt analogy. Squid Game does not want you confused about who the baddies are. There's a bored cabal of cartoon billionaires drinking scotch and throwing tantrums while they watch our heroes shove each other off cliffs. They smoke cigars and say things like 'I am a very hard man to please'. We never get to find out who they are or what their plan is, because it doesn't matter. How could it possibly matter? How could anything matter in a fake hotel lobby where all the furniture is naked ladies? This is how people who want to be rich think people who are rich ought to talk: like insurance salesmen cosplaying sexual villainy in a kink club for tourists. Nobody is supposed to be able to relate to the Squid Game villains. As it turns out, though, I can. There's an innocent explanation for how I came to run my own Reality Show of Death Game. Well, mostly innocent. I happen to have a secret other life as an immersive game designer. It's what I did instead of drugs during my divorce, after discovering that here, finally, was a hobby that would let me be a pretentious art wanker and a huge nerd at the same time. The games are intense – like escape rooms you have to solve with emotions. Many of them revolve around some species of social experiment – the kind that actual researchers can't do any more because it's inhumane. Famously, the 1971 Stanford prison experiment had to be shut down early after students who were cast as guards got far too excited about abusing their prisoners. The sort of people who pay actual money to play this kind of game are expecting to be made to feel things. They're expecting high stakes and horrible choices and wildly dramatic twists. The Death Game trope is an easy way to deliver all of that. Mine forced players to pick one of their friends to 'murder on live television'. It's a five-hour nightmare about social scapegoating with a pounding techno soundtrack. I had a lot going on at the time. I swotted up on Hobbes and Hayek. I took notes on Squid Game and its infinite derivatives. I gave the players character archetypes to choose from – the Diva, the Flirt, the Party Animal – and got them to imagine themselves in Big Brother if it were produced by actual George Orwell. I wrote and rewrote the script to make sure players wouldn't be able to opt out of picking one person to bully to death. I thought that it would be easy. Instead, I learned two surprising things. The first was that it's harder than you'd think to design a scenario where ordinary people plausibly hunt each other to death. Every time, my players tried their very hardest not to hurt each other, even when given every alibi to be evil. I created a whole rule system to punish acts of altruism, spent ages greasing the hinges on the beautiful hellbox I'd built for them, and still the ungrateful bastards kept trying to sacrifice themselves for one another. Even the ones who were explicitly cast as villains. Even when it was against the rules. It takes a lot of fiddly world-building to make violent self-interest feel reasonable. It takes a baroque notional dystopia and a guaranteed protection from social punishment. What you get is a manicured, hothouse-grown garden masquerading as a human jungle – an astroturfed Hobbesian state of nature where the cruelty is cultivated to make viewers feel comfortable in complicity. The story of these games scrapes the same nerves as the ritual reporting about shopping-mall riots on Black Friday – the ones that lasciviously describe working-class people walloping each other for a £100 discount on a dishwasher. The message is that people who have little are worse than people who have more. This is a wealthy person's nightmare of how poor people behave. The rich, of course, are rarely subject to this sort of moral voyeurism. But that story isn't true. In the real-life Lord of the Flies, the children actually worked together very successfully. In the real-life Stanford prison experiment, the guards had to be coached into cruelty. Real poverty, as sociologists like Rutger Bregman keep on telling us, is actually an inverse predictor of selfish behaviour. Not because poor people are more virtuous than anyone else, but because the rich and powerful can afford not to be. The rest of us, eventually, have to trust each other. The fantasy of these games is about freedom from social responsibility. In the Death Games, nobody has to make complex and demeaning ethical choices as an adult person in an inhumane economy. In the Death Games, it makes sense to light your integrity on fire to survive. But if we did, actually, live in a perfectly ruthless market economy where competition was the essence of survival, none of us would survive past puberty. The Death Games don't actually tell us anything about how life is. They show us how life feels. The second surprising thing I learned while running my own Squid Game is that nothing feels better than running Squid Game. If you need a rush, I highly recommend building a complicated social machine to make other people hurt each other, picking out a fun hyperpop soundtrack and then standing behind a production desk for five hours jerking their strings and cackling until they cry. People apparently like my game. It has run in multiple countries. And every time, it took me days to come down from the filthy dopamine high. It turns out that I love power. This was an ugly thing to discover, and there's an ugly feeling about watching a show like Squid Game – which is, to be clear, wildly entertaining. Voyeurism is participation, and the compulsive thrill of watching human beings hurt each other for money creates its own complicity. The audience is not innocent. Sit too close to the barrier at the beast show and you risk getting splashed with moral hazard.


Daily Record
3 hours ago
- Daily Record
Donald Trump 'caught cheating' at his Scottish resort as caddie moves ball for him
A video has emerged from Donald Trump's golf course in Scotland appearing to show a caddie dropping a ball for the US President on the fairway as he played a shot Donald Trump has found himself embroiled in another golfing scandal after footage emerged seemingly showing a caddie dropping a ball for him during a round in Scotland. While on a European trip and visiting his golf resorts, the US President was caught on camera playing at Turnberry when it appeared one of his caddies may have overstepped the mark to help him. The video, shot from within a nearby building, captures Trump arriving by golf cart on the left side of the fairway. With a bunker and some light fescue between him and the green, as he stopped, two caddies walked past – with one seemingly pausing to place a ball in front of Trump. The 79 year old exited the cart, golf club in hand, and approached the newly positioned ball, seemingly ready to take his next stroke. The clip concludes before he takes the swing. the Express. "Who needs a foot wedge when you have a personal ball dropper? ? ?" joked one user on X, previously known as Twitter. Another user humorously suggested, "Him and Kim Jong Un would be INSANE scramble partners." A self-proclaimed PGA professional chimed in with, "Such a perfect metaphor for our Commander-in-Cheat." Some social media users playfully admired the incident. "Wild... Looks like I need these fellas as Caddies with the way I hit it anymore," one comment read. This is not the first instance of Trump being accused of bending the rules on the golf links. Is Donald Trump a cheat on the golf course? Earlier this year, Samuel L. Jackson, the esteemed actor, alleged that Trump had cheated during a game they played together. When queried about who was the better golfer, Jackson confidently stated: "Oh, I am, for sure. I don't cheat." Trump has since refuted the claims of having played with the 'Pulp Fiction' star, asserting on social media that such a game never took place. Actor Anthony Anderson has echoed similar sentiments. During an appearance on 'Late Night with Seth Meyers' in 2016, Anderson remarked, "Trump is a great golfer. I'm not going to say Trump cheats. His caddy cheats for him." When pressed for details on whether he witnessed Trump cheating, Anderson affirmed: "Oh yes, several times. Several times." He recounted an occasion where both he and Trump had poor tee shots. "Trump hit the exact same shot but went 20 yards further left than mine," he explained. "I couldn't find my ball in this trash. Trump's ball had the fluffiest lie in the middle of the fairway." Anderson concluded: "Like I say, I didn't see Trump cheat because he was on the tee-box with me, but his ball was right there in the middle of the fairway." Sportswriter Rick Reilly has delved into these allegations, asserting in 2019 that Trump frequently manipulated his ball's position and even took credit for others' shots. In an article for The Sunday Times, Reilly revealed that Trump's caddies had even dubbed him "Pele" due to his frequent ball-kicking antics. "To say Donald Trump cheats is like saying Michael Phelps swims," he penned. "Trump doesn't just cheat at golf. He cheats like a three-card monte dealer. "He throws it, boots it and moves it. Whether you're his pharmacist or Tiger Woods, if you're playing golf with him, he's going to cheat."