‘Shameless’ season 7: Are we near the end of the road?

Tonight, the premiere of “Shameless” season 7 aired on Showtime, and we got a little more intel about where the Gallagher family is at present.

At the same time, isn’t this time to have a little bit of a bigger conversation about the show’s future? The longest that most series on this network tend to run is eight years, and we’re only one away from being there now with this. We assume that eventually some of the cast will want to move on to other things, or that there could be few interesting stories still to tell. Yet, there has been little talk of the show coming to a close anytime soon.

So what does the series’ own executive producer in Nancy Pimental have to say about this? As it turns out, there have been some discussions, but nothing altogether concrete. Here is what she had to say to TVLine in a postmortem for the first episode:

“We talk about it. We’ve certainly mentioned doing at least Season 8. Then we also say, ‘Look, it’s a family, and the kids are growing. It could go on forever.’ … When you have this many characters in a family where the dynamics are changing, people are growing, it could go on indefinitely. So we’ve talked about all options, [including] wrapping it up in a year or two. Or do we have more stories in us, because we have so many characters?”

We feel like the show has definitely had some ups and downs over the past several years, but with Fiona potentially staying single for some time and Frank cutting himself off with nobody being that interested in saving him, we do think we’re at an interesting spot now. There are interesting angles to explore, and we shall see where we go forward from here.

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