Shameless season 8 spoilers: Frank starts over (good luck with that)

When Shameless season 8 premieres on Showtime this fall, we’re going to see a different Frank Gallagher yet again. This is far from the first time that the character has tried to remake his life, and as you’ve seen on some occasions in the past, prior attempts have not ended all that well.

It’s vintage Frank for him to find someone or some thing that he does want to blame other than himself, so you can expect him to do more or less the same thing during the upcoming batch of episodes. So who is the target of his blame this time around? Well, it just so happens to be someone who is dead, and therefore someone who cannot defend themselves against whatever sort of blame he throws their way. We’re talking at this point specifically about Monica. We lost her at the end of last season, and she is going to become the scapegoat while Frank now does his best in order to start over.

Speaking to TVLine, executive producer Nancy Pimental does her part in detailing more of what the story and struggle coming up for Frank could be like:

“Once he smokes through all of his meth, he realizes that Monica was the source of all of his problems and his bad parenting … He basically pushed the pause button on his life and who he was supposed to be when he met her.”

There’s something so intentionally comical about the way this statement from Pimental is laid out, that Frank of course isn’t ready for reform until after he gets finished with his supply. Also, resetting his life to a younger version of himself probably just means that he’s going to find some excuses to go out and party, which isn’t anywhere near as good on his body at this point in his life as it would’ve been for him and his twenties.

In the end, our projection is that Frank is going to continue to be a mess. Maybe he’ll demonstrate some genuine feelings over season 8, but for the time being we can’t think that he’s someone capable of completely changing. If we did, then we would probably need to go back and re-read the definition of insanity to ourselves. Frank’s already had more opportunities to change than we can count.

Want some more Shameless season 8 news?

If you haven’t seen some of our latest casting reports here at CarterMatt, you can view one of them by heading over to the link here! (Photo: Showtime.)