aprilthest-65934

I hadn't had before what has turned out to be on 11/5/17 the considerable pleasure of seeing "Shameless," courtesy of an SHO marathon which was so compelling I bypassed all the NFL games to see it through to the 8th-season debut! There is absolutely NOTHING on ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX even remotely close to this show, either their pallid so-called comedies or wordy dreary dramas with see-through acting/line reading that doesn't draw the viewer into either the overwrought or underworked stories. I haven't seen any pitfalls in the casting, the writing, the direction (Miss Emmy Rossum demonstrated she can show many a longer-in-the-tooth – and MALE – director a thing or two with her front/behind the camera work in the S7 E4 2016 episode "I Am A Storm") or the "atmospherics" (locations/background music). I believe S8 will continue in the unblinking vein of S7, & I'll be pinching the piggybank to catch up on all of S1-6 I have unfortunately missed out on 1st-run. Thank the Force for home media!

I didn't see the original airing of this excellent episode but on 10/27/17 I currently am, only not under this title. This is the "freshest" example of ID's recent sociopathic spiral, in which for only-they-know-what reason they've begun exhuming single episodes of catacombed shows that never see the light of day as created, the oldest from 2010. Instead of simply airing them as Episode X of Show X they incredibly do a Frankenstein on them, strip off their "skin" (E-X/S-X) & wrap them in "new" hides (uncreative titles like Deadly Desire), with the "guts" (narration/graphics/copyright dates, which just those give away the baldfaced lie about "new") intact; this begs the question of why they bother w/these idiotic "reanimation" efforts. This episode is yet another one, but with a new twist: its "new" title, Dance With The Devil, is just what the IMDb synopsis says! If IMDb are entering these "standalones" into their database, they've been duped bigtime like the viewing audience. Pathetic.

My chief quibble with Judge Faith is her many times being both a broken record & herself telling the litigants their information instead of asking them (paraphrase examples: "And you're from City/State X" or "You started working in Month/Year X"). Otherwise I like her, she isn't a haughty diva w/attitude to burn or ear-busting LOUD like Lauren Lake (who though good is even more of a (long-winded) broken record). Once when a real annoying defendant decided to walk because she couldn't take the heat of Judge Faith's reality check & she shot back, "(N)o one's happier to hear that than me," me & the gallery both clapped through the end credits. Those who don't like her, well that's on them; maybe they'd enjoy Byron Allen's Five Foolish Fakes instead.