Dire circumstances, yet the laughs go on

From “Father Knows Best” to “The Brady Bunch,” to “Cosby,” from “Lost in Space” to “The Waltons,” from “Eight Is Enough” to “Cosby,” “The Flintstones” to “The Simpsons” to “The Sopranos,” family is television’s great subject -- which is only fitting, since it lives in your house. It joins you for dinner, baby-sits your kids, talks to you when you have nothing to say, puts you to bed. “The Partridge Family,” “Family Affair,” “All in the Family,” “Family Ties” and on and on -- most of the rest of what makes up TV, the cop shows and doctor shows and unreality shows, even the news, is remote and fantastic by comparison, being concerned with what interrupts the flow of daily life rather than what defines it. You will probably never catch a criminal or transplant a kidney, but you very likely have had to hide something embarrassing from your parents, or make up with a sibling.

If ‘50s television mirrored the contemporary ideal of working dad/housekeeping mom/two or three kids getting into no worse trouble than an occasional white lie, the last decade has seen the rise of its inverse, the functional dysfunctional family in such series as “The Simpsons,” “Malcolm in the Middle,” “Arrested Development,” (why all these series, as well with “Married ... With Children,” have appeared on Fox is a question for further study). The point of all these shows, and such antecedents as “The Addams Family” and “The Beverly Hillbillies,” is that what may look monstrous from without just looks like life from within, and that there are all sorts of ways for a family to work that are not dreamed of in your sociology textbook.

Now add to that distinguished list the thoroughly superb “Shameless,” (premiering Sunday on BBC America), the story of the Gallaghers of Manchester, England. Set in a council estate -- what we’d call projects -- among a large family with a missing mother and a father often unconscious, it’s a kitchen-sink-school farce, “Party of Five” as imagined by a Ken Loach or Mike Leigh, with smoking, drinking, sex and petty theft, and more laughs than that description suggests.

“Dad did a superb job of taking on the role of both our parents -- he did sod all, twice over,” says 20-year-old Fiona (the excellent Anne-Marie Duff), the de facto head of the household, which also includes Lip (Jody Latham), who is good in school; Ian (Gerard Kerns), who is gay and keeping quiet about it; Deb (Rebecca Ryan), who loves her dad; Carl, whose head is shaved for lice; and Liam, who is little. There are also neighbors Kev and Veronica (Dean Lennox Kelly and Maxine Peake) and Fiona’s new boyfriend Steve (James McAvoy), a medical school dropout turned car thief. “Every time it looked like this family was falling apart,” says Fiona, “next time you looked, we doubled the numbers.”

The father, Frank (David Threlfall), is an extreme cause, to be sure, something like the village idiot or town drunk, famous in his community, brought home unconscious by the police and laid out on the linoleum. (“I wouldn’t put him anywhere near a carpet till his kicks dry off a bit,” says a helpful officer.) He is so habitually inert that Deb mistakes a pile of canvas tenting for him, and brings it a cup of tea. Threlfall is astonishing in the part -- you can’t imagine him turning into a focused, sober person between takes. A veteran of the British stage (he was Smike in the RSC’s “The Life and Times of Nicholas Nickelby,” and Edgar in Laurence Olivier’s TV “King Lear”), he plays Frank with an almost Shakespearean dignity not quite completely ruined by alcohol. He’s a lazy opportunist and more of a child than his children, and subject to a drunk’s dangerous changes of mood, but he is not without charm or joie de vivre.

“Now, nobody’s saying that Chatsworth Estate is the Garden of Eden,” says Frank, “but it’s been a good home to us.” He cherishes “wide-open spaces where everyone goes mental” and “neighborliness,” and what he loves about his family and friends is that “all of them, to a man, know first and foremost one of the most vital necessities in this life is, they know how to throw a party.” This opening narration is delivered as the principles dance around a burning car.

For a society that subscribes generally to the notion that everything can be “fixed,” and in which many take an abundance of worldly goods to be a sign of heavenly grace and their absence as a sign of moral failure, the notion that poverty and pride are not mutually exclusive, or that one may be a loser and yet be worthy of love, remains unfortunately controversial. The lower classes have been largely missing from our small screens of late, and certainly have not been paid such respect since the early years of “Roseanne,” their trials having become the property of Jerry Springer and his kin, who deal exclusively in worst-case scenarios.

Those scenarios can ring true enough, and it’s not all fun and games on the council estates of Old England. But “Shameless” is not a social drama. It’s the story of one particular family -- a less extreme version, in fact, of that of writer Paul Abbott (“Touching Evil,” “State of Play”), who grew up as one of 10 children abandoned by both parents -- and offers an example without drawing a moral. What it does rather is to give a sense of the life that goes on wherever life is, and of joy unconstrained by circumstance.

*

‘Shameless’

Where: BBC America

When: 10 p.m. Sundays

Ratings: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children younger than 17)

David Threlfall...Frank Gallagher

Anne-Marie Duff...Fiona Gallagher

James McAvoy...Steve

Jody Latham...Lip Gallagher

Gerard Kearns...Ian Gallagher