Don’t Rule out Another Steve Appearance on ‘Shameless’

All of you still stewing over what happened to Steve from Shameless, take heart. There’s always a chance the character — also known as Jimmy and sometimes Jack — will pop up again in the show’s 11th and final season, which premieres on Sunday, Dec. 6.

As actor Justin Chatwin told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015, there’s no telling if or when his character will return. “When I first got on the show, [executive producer] John Wells said the show is like a plant in a garden, and it grows; you never know in what direction it’s going to go, or what it’s going to produce, or what it’s going to look like... So people will leave and people will return and people will change.”

At the end of the Showtime comedy’s third season, Steve-slash-Jimmy is forced onto a boat belonging to his Brazilian wife’s drug lord father. He was supposed to be gunned to death in that episode, but his life was spared by a production issue: The filming permit for the dock expired before the Shameless crew could film Jimmy’s demise.

“But actually now it’s kind of cool because we don’t have to have him die that way,” John told reporters at the time, per TV Guide. “We’ve been talking about having the recaps every week [next season] have a different way that he died.”

John added, “We were trying to think up ways to make certain that he was no longer with us. We wanted to do a little tag where we were at a polo match and the Brazilians would go get their mallets and drop down his head.”

Two seasons later, Jimmy returns to Chicago, and Fiona sleeps with him, cheating on then-husband Gus (Steve Kazee). Jimmy tells her he canceled an overseas job to be with her — when really, he was canned from the gig — but Fiona breaks up with him for good.

“It’s interesting because when I was pitched the show, [they] said that this [relationship] is a really f--ked up version of true love,” Justin told THR. “These two are meant for each other; they are the heart of the story; it’s Romeo and Juliet. So, I’ve always rooted for the two of them because they were both really damaged people [whose] hearts lined up because they were both broken.”

“I’m really looking forward to seeing how the fans react to it and if that’s what they want or if it does feel final,” Justin said at the time, reflecting on Jimmy’s Season 5 exit. “I remember in the read-through for that last episode, [exec producer] Nancy Pimental’s episode, it says, ‘Jimmy drives off. And that is the end. That we ever see of him for ever and ever.’ And the entire cast and execs all started bursting out laughing because they’d written that at the end of my exit every time now, and it never seems to work.”

The 11th and final season of Shameless premieres on Sunday, Dec. 6., at 9 p.m. ET.