The Friday Flashback: William H. Macy

By Chuck Sudo in Arts & Entertainment on Mar 4, 2011 7:20PM

Here on this side of the Atlantic we don't have a good track record when it comes to adapting British television programs for our screens. For every The Office we get half-baked takes on Life on Mars or Coupling. But we are digging Showtime's adaptation of Shameless, anchored by a heavyweight performance from William H. Macy as the drunken, sociopath head of a working class Irish American family in Back of the Yards. The fine folks at the Museum of Classic Chicago Television fond this quick commercial from 1976 for the Chicago Job Mart, an employment circular that ran in the Sunday Sun-Times and Friday Daily News, with Macy (from a drafting table that we learned to abhor at Lane Tech) touting the benefits of rooting through it. It also reminds us of the days when Chicago was more than a two newspaper town.