Pandemic ruined Emmy Rossum's series finale return to Shameless

The Covid-19 lockdown scuppered Emmy Rossum's return to Shameless for the series finale.

Showrunner John Wells has confirmed there was a storyline that included the actress' character, but Emmy couldn't get from her home in New York to the set in Los Angeles, so the writers had to abandon the idea.

"We were trying to get Emmy and Emmy wanted to come back...," Wells tells The Hollywood Reporter. "Based on what was going on with the pandemic, when we were planning it... the quarantines went back into effect between New York and Los Angeles and it was impossible to figure out how to get her back.

"It was a very minor but sad result of everything that's happened in the pandemic."

Opening up about an imagined plot including Emmy's character Fiona Gallagher, Wells reveals it revolved around her character's father, Frank Gallagher, battling dementia and the family gathering together to sort out his estate.

"The idea was with Frank's dementia being discovered, there's a call and she comes back to help everyone figure it out and that she would come back and be involved at the end with what to do with the house and all that," John shared. "The travel was such a mess that we never got to the point of my actual writing it.

"We put it up on the writers' room board and then took it down a few times... We had a lot of jokes for her but we never actually nailed it down."

Emmy left Shameless in 2018, at the end of the ninth season.

The series finale, titled Father Frank, Full of Grace, aired in America on Sunday.