The Real Reasons Why 'Suits: LA' Failed So Spectacularly

I’m not sure I will ever truly understand the appeal of the original Suits, which ran for nine seasons on the USA Network (maybe five of them were good) before experiencing a stratospheric resurgence during the 2023 writers’ strike, a phenomenon that remains largely inexplicable. It was never a great show, and no one who watched it would dispute that, but the cast had a certain alchemy that just worked. Gabriel Macht and Patrick Adams had this weirdly bro-tastic chemistry, while Meghan Markle and Sarah Rafferty were more than just eye candy; they were characters with genuine upward momentum. A paralegal and a secretary who basically ran their offices as they climbed the ranks. Gina Torres’ Jessica Pearson kept the place grounded, and Rick Hoffman’s Louis Litt wasn’t just comic relief; he deftly expressed vulnerability through his bluster.

It worked because they were characters we wanted to spend time with, even when the writing was bad (and the writing was always bad) and the plots made little sense (and they rarely made sense). It was easy, relaxed, turn-off-your-brain viewing, and in the summer of 2023, it’s exactly what the nation wanted. Never mind that even the most devoted binge-watchers probably bailed after they put Mike in prison, Meghan Markle and Patrick Adams left, and they tried to salvage the series with Dulé Hill and Katherine Heigl (who were also far better than the material they were given). It was the ultimate in comfort television.

And then, buoyed by its popularity, NBC ordered a Suits: LA pilot and, after waiting much longer than anyone expected, greenlit it to series. They must have known it was a dud from the beginning, but probably hoped that warm nostalgia for the original, the promise of guest spots from legacy characters, and the slim chance that someone might figure it out along the way would salvage it.

The problems were myriad, but chief among them was that it just didn’t have a hook. The original’s hook — a whiz kid who passed the bar but never attended law school, lying his way into a job at a top-tier firm — was nonsensical, but it gave the show low-level tension (will he get caught?) and turned Mike into an underdog. It was fun, escapist, and didn’t matter a lick that creator Aaron Korsh — a Wall Street guy — didn’t know shit about being a lawyer. The hook served as a crutch when needed, but gracefully faded into the background as the characters took center stage, at least until the later, weaker seasons when they dusted it off and used it as an excuse to toss Mike in prison for a season.

The “hook” in Suits: LA was that one rich, arrogant blowhard sold out another rich, arrogant blowhard, spawning rival firms run by rich, arrogant blowhards who were also longtime friends. There was no underdog. No rooting interest. The closest thing to Patrick Adams’ Mike was Bryan Greenberg’s Rick Dodson, who left his rich, arrogant blowhard mentor to work for the other rich, arrogant blowhard.

The Game of Thrones-style jockeying for promotions and partnerships — something the original would spend entire seasons building up to — began immediately, before we even got a chance to know the characters or invest in their careers. Most of them were already in senior positions, squabbling over slightly more senior positions, except for Alice Lee’s Leah Power, an assistant who couldn’t decide if she wanted to be a screenwriter or a paralegal.

The move to Los Angeles was also disastrous. The original Wall Street setting gave the illusion of high-powered clients and corporate drama because we didn’t know any better. In LA, they were representing the likes of Kevin from The Office — the actual Brian Baumgartner — and treating him like a high-powered client while also name-dropping Nicole Kidman, as if the stakes were remotely comparable. I love Enrico Colantoni and Yvette Nicole Brown, but you can’t pretend the stakes are the same between guest-star caliber actors and Nicole Kidman. It shatters all illusions. The most recent episode even had two attorneys shaking down a producer to demand a nobody actress get an audition for the lead in a Sean Baker film, lest they pull Sean Baker off the film, as if the director of Anora and The Florida Project could, or would, make those kinds of demands on behalf of the client of his manager’s friend.

But if Suits taught us anything, it’s that you can overcome bad writing and worse storylines with the right cast. In this week’s episode of Suits: LA, Rick Hoffman cameoed, attending an anger management spa with his LA counterpart, played by a ridiculously blond Josh McDermitt. The two got into a shouting match and even spent part of the episode discussing penis names. It was terrible, but it was also the closest Suits: LA has come to capturing the spirit of the original. Louis Litt was always a hot-tempered but vulnerable mess, and it was what we found endearing about him; after years of character work to get him there.

Suits: LA just tried to cast Suits archetypes without doing the work to flesh them out. Everyone on the show had a plodding sob story, and everyone led with it. “Hi! I’m Veronica. Here’s a list of terrible things that have happened to me in my life, and that’s why I am the hard-charging, take-no-shit lawyer I am today. Please empathize with me now.” Every character lugged around 100 pounds of exposition, ready to drop it in between self-serious, heavy-handed flashbacks about dead fathers and brothers with Down syndrome. The show laid it on so thick that the characters never got a chance to breathe.

But honestly, the failure of Suits: LA begins with the casting of Stephen Amell, a catastrophic decision that doomed the spin-off from the start. I get that they wanted a Gabriel Macht type, but Amell had all of Harvey’s arrogance and none of his wry charm or playfulness. Amell has always been a black hole of charisma — watching him is like queso an hour after it’s been eaten: a brick in your stomach, leaving you bloated, lethargic, and regretful. That’s Stephen Amell. And whose bright idea was it to shave his goatee?

NBC execs didn’t sugarcoat the reason for canceling the series, saying the show “just has not resonated the way we thought it would” and “just isn’t showing the potential to grow for us.” After some initial curiosity, viewers quickly lost interest. Overnight viewership tanked, with the series shedding 65 percent of its overnight audience by the season’s end. I also never saw it crack the Peacock Top Ten, where competition is not exactly fierce (the bottom three right now are Dateline, Days of Our Lives, and a six-month-old season of Yellowstone).

If NBC had brought back the original Suits, they might have had a shot. But this spin-off — like the Jessica Pearson spin-off that lasted just one season — was doomed from the start because I’m not sure Aaron Korsh even understands why the original was successful. There’s almost nothing in this spin-off that resembles its spirit or tone. It crashed and burned so spectacularly that it probably tainted the memory of the original—a memory so beloved that it made Gabriel Macht, Patrick Adams, and Sarah Rafferty the stars of Super Bowl ads. During the next writers’ strike, no one is going to dig up this boondoggle for comfort viewing. Peacock would be wise to purge it from their streamer entirely and erase all memory of its existence.