The Big Reason ‘Suits LA’ Doesn’t Work
In the summer of 2023, a strange thing happened. The TV show Suits — a modest USA Network legal procedural from 2011 — broke out as one of Netflix’s biggest hits ever after it arrived on the streaming service. Which meant that a sequel or reboot was inevitable. Original showrunner Aaron Korsh is back for a West Coast version of the legal dramedy filled with characters that talk with the same brashness as their New York counterparts but spend marginally more time outdoors. That long-awaited spinoff, Suits LA, airs on NBC starting Feb. 23.
The action centers on Ted Black (Stephen Amell), the best entertainment attorney in Los Angeles, though we learn through a series of flashbacks that he used to be a New York prosecutor and scoff at lawyers who drew up contracts for celebrities. He is surrounded by a cast of characters who will be eerily familiar to fans of Suits, as if Korsh plucked personality traits from his original players, threw them in a blender, and poured them back out again into various cutthroat partners and associates.
Read More: In Defense of Suits
In the first episode, the audience is immeidately thrown into a dramatic breakup between Ted and his fellow founding partner at his law firm, Stuart Lane (Josh McDermitt). Stuart, sore over a fight that’s frequently referenced but never actually shown, joins forces with Ted’s ex-girlfriend to form a new firm and screw over their best friend. Since we have no context for how either of these relationships came together and fell apart, it’s hard to feel too bad for Ted as he begins to pick up the pieces. We also don’t feel all that invested in any effort to mend his relationships with his old colleagues, friends, and lovers. The show, at least in its early stages, is quite confusing and not particularly sharp. But that’s not its fatal flaw.
What made Suits so bingeable was the premise: Mike (Patrick J. Adams) did not have a law degree, and yet his mentor Harvey (Gabriel Macht) hired him anyway because Mike has a perfect memory that made him a savant. He always solved the unsolvable legal conundrum by the end of each episode. The tension arose from the fact that Mike — and by proxy, Harvey — might at any moment get caught in this masquerade.
Is it ridiculous that Mike managed to hide this information season after season? Yes. But that kernel of an idea saved Suits from becoming a forgettable case-of-the-week procedural. Each week’s legal scuffle provided the B plot. But the main thrust of the story was Mike and his mentor Harvey bonding as they schemed to hide Mike’s lack of credentials from friends, colleagues, and love interests. It stretched the bounds of credulity, but it offered an important backbone to the series.
Suits LA has no such conceit. Instead, Korsh tries to stuff an immense amount of backstory for his main character Ted into very little screen time. It’s en vogue at the moment for TV writers to deploy incessant flashbacks in order to reveal character secrets: recently released shows like Paradise, Apple Cider Vinegar, and No Good Deed have all abused the device. While shows like Lost and Orange Is the New Black would use flashbacks to develop their characters over time, newer shows seem obsessed with flashing back in history just mere seconds after we meet a character in order to explain their damage. Blame streamers like Netflix, which apparently demands that characters state what they are doing out loud in case the audience is distracted by laundry folding. Subtlety in dialogue has gone out the window.
But perhaps no show has used flashbacks quite as confusingly as Suits LA. In the first episode, Ted keeps dozing off and dreaming about the past. These dream-memories throw us directly into the action with scenes involving mobsters, a neglectful father, and an explosion — all before skipping back to unrelated conversations in modern day. The experience is disorienting. There’s also a truly eye roll-inducing moment when the identity of a certain character is revealed at the end of the first episode. (Trust me, you’ll groan.)
The bewildering plot structure could be forgiven if these characters had the charm of the original cast: What’s also missing from Suits LA is the chemistry Adams and Macht found onscreen from the moment Mike accidentally stumbled into a job interview with Harvey. We learned the characters’ respective damage over the course of many seasons — dead parents, a mom who cheated, commitment issues — not all in a single episode. Suits instead relied on these two characters poking at each other’s expensively-suited facades to eventually reveal the bleeding hearts underneath. Reliable comedic turns from Rick Hoffman’s hapless Louis and Sarah Rafferty’s fierce Donna brought a lightness to the show and rounded out the ensemble.
By the second and third episodes, Suits LA does settle down a bit. There are still flashbacks and ominous references to dangerous pasts. But there are also cases to mete out, defendants’ innocence to establish, and, since this is L.A., celebrities to name drop. (In a line that has aged poorly even before the show airs, Ted compares his GOAT-like status to that of Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes.)
But the result is something closer to a generic procedural than the show that originally broke out on the USA Network. Amell is doing an admirable Macht impression, equal parts arrogance and charm with some random yelling thrown in, but it’s still an impression. Why not just hire Macht and build a series around him instead? The show is a pale shadow of its predecessor.