For all my eye-rolling at spinoffs, reboots and IP rehashing, I have to admit that a redux of Suits, the erstwhile USA Network show about smartly dressed hyper-smart lawyers bickering smartly, is smart business. The original series, which ran from 2011 until 2019, is the type of show that linear television used to excel at, and what streaming services have long struggled to replicate: lightly serialized, an aspirational workplace drama with near-comically low stakes, sleek and sexy and easily second-screened. It was the show of the summer in, of all years, 2023, nearly half a decade after it wrapped its run and cultural eons away from the heyday of breezy, beautiful so-called “blue sky” television.
Given that everyone and their friend was watching (or rewatching) Suits a year-ish ago, it made sense, and was even maybe promising, that NBC greenlit Suits LA, a spinoff set in a somehow even sunnier environment than the original’s unrecognizably bright vision of New York (via Toronto). As an original series watcher carried back by the Netflix resurgence, I, too, was hopeful for an extension of the show’s cheeky, clever, bad-but-fun spirit, a show that doubled down on the magnetic hyper-competence of a corporate lawyer like Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht), continued the predominance of unrealistically sexy tailoring, and transcended the presence of a pre-Sussex Meghan Markle.
