Stephen Amell has blamed his performance in Suits LA for the show’s early cancellation.
NBC’s short-lived Suits spinoff, which was axed last May after one season, starred Amell, 44, as Ted Black, a former New York federal prosecutor who reinvents himself as an entertainment lawyer and moves to Los Angeles to represent some of the city’s most powerful clients.
Speaking on a recent episode of Michael Rosenbaum’s Inside of You podcast, the Arrow alum reflected on the show’s brief run, admitting: “It wasn’t good enough. I think that anything that ends not on your terms is a failure.”
While Amell acknowledged noticing early “issues” with the production, he ultimately insisted, “the blame rests with me.”
“Whatever problem you have with the show — because I think that there were issues — it’s my job to solve those, to smooth them over, to gloss them up with some type of performance or something that, tangible or otherwise, that covers up those mistakes,” he said.
“Because you do something that is magnetic, that is charismatic, that fixes those problems. And I didn’t do that. I didn’t find anything ultimately with Ted Black that translated, that smoothed those things over, that gave us a chance to keep going.”
Asked why he felt obligated to take responsibility for the show’s failure, Amell explained: “If it’s successful, I’m gonna get a disproportionate amount of the credit. And so I think it’s only fair that I stand in front and I take the blame. I’m the lead of the series. And it didn’t work.”
He recalled sitting down with Suits and Suits LA creator Aaron Korsh while the pilot was being edited. “[Korsh] was like, ‘I don’t know if this is gonna work,’” Amell remembered, adding that Korsh’s creative vision clashed with what the heads at NBC wanted.
“I don’t wanna say they battled because I wasn’t a part of those conversations, so I’m not gonna speculate,” he said. “But it just seemed like what he wanted to do and what they wanted to do [was] different.”
The Independent has contacted NBC for comment.
Suits LA was greenlit in 2024 after its nine-season predecessor, featuring Meghan Markle, Gabriel Macht and Patrick J. Adams, experienced a surge in popularity when it became available on Netflix in 2023, racking up an astounding 57 billion minutes of viewing time.
Despite the resurgence of the original, the new series failed to impress critics, who deemed it “joyless” and “unsexy” in brutal reviews. It also failed to match the original’s viewership figures, debuting to a disappointing 2.61 million viewers in February 2025.
