Whether you were an OG Suits fan who tuned into the series during its entire run on USA Network or you caught up with the series via Netflix bingeing, we’ve all come to appreciate what this series has to offer.
The fashion, snappy dialogue and delivery, semi-glum setting, lovable jerk characters, and constant wheeling and dealing were genuinely fun to watch.
Harvey Specter? One of the all-time great characters played with expert precision by Gabriel Macht.
Louis Litt? He has one of the most intriguing trajectories of a character onscreen, and Rick Hoffman is the greatest at bringing this man to life.
The series showed all the haters that Meghan Markle held her own playing the fierce Rachel Zane before she was the Duchess of Sussex.
Jessica Pearson is still the GOAT; we’re not taking any arguments on this. Donna is so great that you merely have to utter her name, and people get it. She’s Donna, end of story.
The series played fast and loose with the law, had dialogue that easily should’ve been obnoxious but somehow wasn’t, and uttered, “goddamn” so much you’d be comatose if you drank a dirty martini for each occasion.
But Suits combined so many things we love about television, making the medium work and register with audiences.
It was edgy enough to attract a broad audience, had procedural elements that worked, was light enough to play at the Blue Sky Drama genre, had characters you wanted to be friends with, and had enough episodes to carry a season.
It’s no wonder the Suits Renaissance took off the second it hit Netflix and introduced this series to a whole new audience.
Unsurprisingly, the network wanted to capitalize on this success. But as usual, they never really know what viewers want; they think they do.
Worse yet, they think if they present us with something in a certain way, they can convince us that it’s what we’ve wanted the whole time, and we’ll subscribe to it.
Naturally, coming off the renewed success of Suits, a spinoff was on the horizon.
But some of us were wary of that announcement from the start. For starters, it feels absurd to call something a spinoff all these years later when there’s no connective tissue between the original and said “spinoff.”
Suits LA is like if fanfiction came to life comprised of a slew of original characters and only hints at the legacy ones that people are most familiar with and love.
What’s become evident with Suits LA is that it’s essentially connected to Suits in name only. It’s a standard approach to a legal procedural with the attachment of IP in a blatant effort to cash in on that success.
Suits LA feels like it attempted to do a Matlock switcheroo that CBS managed to pull off.
Remember how we thought Matlock would be another (Gender-bent) reboot of a classic series? And then, by the end of Matlock Season 1 Episode 1, they blew our minds when it was evident that they had zero intention of rehashing that series but instead created its own.
Suits LA isn’t like Matlock, though. It’s more like CBS’ Watson. And we have our own thoughts about how that freshman series fails to grip viewers because of its genre confusion.
At this point, Suits LA’s biggest error is desperately attempting to tie this “reboot” to the original, like fitting a square peg into a round hole.
No, it wasn’t strong enough to stand on its own in the first place because legal procedurals are a dime a dozen, and without the Suits moniker attached to it, the series doesn’t have a hook.
But at this point, what likely was the most significant factor in greenlighting this series has backfired drastically.
The only thing anchoring Suits LA to Suits has done thus far is weigh this new series down.
It’s crumbling under expectations, and it’ll never be able to live up to it, as, at best, it comes across like a CW version of a series we used to love.
In an effort to recapture some of the magic of the original, Suits LA actually fails to cultivate or create any of its own. It has no identity, and audiences are sharp enough to pick out posers.
The series’ setting of LA doesn’t remotely reflect the authenticity of the city but rather the bright, glossy version that tends to be more offputting than appealing.
The dialogue is so “try-hard” it’s enough to make a person cringe, and the Entertainment Law avenue, thus far, hasn’t proven to be nearly as interesting.
Corporate law is cutthroat and raises many ethical and moral questions and complications, resulting in intriguing conflicts.
You either cared enough about the characters that you wanted them to “win” or weren’t invested enough in the concept of corporate law and what was at stake.
That made it easy viewing in which you may or may not have derived some pleasure in watching a bunch of rich people crumble and burn or screw over other rich people.
However, Entertainment law doesn’t have that same level of interest or high stakes. If we wanted to come remotely close to fashionable, hot lawyers navigating Los Angeles in intriguing ways, we have The Lincoln Lawyer.
But with Suits LA, there’s zero investment in what’s at stake for any of these characters or their clientele.
It also didn’t help that they never bothered to build up any of the characters much. Instead, it felt like they dropped us into a huge plot conflict mid-series and expected us to pick a side or feel something.
At the heart of Suits was its characters and their ability to resonate with viewers somehow.
But Suits LA doesn’t have that, and it never will for as long as they have their characters traipsing around trying to cosplay versions of Harvey, Donna, or whomever else.
So, in the end, Suits LA can attempt to lure in as many original Suits characters as possible, but it won’t benefit the series.
We know Gabriel Macht will suit up for another stint as the incomparable (and I mean that) Harvey Specter. That may convince a few people to tune in long enough to see the character again for nostalgia.
And LA is about to get Litt Up when Rick Hoffman will also make a cameo down the road.
But these cameos aren’t enough to save Suits LA. They’re only emblematic of what’s hindering the series most — painfully, desperately trying to merge these two series when it simply doesn’t work.
If Suits LA has a shot of surviving the bloodbath of cancellations that are often on the horizon as the network whittles away at its lineup, it needs to steer clear of the Suits franchise spiel rather than clumsily faceplanting into it.
Until Suits LA can find an identity of its own rather than attempting to be a poor man’s Suits, The Lincoln Lawyer, The Good Wife, or LA Law, it won’t matter if they summon the entire Suits lineup Avengers-style to pass a literal torch; it won’t save it.
Over to you, take our poll and hit the comments with your thoughts.
Watch Suits LA Online
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