Why 'Suits LA' got disbarred

Witty banter, appealing characters, likable relationships and entertaining cases: Suits had it all. The beloved USA Network legal drama that ran for nine seasons before going off the air in September 2019 managed to do what some television shows only dream of achieving in a relatively short period of time: Find a whole new audience on streaming mere years after its finale.

After a resurgence on Netflix and Peacock made Suits 2023’s most-streamed show, NBC greenlit a spin-off, Suits LA, in February 2024 to capitalize on the original series' renewed popularity.

The network bet big that Suits LA would recapture the magic that made Suits — starring Gabriel Macht as hotshot attorney Harvey Specter, and Patrick J. Adams as his protégé, Mike Ross — a fan favorite. For outsiders looking in, it seemed like a surefire hit.

Gabriel Macht and Patrick J. Adams in Suits. (Christos Kalohoridis/USA Network/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)

However, the Los Angeles-set offshoot, which starred Stephen Amell (Arrow, Heels) as prosecutor turned defense attorney Ted Black, struggled to live up to expectations — both creatively and in the ratings.

The series, which premiered Feb. 23, got axed on May 9 by NBC before it even reached its Season 1 finale. The final episode, which aired May 18, ended on a whimper.

With so much going for it at the outset — fans wanting to return to the law offices of Pearson Hardman, the promise of new stories and the specter of Meghan Markle looming large — why did the series fail to land with viewers? Turns out, there may have been multiple factors that contributed to its short shelf life.

‘They changed the wrong thing’

On paper, Suits LA seemed to have similarities to the original Suits. Both shows were set at prestigious law firms, both featured intelligent lawyers and both used the same theme song (“Greenback Boogie” by Ima Robot). The spin-off even brought back Suits creator Aaron Korsh and saw the return of original stars Macht and Rick Hoffman’s Louis Litt. But that’s where the commonalities ended.

Where Suits focused on the “bromance” between Harvey and Mike and created dramatic tension by keeping alive the threat of Mike’s secret (that he didn’t have a real degree but practiced law anyway), Suits LA took a creative left turn. It centered instead on Ted’s demons and traumatic family past, and introduced an internal coup in the first episode that set up an antagonistic dynamic between Ted and his best friend for the rest of the series.

Mark Derwin and Stephen Amell in Suits LA. (Nicole Weingart/NBC via Getty Images)

Abandoning the signature charms that made Suits a bona fide hit proved to be a death knell for Suits LA.

“People went back, and they wanted the old Suits,” Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture and trustee professor of television, radio and film at Syracuse University, told Yahoo Entertainment. “We want new episodes of the exact show that we loved so much back then.”

Lauren Piester, a freelance entertainment journalist who’s covered Suits and Suits LA for various publications, said the spin-off failed to identify what made Suits thrive in the first place.

“I don’t think Suits LA had any idea what people liked about Suits,” she told Yahoo Entertainment. “Suits LA started the first episode by destroying all of the relationships it didn’t have time to [build].”

“It was trying to be four shows at once — and none of them were like Suits,” Piester said.

Daniel Herbert, a professor in the Department of Film, Television and Media at the University of Michigan, echoed a similar sentiment. “Maybe [for] most fans it was about this particular kind of relationship [between Harvey and Mike] and this particular kind of dramatic tension — will [Mike] be found out or not?” he said. “If that’s the draw and they don’t have that same draw in the reboot, then it’s by comparison not going to work. They changed the wrong thing.”

He acknowledged that “it’s a really tricky thing” revisiting a familiar universe that’s already experienced success. And it’s not an exact science, even if you think you got everything right.

Viewers will naturally compare the new version of a show to what they liked about the previous one — for better or for worse.

“But a lot of times, the reason people are watching reboots is because they like the original,” Herbert said. “And if you’re not as good as the original” — as was the case with Suits LA — ”then you’re kind of stuck.”

‘A false sense of popularity’

Days after NBC gave Suits LA the axe, a top network executive cited disappointing numbers on linear and streaming as to why the Suits spin-off wouldn’t live beyond 13 episodes. Since it debuted in February, Suits LA consistently underwhelmed in the ratings, hovering around 1.5 million viewers for NBC on Sunday evenings despite welcoming back memorable characters from its past. (For comparison’s sake, the CBS Sunday drama Tracker ended its second season May 11 with 8.3 million viewers.)

“Suits [LA] has had a very short run, but it really just has not resonated the way we thought it would,” Jeff Bader, president of programming strategy at NBC, said during a conference call with reporters on why the show wouldn’t return for a second season. “There can be many, many reasons — people are speculating why it hasn’t resonated, but it’s just not really showing the potential to grow for us in the future unfortunately.”

Ultimately there was no “growth potential” for Suits LA, Bader said.

Herbert believes executives may have taken the wrong lesson from the streaming success of Suits.

“A studio will get a false sense of the popularity of a show because it surges on Netflix,” he told Yahoo Entertainment. “And this backlog demand suddenly makes … it look like, oh, this is a hot item. But it’s not a reliable indicator of demand for a new product. It just means that audiences are finding this reservoir of existing programming that wasn’t on Netflix previously and engaging with it.”

Some Suits LA cast members took the cancellation in stride. Bryan Greenberg, who played lawyer Rick Dodson, cheekily wrote on Instagram ahead of the May 18 finale “Turns out Suits LA was a limited series all along,” alongside a laughing emoji. “Thanks to everyone who watched and supported. We had a blast making this. It was fun to dance in Rick Dodson’s goofy shoes for a season.”

His costar Lex Scott Davis who portrayed Ted’s law firm partner Erica Rollins, reflected on her brief Suits LA journey in an Instagram post on May 18.

“What an honor it was to show up every day for the past year or so, playing make-believe, with your faces to greet me with a smile & a hug,” Davis wrote, along with various on-set photos. Her post ended with a wistful statement: “Oh how I wish we could continue … but I know we’ll all cross paths again someday soon.”

Piester thinks Suits LA could have worked if it took on a breezier approach, more in line with what USA Network captured so well in its heyday of “blue skies” programming.

“A law firm in L.A. with a really smart guy running it. Maybe they could do a twist on it where at one point he was doing law without a law degree, but now [he] has one,” she said. “He has misfits in his law firm, everyone likes each other and everyone’s having a good time. That is what I would want from a Suits spin-off, and I didn’t think it was a difficult thing to ask for.”

“The show wasn't executed as well as the one that it was spun off from,” Thompson said. “It wasn’t as interesting. It wasn't part of the cultural moment.”