A Grand Unified Theory of Suits and Suits LA

If you are remaking Suits, as Suits LA is attempting to do to increasingly poor results each week, the first question to answer is: which Suits are you remaking? 

Over the course of its run, Suits was many shows. That variety and capacity for reinvention helped it become an unexpectedly beloved streaming hit, but also contributed to an unevenness that likely kept it from becoming a respected TV classic. It was a romantic melodrama that never wanted its audience to fear for a second that its central couples would not end up together. It was a slightly grating buddy comedy, where every character was fluent in the movie and TV references from the bro canon. At its worst Suits was like being locked in a fraternity common room during pledge week. It was a silly law drama where corporate and criminal law work much like science and engineering in Star Trek: there was no legal position so dire where a problem could not be solved by a blue folder passed across a table followed by a character saying something like, “Does this mean what I think it does?”

At its peak, though, Suits was a show about ethics versus ambition, decency versus duty. These tensions were initially embodied by its main character, legal super-mind and fraudulent Harvard grad Mike Ross, and the mentors and foils that surrounded him at his high-powered corporate litigation firm. A poor college flameout who wanted to do good by serving the law, Mike’s idealism was juxtaposed with his mentor Harvey Specter’s ruthless devotion to victory and material reward. Mike’s emotional streak was contrasted with Harvey’s mentor and Mike’s boss, Jessica Pearson, who always had to take a more detached view as the head of the firm. Finally, Mike’s poverty and lack of status was contrasted with his sometimes nemesis Louis Litt, whose fawning credentialism and vast insecurity drove his toxic ambition. 

More interesting than those conflicts, however, was one the show never fully reckoned with. Before anything else, Suits was a show about loyalty. And loyalty, Suits demonstrated across nine seasons, is where corruption often begins.

It’s there from the start: Mike Ross’s life was derailed in part because he gave his loyalty to a bad friend. When Harvey invests in Mike despite the fact Mike never got a law degree, he becomes deeply loyal and attached to Mike, and that increasingly compromises not just him but everyone around him. Forced to choose between exposing Mike or protecting Harvey and the law firm they all work for, slowly every member of the cast becomes party to Mike and Harvey’s lie. By the middle of the show’s run, there were times when you could easily have made the case that everyone involved should be barred from practicing law and maybe half of them should go to jail, and yet Suits was always there making their mutual corruption look high-minded. Character are constantly pledging some version of, “If anyone wants to get to you, they’ll have to go through me, and I’m not backing down from a fight.” Which sounds awesome until you remember that everyone is basically guilty of even worse than what they’re being accused of, and ultimately they want to keep their really nice jobs and their growing personal fortunes.

For a while, Suits presents Mike as someone who is trying to use the law to do good, in contrast to Harvey’s combativeness on behalf of rich and frequently evil clients. But Patrick J. Adams plays Mike with a nasty, childish streak that never quite meshes with his appeals to morality and justice. At time the mask comes off completely, like when he meets a nurses’ union rep at his grandmother’s care facility. To explain why she’s threatening a strike, she shows Mike all the off-the-book extra care nurses give patients like Mike’s grandma… and Mike uses that info to get the nurses in legal jeopardy for breaking care protocols, forcing the union to accept the contract the hospital chain was offering. Unsurprisingly, some members of the audience were on Mike and Harvey’s side here, illustrating the degree to which Suits places its audience on the side of the rich and powerful.

What makes Mike tolerable as a character is that Harvey loves him, and via Harvey the show treats Mike as a difficult little brother and not a toxic autodidact. That judgment counts for a lot because as the show goes on, despite its original design, Harvey emerged as its moral center.

The world of Suits is mostly filled with lousy people serving lousy causes, and those people are the ones with the money that give you access to lives of comfort, luxury and excitement. Harvey is an unapologetic sell-out, but what’s compelling about him is watching him negotiate the terms of that sale. It includes his talent and energy as a legal mercenary, but it does not include his integrity or that of the people around him. When the latter move into conflict with the interests of a case or a client, Harvey turns on a dime. And in that framing, Harvey becomes relatable as the kind of boss, coworker, or person that many of us wish we had in our lives, or were ourselves. Someone who places the best parts of his character off-limits from work, from the judgment of others, and from his own ambition. It’s a seductive fantasy: that you can prosper in a fallen world working in service to the devil and yet keep him from your own shoulders.

It is not really a tenable moral position and this eventually doomed Suits to a stale formula of meaningless wars of office politics waged between the wealthy retainers of the growing oligarchy. Ultimately the contradiction was resolved with Mike’s exit from the show to go to Seattle to start a very different law practice than he and Harvey worked at. When it was time for Suits to end its run, Harvey and his intrepid secretary-turned-wife Donna left New York to join Mike and his wife, Rachel. They were all going to become wealthy Atticus Finches, just out of frame.

The show was well into anticlimax by that point, but before it tied everything up in marriage knots, it had produced at least one tremendous season of television and a few great ones. It managed that by asking what integrity meant in a setting where friendships, political alliances, professional obligations, and career goals were constantly reconfiguring themselves and exerting tension in new and interesting directions. 

Suits LA, after three episodes, is struggling mightily to recapture any of this. In many ways it feels like a continuation of where the show left off in its struggling final season, with a new cast going through the motions of Suits plotlines without any of the history or relationships stakes that made them interesting.