You know what’s fun? Watching lawyers do lawyer stuff on TV. It’s certainly much more fun than dealing with lawyers in real life, which is why the lawyer show has been a fixture of television since the days of Perry Mason and The Defenders. It’s a proud and noble tradition of storytelling that’s continued to the newest entry in the genre, Suits LA — a spinoff of the USA Network series Suits, featuring Stephen Amell and so many baffling choices.
The first episode of Suits LA is easily the worst of the three shared with critics, largely because it tries to do too much at once. But the show doesn’t improve much from there. Amell stars as the besuited Ted, who runs a high-powered law firm specializing in entertainment law. Entertainment law is a fresh area of TV lawyering for a show like Suits LA to explore, and it gives the show’s producers a fun opportunity to cast folks like John Amos, Brian Baumgartner, and Patton Oswalt as themselves. If only that was all Suits LA was!
For those unfamiliar with the original series (or who only discovered it during its now-legendary boom period on Netflix), let’s do a quick history lesson: Suits premiered in 2011, at the height of USA Network’s “Blue Sky” era, when the cable network specialized in hour-long procedurals featuring quirky individuals with unique professions, leading to the distinctive catchphrase “Characters Welcome.”
The more memorable series from this time included Burn Notice (featuring a blacklisted spy in Miami), White Collar (featuring a con artist in New York City), Psych (featuring a fake psychic detective in Santa Barbara), and Royal Pains (featuring a fancy private doctor in the Hamptons). The emphasis was on relationships over intense plotting, the sort of cozy television it’s fun to relax with.
Suits was right in line with that philosophy, featuring a high-powered lawyer (Gabriel Macht) who takes on an associate (Patrick J. Adams) who’s brilliant but not technically a lawyer. Keeping the non-lawyer’s lack of law degree a secret was a big part of the show’s narrative, but the focus was otherwise on an intriguing range of cases being lawyered by a charismatic ensemble — a pleasant viewing experience whether you were watching week-to-week as it initially aired or as a binge.
After Suits became massively popular on Netflix in 2023, USA Network parent company NBCUniversal asked Suits and Suits LA creator Aaron Korsh to reconfigure (or en-Suits-iate) an earlier idea about Hollywood agents to fit within the Suits-iverse, which ultimately landed at NBC. (This paragraph exists to answer the question “I thought Suits was a Netflix show! Why aren’t they streaming the spinoff?”)
So, take that basic formula — attractive men and women in suits doing suit stuff in conference rooms and maybe the occasional courthouse — transplant it to Los Angeles, and add as many cameos as an NBC budget can afford. A simple formula for success!
Suits LA (NBC)
Unfortunately, Korsh and the creative team went a different way. All of the problems with Suits LA are rooted in the way the show diverges from the original. Not because the new elements that have been added are different from what came before, but because these new elements, on their own merits, range from unnecessary to nonsensical to deranged.
The really deranged stuff can’t be discussed due to spoilers, but one of the show’s biggest issues is the choice to dig deep into the origin story of Amell’s Ted, specifically how a former prosecutor from New York ended up negotiating contracts for starlets in Hollywood. This is handled via an unending series of flashbacks to Ted working on a big mob case over 10 years ago — a case that ended up having lethal repercussions for more than one person involved. While the flashbacks are clearly building up to some big reveals, they end up feeling like reheated gangster movie leftovers, while also distracting from all the potential Suits-ing that could be happening instead.
Additionally, while Suits had a sharp eye for character relationships, Suits LA blows up nearly all of Ted’s most personal connections in the pilot, leaving him adrift. And while Amell can be a charismatic presence on screen, Ted otherwise feels like a quip-generating cypher, whose only interesting bonds with others exist solely in the flashbacks. And again, the flashbacks aren’t great.
The ensemble has some potential, even if a character like Erica (Lex Scott Davis), who is fighting to head the entertainment division of Ted’s law firm, is defined by two traits: Ambition and a lack of knowledge about actual movies and television. (The show brings the latter quality up like it’s a charming quirk, as opposed to a good reason for her to not head the entertainment division.) Maggie Grace gets some limited screen time as Amanda, a pro bono defense lawyer who doesn’t technically work for Ted and thus can have non-problematic flirty tension with him. More importantly, she at least has some personality, though she isn’t around enough to make up for the deficits elsewhere.
All that being said, while the pilot is the worst episode of the first three, the second and third did seem to improve on the first — while still burdened by those flashbacks, the present-day sequences had some spark to them. It’s not uncommon for a show to take a little time to figure itself out, and a smart choice was made in balancing both single-episode storylines and longer-running plots: While it could have been potentially told in just one episode, an ongoing murder case involving Alias’s Kevin Weisman was compelling enough for this humble critic, at least, to be curious about how it might resolve.
If this show can shuck off its tiresome flashbacks as well as its more ridiculous twists (viewers who reach the end of the pilot will have no question as to what at least one of them might be), there could be something watchable here. But Suits fans hoping for a West Coast-flavored edition may struggle to find here what they enjoyed before. Suits LA didn’t have to be exactly the same as the original series — but ideally, it wouldn’t have lost sight of why people watched in the first place.
Suits LA premieres Sunday, Feb. 23rd at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on NBC, and will begin streaming on Peacock the next day. Check out the trailer below.
