‘Suits LA’ Review: Stephen Amell’s West Coast Spinoff Gets Lost in a Rough Start
Hot off the heels of the unexpected “Suits” resurgence of summer 2023, the latest spinoff of the 2011 USA Network series is upon us, forcing us to remember what it was that we liked about “Suits” in the first place.
Unfortunately, the answer to that question is not found in the first episode of “Suits LA.” It’s also not found in the other two episodes sent to critics for review, though they do get closer to the feeling of the original show. “Suits” creator Aaron Korsh spent the past year and a half riding the original’s streaming success right into “Suits LA,” which he also created — and maybe he rode a little too far and got lost in the plot along the way, giving us a show that’s both too much and not enough at the same time.
Born from a pilot originally unrelated to the “Suits” universe,“Suits LA” stars Stephen Amell as a Los Angeles lawyer dealing with too many things for one pilot to handle. He’s considering a merger alongside his best friend who might also be a rival, which means he also has to second guess all of his employees and their loyalties. He’s also having nightmares about an old case that ended in an explosion that killed a man named Billy and somehow relates to his lawyer father, whom he hates and who is dying and who did something that endangered Ted’s brother Eddie. In the present day, Ted is trying to sign a young action movie star and has to represent a producer who may or may not have killed his business partner. There are assistants wanting to be promoted and Ted’s ex who works at a rival firm and entertainment lawyers who don’t know anything about entertainment, and all of this is explored in Episode 1.
At least half a season of plot twists, betrayals and flashbacks happen in just the pilot and by the time it ends, there are a million answers to questions viewers haven’t had time to ask, but nothing to really hang on to other than the show’s own confidence that it’s doing something great.
In Episodes 2 and 3, there are glimmers of what “Suits LA” could become. The problem is that it insists on holding on to Ted’s past traumas to the detriment of what’s actually going on with the suits. We’ve seen daddy issues before. We’ve seen Stephen Amell act out daddy issues before as Oliver Queen. We don’t know this daddy well enough to care about him, but maybe we could if the show would just slow down for a second and not try to force feed us a tragic backstory that explains why the lead jerk is such a jerk.
Amell, who spent years on “Arrow” as a brooding recovering bad boy with too much weight on his shoulders, makes complete sense for Ted, an ambitious man with buried emotions who acts quick and doesn’t mince words. The problem is that the show is asking him to conjure some unearned pain right off the bat, before there’s anything else to know about his character. Couldn’t we have seen this guy in action for at least an episode before digging into why he hates his father? Couldn’t we have seen him and his best friend be best friends before ripping them apart? Couldn’t Amell have been given better dialogue than, “You play a badass in the movies. I’m a badass in real life?”
The original “Suits” also moved fast, but there was more to it than that. There was a simple-ish premise that allowed the show to thrive in the fast lane: a successful and charming attorney hires a conman college dropout with a photographic memory but no law degree, and they both have to work cases while also keeping that secret. “Suits LA” doesn’t have that driving force. There’s no built in bromance or established community because most of the relationships get blown up in the pilot. These are just lawyers in Los Angeles, and they talk and move real fast with no real place to go other than to therapy.
There are glimmers of something here, beyond the flashbacks and beyond Ted in general. Lex Scott Davis plays Erica Rollins, an associate who we are told has a prickly personality but who appears to just be a good lawyer navigating an irritating workplace. The standout scenes in the first three episodes involve her and her assistant Leah (Alice Lee). Erica has now been put in charge of the firm’s entertainment division, and while she knows actors and writers and producers, she doesn’t really watch movies or TV. Leah, however, is a fan of everything, and they’re able to put their heads together to satisfy clients like Brian Baumgartner, who plays himself.
These scenes, which also feature Patton Oswalt playing himself, are sort of a strange experiment in “Entourage”-style fake reality and take you out of the world of the show immediately, but it’s fun to watch Erica and Leah try to deal with the sort of problems that plague working actors. It’s like a window into what the show could be once it sheds all the backstory weighing it down and figures out its version of Hollywood. Entertainment lawyers have to deal with enough surrealism in their daily cases that there’s already a show there, all the extra fluff is unnecessary. Just say Ted is a former justice department attorney who now negotiates nudity clauses and billing orders, all the other drama could have come later.
Of course, “Suits” was a one-of-a-kind cultural phenomenon for many reasons, including some beyond anyone’s control. It was a product of USA Network’s blue skies era, when quick-witted problem solvers quickly and wittily solved problems on cable every weeknight from 2005 to 2016. It was the time of “Monk,” “Psych,” “White Collar,” “Burn Notice” and crown jewel “Suits,” which outlasted all the rest and didn’t end until 2019. USA then pivoted to wrestling and reality shows, and TV generally seemed to get a lot more cynical as more and more main characters needed tragedy to justify their personalities.
“Suits” also gained notoriety in 2016 when Meghan Markle, who played paralegal Rachel Zane, suddenly found herself in every headline as Prince Harry’s new and serious girlfriend. She got attention, the show got attention and Rachel’s onscreen love story with Mike (Patrick J. Adams) became a much bigger deal. Markle left the show at the end of the seventh season when Rachel and Mike got married, which meant Mike had to leave too. Every future appearance of Mike or mention of Rachel got headlines through the end of the series, allowing the show to remain popular despite its flagging quality. By the time it hit Netflix in 2023, people weren’t just deciding to binge this random lawyer procedural; it was the random lawyer procedural that the Duchess of Sussex was on before she met Prince Harry. This is not the kind of phenomenon you can recreate!
It’s almost guaranteed that none of the stars of “Suits LA” will marry into the British royal family, but so far, the new show is also missing a lot of the other stuff that made “Suits” great: like a solid central premise and a functional group of coworkers with a sense of humor and more motivation than just individual ambition. It could get there, but even if it wanted to, it’s hard to imagine viewers having the time or patience to wait for it.
“Suits LA” premieres Sunday, Feb. 23, on NBC and streams the next day on Peacock.
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