Of *Course* 'Suits LA' Tanked...!

NBC mistook the momentary, almost accidental popularity of USA's character-focused workplace dramedy among Netflix subscribers for the existence of a monetizable IP.

We built this city

I am slowly catching up with Hulu and 20th Century Studio’s Paradise, having somehow missed the big rug-pulling twist that closes out its pilot. I have mixed feelings about the switcheroo, since it reveals the show as something more… high-concept than advertised. As someone who was very much into the pilot’s unusually well-written and obviously well-acted (Sterling K. Brown and James Marsden are doing career-best work) political thriller dynamics, I rolled my eyes at the notion that it was actually, “Oh, another one of these, dammit.” To be fair, the next few episodes do a decent job of having its cake and eating it, too. I will admit amusement at its episode-closing gimmick of playing a popular song in a distinctly “sad trombone” cover. It may be silly (the fifth episode, for example, closes out with a grimdark riff on “Eye of the Tiger”), but it works. I mention this because the first episode of NBC’s Suits LA positions itself as a personification of a “sad trombone” cover tune of the original USA dramedy.

Starring a game Stephen Amell as the head of a big-deal Los Angeles firm who left his former gig in New York as a prosecutor for “complicated reasons,” the first episode is hilariously dark and mournful. It plays out as if the pitch (or network edict) was, “Okay, but what if Suits was a prestige drama under network television restrictions?” That it has tanked in the ratings, with 2.6 million viewers on Monday night and no sign of it on Peacock’s “ten most-watched television shows,” is no surprise. Its very existence is a classic example of studios misunderstanding the often arbitrary and random nature of what succeeds on streaming platforms. Its initial structure, which packs what is usually an entire season’s worth of “Oh no, someone is trying to destroy the firm from within!” plotting (which became an ongoing cliche early on in the show’s nine-season run) into a single 43-minute episode, argues that somebody important thought those who devoured Suits on Netflix in the summer of 2023 gave a damn about the plot.