On a January morning, attractive people in tailored attire stood in a sun-skimmed California courtroom, arguing a motion in the murder trial.
“Bring the venom!” the director, Anton Cropper, said encouragingly.
This was on the set of “Suits LA,” a sibling of “Suits,” the legal procedural that ran on USA for nine seasons, from 2011 to 2019. (It is also a cousin of “Pearson,” a short-lived “Suits” spinoff.) Back in the courtroom, a clash over evidentiary rules turned vicious as one lawyer hissed at another, “You immoral piece of filth!” Time, it seemed, had not mellowed the mildly glamorous, majorly cutthroat world of “Suits.”
The original “Suits” had done well on USA during its run — well enough to be renewed and renewed. But its hold on the cultural imagination was never especially strong and its reviews were, like the Season 1 suits themselves, muted. “Though the series begins amusingly enough, it quickly descends into cloying buddy escapade,” The New York Times wrote in 2011.
It wasn’t much lamented when it ended, and as late as a year and a half ago, Aaron Korsh, the show’s creator, claimed another “Suits” spinoff was unlikely. Case closed.
But when “Suits” moved to Netflix in mid 2023, it set a record for the most total weeks and the most consecutive weeks at the top of the Nielsen streaming ratings. Pacey, witty, cast with good-looking actors (Meghan Markle among them) and smart — but not so smart that you couldn’t follow along while also answering a few emails — “Suits” was the nice lawyer show an exhausted America needed.
Now, beginning on Feb. 23 on NBC, and streaming the next day on Peacock, America will be getting at least 13 episodes of “Suits LA,” which arrives with very different expectations.
In 2011, Korsh and his colleagues had not known they were making a show that could soothe a weary nation and set viewership records. Now they did. “Don’t pull any punches!” Cropper said, as the actors reran the courtroom scene. The show, however generously budgeted, could not afford to.
On a recent call, I asked Korsh what that level of stress felt like. He said that he doesn’t let himself feel it.
“What I want to do is be proud of the show I’m making,” he said. “That’s an enormous amount of stress — I don’t need to add to that by worrying about how the public perceives it. The worst notes I get on the show are when people are worried about what the public is going to think. I have to resist those notes with all my heart.”
What became “Suits LA” wasn’t envisioned as a “Suits” show at all. Then again, the original “Suits” wasn’t meant to be a lawyer show; it was a drama with comic elements set on Wall Street, where Korsh worked for a few years after college. When he showed the pilot to Alex Sepiol, an executive at USA, he told Korsh that he might be interested if the show were a procedural. So the bankers became lawyers.
Bonnie Zane, the casting director, assembled a troupe of unknowns and underknowns, led by Gabriel Macht, as the smooth-talking senior partner Harvey Specter, and Patrick J. Adams as Mike Ross, a brilliant lawyer who unfortunately lacks a law degree. The tone of the show was, Korsh said, “silly and intense.” Korsh used the same words to describe himself.
When “Suits” was given a suggested end date, Korsh felt relieved. “I was pretty exhausted by the end of the run, so I was happy to be over,” he said. At that point, “Pearson” was still in the works, though when that show didn’t catch on — Korsh believes that USA mistimed the roll out — Korsh was fine with that, too.
After a fallow year or two, he began writing again during the pandemic lockdowns. This new show would be centered on a talent agent, inspired by Ted Chervin at Creative Arts Agency, who began his career as a federal prosecutor in New York before moving West — a trajectory that fascinated Korsh.
Most networks and streamers passed on it — talent agents felt too insider-y. But Sepiol, now at NBC, gave Korsh the same note he’d given years earlier: Make them lawyers. Korsh did. NBC passed anyway, but after “Suits” became a Netflix sensation, interest revived, with a stipulation: Could Korsh change the title to “Suits LA”?
To make the new series, Korsh brought on many of the same writers, directors and designers who had worked on the original. While he was open to characters like Harvey returning for an arc, a different coast demanded new lawyers and new cases. So far Macht is the only “Suits” alumnus confirmed to appear. There are no plans at present for Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex, to reprise her role. (“But if she wants to, she’s always welcome back,” Korsh said.)
“I didn’t want to just flood this show with all the ‘Suits’ characters,” Korsh said. “It is not my intention to make a Season 10.” And yet the differences seemed subtle, a matter of tone and degree. “Suits LA” is, at least in its first episodes, a little more intense, a little less silly.
Instead of a duo like Harvey and Mike, “Suits LA” has a single lead character. Ted Black, based on Chervin, is less lightsome than Harvey or Mike.
“It’s a darker character, a more brooding character,” said Zane, who also oversaw casting for the new series. For Ted, she found Stephen Amell, an actor in his mid 40s who had been a series lead on “Arrow” and “Heels.” Amell was the rare person who had never seen “Suits,” even accidentally, but he watched the first three seasons once he had his feet under Ted’s very fancy desk. He noted the similarities.
“It has a different backdrop,” he said of “Suits LA.” “But the dynamics and the overall ‘Suits’ feel and culture are still very prevalent.”
On set on that January morning, the people were beautiful, just as in the original, and the sets were similarly glossy. Plenty of New Yorkers move to Los Angeles in search of an easier life (that seems to be, in part, Ted’s story), but with its rat-a-tat dialogue and murder trial plot, “Suits LA” did not seem to be taking it easy.
“It’s a different group of people, but it’s still high-stakes,” said Cropper, who directed 17 “Suits” episodes and several for the new show.
(And given the presence of Harvey, who has been reimagined as an old buddy of Ted’s, at least one of the people is the same.)
“We’re all the same kind of people when you really break it down,” said Lex Scott Davis, who plays Erica Rollins, an entertainment lawyer, said of the characters in the “Suits” universe. “We’re all striving for the same things. We’re all very goal-oriented. We’re all go-getters.”
The pilot episode, even as it establishes the new stories and characters, teases some of these overlaps. The first needle drop includes the lyric, “You got me feeling like I’m back home.”
So what are the differences? “It’s a lot warmer in Los Angeles?” Macht said. But while “Suits LA” actually films in Los Angeles, as opposed to the original, which subbed Toronto for Manhattan, it doesn’t spend a lot of time outdoors in the sunshine.
“We’re not out in L.A. that much,” said Jolie Andreatta, who designed costumes for both series. “We’re in courtrooms. We’re in the office.” Still, she tried to make the suits themselves more West Coast.
“We wanted to be a little more sexy, edgier,” Andreatta said.
In conversation, Macht identified the theme of “Suits” as loyalty. Asked about the theme of “Suits LA,” Korsh replied that it was the same: “I’m a one-trick pony.” His primary loyalty is to himself, to the vision of the show he wants to make.
“I would love other people to like it,” he said. “I would love it to be a big hit. But it is of a secondary concern to me.” Arguably Korsh’s vision is very closely aligned to ”Suits.” So Korsh wasn’t exactly joking when he identified the main disparity.
“The biggest difference between the original and ‘Suits LA’ is fans’ expectations,” he said. Will these fans embrace a new city, a new firm, new suits?
Jury’s out.
